#Debate: Under the Banner of "Real Is Beautiful," Can We Still Talk About Beauty and Ugliness?

Once moral standards are attached to taste, talking about beauty starts to look like a new form of oppression. In that case, does beauty still exist?

#Debate is a new QDaily column for arguing about contested and interesting questions. We know we stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us.

Can we still talk about beauty and ugliness?

Not as freely as we once did. Better not to mention plastic surgery in front of Korean women: this summer they launched a movement rejecting cosmetic surgery and makeup, in protest against punishing beauty standards and the habit of judging women by their looks. Be careful, too, about praising size-zero models — the fashion world's love of gaunt frames now counts as discrimination against fat people, and the industry insists that runway shows add plus-size models. And avoid showing too much appetite for big breasts and narrow waists, or you will very likely be labeled a product of patriarchal brainwashing. In today's society, a judgment that looks like nothing more than a personal preference can draw endless criticism.

Aesthetic judgment has always been a complicated matter, but loading moral standards onto talk about beauty is new — a development of the past few decades. People have gradually come to believe that behind any verdict on beauty and ugliness lie oppression, power, and a society's systematic discrimination against some group, and that beauty and ugliness are therefore not worth discussing and should not be discussed.

"Be yourself." No slogan is more common today.

Two different worries have brought people to this view. One is a fear of power. The fashion industry likes rail-thin models; girls who feel they must keep their figures fall into anorexia, and some die. It is an old Chinese story in modern dress: the King of Chu loved slender waists, and women in his court starved to death. The other worry is respect for cultural difference. The Tang dynasty prized plumpness; the Qing dynasty admired bound feet. If beauty takes a different form in every age, then each form is only a product of its society, and no version of beauty ranks above another.

People seem to believe that refusing to judge beauty and ugliness is still not enough to hold off harmful power and preserve variety in taste. "Look at me — I did my hair, I put on makeup, I got my nails done, I'm wearing pretty clothes. There is no way I can be liberated," the Korean actress Im Soo-hyang said of her country's punishing beauty standards.

Social media has been arguing for a while about whether the lingerie brand Victoria's Secret leans too hard on the so-called "perfect body." The American clothing brand Universal Standard recently released an ad showing a woman in white close-fitting underwear, her fat folding into ridge after ridge. The ad looks close to extreme; by showing plus-size bodies over and over, it argues that large sizes and small ones should carry no difference in beauty at all.

Nothing survives being pushed to an extreme. Ideas of beauty and ugliness may be personal, but across human civilization people do share some agreement about beauty, built on historical experience and always shifting. Patriarchy is one ingredient in that shift; so is "women deciding this is patriarchy and submitting to it anyway"; and so, of course, is women simply finding something beautiful.

Back to the plus-size models in fashion magazines and on the runway. Now we can ask:

When people applaud and cheer for diversity in taste, do they really believe this is the kind of beauty women should have?

When people praise "this is real," what are they praising — the realness, or the beauty?

Should fashion reflect reality rather than beauty?

And is "real" actually beautiful?

In the end, who defines beauty and ugliness? Given how deadlocked the argument now is, satisfying everyone would require wiping out the distinction altogether: fat and thin equally beautiful, smooth skin and a face full of wrinkles treated the same.

The way out, it seems, is to take from everyone the right to decide what is beautiful and what is ugly — to erase whatever in a person's appearance might produce inequality, and the forces behind it.

The ideal may start from a decent impulse, but it ignores the fact that aesthetic response is an instinct. Biologically, people cannot stop themselves from judging how things look.

If classical philosophers were too abstract when they discussed beauty, modern neuroscience has settled the point. Brain scans show that when people make an aesthetic judgment, the most active region is the one normally used to weigh gains and losses. That region mattered greatly in evolution: it is what a person relies on when they see a fruit and decide whether they can eat it. Neuroscientists conclude that aesthetic response grew out of this instinct to seek what helps and avoid what harms.

Judgments about beauty likewise rest on physical instinct. Men, without thinking, use waist-to-hip ratio to decide whether a woman's figure is good, and physiologists believe the ratio is tied to fertility. An average face — one that resembles more people — is also rated more beautiful, again for evolutionary reasons: extreme features often signal harmful genetic mutation. Beauty, in this sense, is a spontaneous feeling born out of pleasure.

Human biology has evolved far more slowly than moral standards. People may have made "don't judge by appearance" a rule to live by, but instinct still takes over in front of a beautiful thing. Years of research by economists and psychologists show again and again that when a candidate has a better-looking face, interviewers are friendlier and score them higher. At work, better-looking people usually earn 10 to 15 percent more than everyone else. Women are especially exposed: the pay gap between women with trim figures and obese women can run as high as threefold.

Today's refusal to judge beauty and ugliness has to do with treating "don't pass judgment on other people" as a virtue. That belief rests, broadly, on one understanding of freedom: everyone has the right to choose how to live, and no choice is better than another. As the British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin said in his lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty": "If all values are created by the human spirit, and are called values for that reason, then no value stands above the values they create."

Berlin's position later became known as value pluralism, and many people today invoke it to defend the way they live — their careers, their religion, their gender identity, their goals in life, and more.

In 2016, Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in the ruling that made same-sex marriage legal: "The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity." The passage can be read as value pluralism stated in law.

The argument over beauty and ugliness belongs in the same category. Value pluralists believe a bare face and a large body should count as values among many, alongside makeup and a thin frame; to call the first ugly and the second beautiful breaks the rule of plural values. So they attack people who like, praise, or pursue traditional standards of beauty, and call them accomplices to oppression.

Yet value pluralism, like the liberal effort to suppress judgments about beauty, seems in recent years to have turned into its own opposite. Alongside its call for tolerance of many values, it increasingly shows an oppressive face. In July 2012, a baker who refused, on Christian grounds, to make a wedding cake for a gay couple was reported and punished by the local civil rights commission. In 2018, Vanity Fair published the complaint of a conservative college student who supported Trump: "They" — the liberals — "say we're white supremacists, rapists, misogynists. Labeling is the first thing they do. They call themselves inclusive, except toward us."

While preaching value pluralism, they forget a crucial part of Berlin's own definition of it: "People must find some possibility that allows all these values to coexist in some fashion." A person who finds a bare face beautiful, in other words, has to coexist with a person who finds a made-up face beautiful. Berlin granted that the two groups will clash, but coexistence means accepting that the clash exists; any attempt to stamp out discord destroys value pluralism itself.

For Berlin, holding a pluralist position means accepting that values will inevitably conflict, and living with the conflict. "Discord will always be part of human life," he believed. Conflict can be eased, never abolished; the goal is a delicate balance among all values that keeps clashes like religious wars and genocide from breaking out.

This is exactly where the gay couple went wrong in suing the baker who would not make their cake. "These disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market." Kennedy, the same justice who had backed same-sex marriage, this time sided with the baker, and the tolerance he called for matches Berlin's design. Gay people cannot force the baker to make a cake; the baker, in turn, cannot use his faith to stop them from living as gay people. All they can do is tolerate each other's existence.

Applied to beauty, the principle means that people who hold aesthetic ideas outside the mainstream should not try to erase the line between beautiful and ugly. They should show what they find beautiful and, by meeting every kind of criticism head-on, prove that their choice is a workable way to live. That is the point of value pluralism: a society should let each person look at many different ways of living, weigh what each costs and offers, and pick the one they want.

The competition among ways of life is not entirely fair. In an open market, big food companies can push packaged food at low prices, squeeze small organic farms, and leave some people no way to choose organic food. Beauty works the same way. As noted above, people who fit mainstream standards tend to do better at work, which leaves many people no room to choose another standard — and that is the harmful power that worries those who want the line between beauty and ugliness gone.

If this really is a form of unfairness, Berlin would still call it a conflict between ways of life. And his answer is not to abolish inequality structurally, once and for all, but to go back to each concrete case and look for a solution there. Kennedy took the same position in the dispute between the baker and the couple. He noted carefully that a dispute arising in other circumstances, even one that looked much the same, would require both sides to argue in far more detail in court. Only that way can such disputes be settled while both including people and respecting religious belief and sexual orientation.

Aesthetic judgment, as a value, also fits Berlin's conception of pluralism. He believed each individual has to justify their own values not by destroying other values but by practicing and developing their own. Philosophers, too, generally treat aesthetic judgment as a capacity that has to be developed.

"Only by reflecting on things according to the pleasure and pain those things bring can a person acquire the ground and the capacity for aesthetic judgment," the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in Critique of Judgment. The British philosopher David Hume made a similar point in his own work: "One man may even feel beauty, where another is sensible of deformity; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others."

"Real is beautiful," plus-size models, the "perfect body" — turning any body type into an ideology, or going the other way and emptying all standards of beauty into nihilism, is probably nothing more than a grab for the right to define beauty. And a fight over power has nothing to do with what beauty is.

Cover image from Refinery29; Glamour