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How virtue morphs into beauty in the eye of the beholder | Aeon Essays
Beauty is a deeply moral matter that makes kindness, empathy and honesty attractive, while vice warps into ugliness
aeon.co
Here’s what I think: beauty and morality, and ugliness and immorality, are intrinsically linked. Specifically, the moral virtues – honesty, kindness, fairness, empathy, etc – are beautiful character traits, and the moral vices – their contraries – are ugly. I mean this quite literally. Of course, the kind of beauty or ugliness in question is independent of physical appearances – it belongs to characters and actions. Drawing on the 18th-century British philosophical tradition, and the work of the contemporary philosopher Berys Gaut at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, I label this the moral-beauty view
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Let’s take a step back. Throughout history, and across different cultures, from the Ancient Greeks to the Yorubas of Africa, the beautiful and the good have been seen as closely connected. This has been reflected in language. In Ancient Greek, kalon meant both beautiful and good, while the Yoruba word ewa, normally translated as ‘beauty’, is primarily used to refer to human moral qualities. In the anglophone tradition, the moral-beauty view rose to prominence during the Enlightenment. The philosophers Francis Hutcheson and David Hume frequently spoke of the ‘moral beauty and deformity’ of various character traits, while Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that ‘benevolence bestows upon those actions which proceed from it, a beauty superior to all others, [while] the want of it, and much more the contrary inclination, communicates a peculiar deformity to whatever evidences such a disposition’.
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After millennia of shaping religious and philosophical thought, art and ordinary experience, the moral-beauty view suddenly began to evaporate, at least in the anglophone philosophical tradition... the greatest blow to the moral-beauty view was dealt by Immanuel Kant
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Although importantly different in their particulars, critiques such as Burke’s and Kant’s stemmed from a number of common considerations, including purported epistemological, metaphysical and practical features of beauty and goodness, which indicated their distinctness. For instance, beauty was thought to be mostly a matter of pleasure in the form of an object, and ugliness of displeasure in deformity; and form was limited to the visible or aural properties of an object. By contrast, goodness, and traits such as honesty and kindness, or selfishness and cowardice, are not like that; they are imperceptible, psychological traits, the goodness or badness of which stems from adherence to or violation of rational principles. So while beauty is discoverable perceptually and depends on subjective feeling, goodness is based on principles that are objective, and discoverable a priori. Moreover, while the good is, or should be, desirable for its own sake, the beautiful is desirable because it’s pleasurable. So linking beauty and goodness might lead to a corruption or degeneration of moral motivation by encouraging the pursuit of goodness for its beauty.
It should be noted that Kant’s own views on these matters are difficult to assess, not least because in 1790 he puzzlingly claimed that beauty is the ‘symbol of morality’. Nonetheless, it’s quite clear that philosophers of a Kantian persuasion, as well as their successors, began to see morality and beauty as distinct in fundamental ways
...
Let’s take a step back. Throughout history, and across different cultures, from the Ancient Greeks to the Yorubas of Africa, the beautiful and the good have been seen as closely connected. This has been reflected in language. In Ancient Greek, kalon meant both beautiful and good, while the Yoruba word ewa, normally translated as ‘beauty’, is primarily used to refer to human moral qualities. In the anglophone tradition, the moral-beauty view rose to prominence during the Enlightenment. The philosophers Francis Hutcheson and David Hume frequently spoke of the ‘moral beauty and deformity’ of various character traits, while Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that ‘benevolence bestows upon those actions which proceed from it, a beauty superior to all others, [while] the want of it, and much more the contrary inclination, communicates a peculiar deformity to whatever evidences such a disposition’.
...
After millennia of shaping religious and philosophical thought, art and ordinary experience, the moral-beauty view suddenly began to evaporate, at least in the anglophone philosophical tradition... the greatest blow to the moral-beauty view was dealt by Immanuel Kant
....
Although importantly different in their particulars, critiques such as Burke’s and Kant’s stemmed from a number of common considerations, including purported epistemological, metaphysical and practical features of beauty and goodness, which indicated their distinctness. For instance, beauty was thought to be mostly a matter of pleasure in the form of an object, and ugliness of displeasure in deformity; and form was limited to the visible or aural properties of an object. By contrast, goodness, and traits such as honesty and kindness, or selfishness and cowardice, are not like that; they are imperceptible, psychological traits, the goodness or badness of which stems from adherence to or violation of rational principles. So while beauty is discoverable perceptually and depends on subjective feeling, goodness is based on principles that are objective, and discoverable a priori. Moreover, while the good is, or should be, desirable for its own sake, the beautiful is desirable because it’s pleasurable. So linking beauty and goodness might lead to a corruption or degeneration of moral motivation by encouraging the pursuit of goodness for its beauty.
It should be noted that Kant’s own views on these matters are difficult to assess, not least because in 1790 he puzzlingly claimed that beauty is the ‘symbol of morality’. Nonetheless, it’s quite clear that philosophers of a Kantian persuasion, as well as their successors, began to see morality and beauty as distinct in fundamental ways
