A Duty to Be Beautiful?

In this chapter, I aim to show why the contemporary beauty ideal — as it is emerging and in some instances already manifests — is an ethical ideal. That the beauty ideal is functioning as an ethical ideal is the first core argument of the book and is necessary for all the claims that follow. Beauty has long been connected to morality, both implicitly and explicitly. Beauty on the outside as representative of beauty on the inside — think of paintings of the virtues as beautiful women — and at times the two have been equated. For Plato, beauty is the only spiritual thing we love by instinct, by nature, and it is love of beauty that sets us on the moral path towards goodness and moral virtue. Conversely, ugliness and evil are equated. The link between beauty and goodness (and ugliness and evil) is particularly clear in the stories we tell our children where heroes and heroines are young and beautiful and stepmothers, goblins, and ugly sisters are, well, ugly. Disney exemplifies the paradigmatic equation of beauty with goodness and without ambiguity or nuance. The outside must match the inside: the beast must become a beautiful prince (he cannot remain a beast and be loved); the evil stepmother must be punished for seeking to remain beautiful, for pretending to be beautiful, or for trying to compete with, or steal beauty from, the young. Thus, goodness and beauty are, and have been, intimately acquainted, and often beauty is used symbolically to represent the good. How this equation manifests, and what it means, can be, and has been, very different. For example, while images of beautiful women might have represented the virtues, actual flesh and blood, particularly beautiful, women were regarded suspiciously and potentially as morally corrupting; the devil's gateway. In contemporary culture, beauty, as will become abundantly clear, is physical, with particular attention on the naked body and the close-up face.

The assumption that the beautiful are morally good is not limited to fairy tales but is an assumption that continues to underpin our expectations of the beautiful. In this chapter, I will document some of the ways in which these assumptions are manifested in the contemporary context and unpick the ways in which the beauty ideal is, and is functioning (for some wholly and for most in part) as, an ethical ideal. Despite mantras such as "it's what's on the inside that counts" in an increasingly visual and virtual culture, and irrespective of whether we think this should be the case, often it is what is on "the outside" that counts. Judgments about the inside, about the person, are made on the evidence of the outside. Moreover, at times it is effectively only the outside that counts: what is inner is identified with and determined by the outer. I argue that in such instances, beauty does not simply represent, but has become goodness. The symbolic nature of the relationship (where beauty signifies goodness) is broken: beauty is no longer a stand-in, or a place-holder, for goodness, but rather beauty is what is desired (for itself and for the goods that it is believed it will deliver). Beauty then becomes the (ethical) ideal to aspire to and strive for, as the song says it is "your duty to be beautiful, keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved." The song even instructs you how to attain this beauty: of the face ("don't fail to do your stuff, with a lot of power and a puff"), and the body ("if you're wise exercise all the fat off, take it off over here, over there").

For some then beauty is what is desired for itself, beauty is the goal, the end point, the good, which is sought, striven for, and worked towards — the ideal. For others, beauty may be desired in part as a good itself and in part as a means to other goods, and some may not value beauty at all. For those who fall wholly under the beauty ideal, beauty functions unambiguously as an ethical ideal, as a primary value framework; and, as I will argue in the next chapter, more of us fall under the ideal and to a greater extent than previously. In this chapter, I aim to show that, and how, the contemporary ideal of beauty is becoming, and for some already is, an ethical ideal, an overarching moral framework. It provides an ideal to aspire to, and work towards, and individuals judge themselves and others successes or failures according to the extent they conform to it. Under such a framework attaining minimum (good enough) standards of beauty becomes effectively a (moral) duty, something that is required and necessary. As a value framework, the beauty ideal provides shared standards by which to apportion praise, blame, and reward, making beauty-success a moral virtue and beauty-failure a moral vice. As I will go on to show, increasingly beauty failure is regarded as a failure of the whole self, rather than a local failure. Thus, failure to measure up in beauty stakes is not minor or limited, but colors how the self is perceived across contexts. Finally, the beauty ideal is an ethical ideal in that it promises to deliver the goods of the good life. None of these arguments alone is sufficient to establish the beauty ideal as an ethical ideal, but they all point to the change in the status of the beauty ideal, and taken together they have significant weight. That the beauty ideal is an ethical ideal is further supported by claims in subsequent chapters about dominance, scope, and demandingness. As the ideal extends across domains, and in ways I will outline, the nature of the ideal transforms and the ethical nature embeds.

Perfect Is ...

Let me begin by sketching the features of the ideal, features that will be elaborated over subsequent chapters. At this point, my aim is not to defend the larger claim that beauty ideals are converging, but to broadly map the key features of the ideal. By using the language of "an" or "the" ideal I do not mean that there is just one possible "perfect," a detailed blueprint that must be conformed to in all aspects to be "good enough" or "perfect." There is not a single acceptable hair color, eye color, height, or weight. For instance, to be perfect we do not need to be exactly the same (say 5 foot 8, size 10, with long blond hair and blue eyes and a wide smile, or any other detailed and particular instance of "perfect"). We do not all have to be Barbie! Rather to be "perfect," "better," or just "good enough," we have to meet a number of broad requirements. The beauty ideal is not a single model, but a (relatively narrow) range of acceptable models. For example, size can vary, you can be tall or short, petite or Amazonian, but you must be some version of slim; hair style and hair color can vary, but some evidence of grooming is required; breast size can vary, but pertness is desirable across sizes;...