Our Judgment: BEAUTY THAT IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER IS NO

LONGER ONLY SKIN-DEEP

Let us make some dogmatic remarks about beauty and subjectivity.  We can discuss
them in more detail on the air tomorrow. There is such a thing as beauty that is only
skin-deep.  It is the beauty of appearance, what we call "looking good."  It has little to do
with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to
how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities. 

The beauty of appearance -- what we can judge, say, by looking at a photograph of a face
-- is something that psychologists have been investigating a lot recently.  In general, they
show people photographs of faces and ask them to rank them in terms of their beauty. 
Since these are digital photographs, it is possible to combine them into composite
photographs.  What seems to be the case is (1) the larger the composite photograph (the
more features of individual faces it combines) the more people are likely to consider it
beautiful and (2) there is remarkable agreement, both within and between different
cultures, about which faces are more beautiful than which.

Several hypotheses have been offered to account for these phenomena, and it seems
agreed that they have something to do with the likelihood of reproductive success.  The
more features a face combines, the more average it is.  Now it is very counterintuitive to
say that the average is what strikes us as beautiful (since the people or works of art we
find beautiful usually stand out against their background), but it turns out that average
members of groups are less likely to be subject to external evolutionary pressures and
more likely to be healthy and survive in the long run.  (That may suggest that even
beauty that is skin-deep shows something about the nature of the person it
characterizes.) But the fact that there is significant agreement about such judgments (as
well as the fact that it is explained in terms of evolutionary success) suggests, in turn,
that BEAUTY THAT IS ONLY SKIN-DEEP IS NOT SIMPLY IN THE EYE OF THE
BEHOLDER.

Now, not only are these psychological results counterintuitive -- they also contradict
another aspect of everyday experience.  Most people in the known universe have, at
some time or other, loved someone and most people in the known universe have, at
some time or other, been loved by someone, though that is not always, unfortunately,
the same person.  But the point is (here we are being very dogmatic) that it is impossible
to love someone or something that you do not find beautiful.  And so, since most people
in the world are not, by the evolutionary standards above (or even by the standards
applicable to supermodels, male and female) beautiful, either most people in the world
are deceived all the time or there is more to beauty, so to speak, than meets the eye.

We must be careful here, for the easy way out is to say that there is such a thing as
"inner" or "psychological" beauty, to be contrasted with the beauty of appearance.  But
that is only easy, and nothing else -- in particular, it is not true.  For even if you love
someone on account of their character or wit or whatever, these features will manifest
themselves in the appearance of the person in question: you will literally perceive them
in their face, their posture, their voice and their behavior.  That is, a person you love will
not appear to you as they do to others who don't love them or as they appear to you
when you are indifferent to them.

Such beauty is, unlike good looks of the sort psychologists investigate, very
controversial, which is why we keep asking ourselves what our friends see in the people
they love, but whom we can't stand. The sense in which there is more to beauty than
meets the eye is not that it is "inner," but that it is not likely to meet many eyes.  That is,
beauty, generally considered, is a product of love and not, in general, its antecent cause. 
That's what locates it in the eye of the beholder.   BUT BEAUTY THAT IS IN THE EYE
OF THE BEHOLDER IS NO LONGER ONLY SKIN-DEEP.

It is this beauty that we find philosophically interesting and important.  It applies

equally to people and things, particularly works of art.  It certainly is valuable, although
we are not sure its value is intrinsic, as Ken suggests (it may be -- we really are not
sure).  But its value, along with the value of all the "aesthetic" features that are
associated with it, is very different from the moral values that seem to have acquired a
monopoly over human life in philosophy and public discourse.   Moral values, broadly
speaking, depend on the similarities and connections that require us to treat each other
impartially, fairly and equally.  The values associated with beauty, by contrast, depend
on the differences between various human beings and give preference to individuality,
autonomy and personal style.