Is it bad to want a badie? Why, contra D'Alessandro we shouldn't try to eliminate a romantic preference for the attractive.

If you could press a button that would make you indifferent to physical beauty, including in potential partners, would you and should you? Ted Chiang famously explores this question in Liking What You See: A Documentary but a recent paper by William D’Alessandro Is It Bad to Prefer Attractive Partners? exploring a similar proposition caught my attention recently. D’Alessandro argues that a romantic preference for the attractive is harmful and unfair and we should try to overcome it.

Approximately the way attractiveness works is that people have a certain amount of it, and want as much of it as possible, and through a market dynamic, tend to end up with partners roughly as attractive as them- unless they have powerful secondary assets like wealth or truly apocalypse grade rizz. Some people try to deny this and paint a picture in which everyone has varied tastes and so can find someone for them who’ll accept them, but sadly this is not the case. Some people are hot, some people are not, and for people who are not, that’s just the way it is. As D’Alessandro notes:

“It’s important to acknowledge, though, that for whatever reasons—social or biological or both—people largely concur in their judgments about attractiveness. According to a 2000 metaanalysis of facial attractiveness research, “judges (within a given culture) showed high and significant levels of agreement when evaluating the attractiveness of others. ...More importantly, our cross-cultural and cross-ethnic analyses showed that even diverse groups of raters readily agreed about who is and is not attractive. Both our cross-cultural and cross-ethnic agreement effect sizes are more than double the size necessary to be considered large” (Langlois et al. 2000: 399-400). (Often the Pearson’s r coefficient for raters’ judgments in these studies is found to be between .85 and .95, where r = 1 indicates perfect correlation. This is indeed a strikingly large effect size.)”

A massive effect size indeed. To some degree, we can control our own attractiveness, but a good chunk of it is beyond us. Even the chunk we can control doesn’t necessarily reflect our moral standing- it reflects wealth and time and the like- a point D’Alessandro makes in his paper. All this does strike me as prima facie unfair and harmful- so I’ll grant that, for the sake of argument, to Alessandro.

So should we try to stop preferring attractive people in our romantic pursuits the name of fairness?

One obvious reply is that we can’t really stop ourselves from preferring attractive partners. If we try we’ll just end up unhappy in relationships we don’t prefer, which is fair neither to us nor our partner. I take this, more or less, to be a decisive objection to the naive version of the thesis, although I think D’Alessandro disagrees- but there’s no need to get into that debate here.

We can save the thesis by making it more sophisticated in a number of ways, viz:

1. The claim is true at the margin. While we will never be able to completely control our desires, we should strive- perhaps with real exertion- to limit our romantic prejudices based on attractiveness.

2. The claim, while practically unattainable, is true in the counterfactual where there is a freely available intervention that would make us blind to attractiveness, like Chiang’s calliagnosia.

So should you strive at the margin to limit your preference for the attractive? Should you press a button that will blind you to physical beauty?

I want to suggest this moral question is a good case for drawing a limit to morality- not for extra-moral reasons, but for moral reasons. We don’t want to demand overmuch piety for the reason that doing so would do more harm to the good than help. It wouldn’t work and even if it did work, the amount of energy and goodwill we’d have to spend on that crusade wouldn’t be worth it.

Or to say it a little differently There is a technical sense, maybe, in which you should press the button. But we should back off from demanding it, and perhaps even from recommending it because doing so would be a disgrace to the name of the good. It would give people a reason to view morality as overbearing, unreasonable, and, well, ugly. It is not the place of morality to end such a fundamental sphere of human existence without a much better casus belli. Perhaps we should recommend people be a bit more realistic about how happy an attractive partner will make them in the long run just on prudential grounds, but we shouldn’t be pushy about it.

What about ourselves though? Should we at least try to do the abstract "best thing” and disregard beauty? No, I don’t think so. I mean if you really want to stop yourself from discriminating romantically on the basis of attractiveness go ahead I guess (particularly if you’re male, gay, and in my area). But I think there’s a risk of making ourselves jaded towards the good by trying to do extremely psychologically difficult things in the name of what’s right.

To be honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way reading contemporary ethics, it’s just one of the clearest instances. Ethicists are always looking for new things to discuss the ethics of, and frankly, as ever more areas are found, and ever wider ambit claims are made on behalf of morality and its requirements, the whole thing can get a bit tiresome. I’m not talking about a claim that the demandingness of morality should only be pushed so far, as for example made by Susan Wolf. I’m talking about a kind of moral micromanagement- it’s not the extremity of the demands, it’s the number of them. Fortunately, this paper isn’t tiresome, it’s provocative and fun.