Beauty is Objective

Thanks to my opponent for some incisive comments, I'll do my best to address the challenges offered. Apologies in advance for the lack of referencing! I'll begin with a summary of an argument made in Sam Harris's most recent book, The Moral Landscape, about the objectivity of well-being. The central point of Harris's book is that science can help us determine moral values. In order to demonstrate this, Harris responds in advance to the criticism that while something verifiable by evidence, such as evolution, should rightly be described as objectively true, human well-being is by its very nature a subjective and culturally contingent experience/phenomenon, and cannot, therefore, be treated the same. Harris's rebuttal to this involves an analogy with health, which I summarize as: 1. Health, like well-being, is an undefined term, and can be considered culturally contingent. Other cultures may consider certain physical states signs of good health, whilst we would disagree. It would be tempting, therefore, to call health subjective. 2. This in no way detracts from the fact that the distinction between a dead person and an alive person is about as clear a distinction as we can make. 3. Those who define good health as a dysfunctional body, constant pain and short lifespan are not engaging in an intelligible discussion, or at least not a discussion that uses any common or useful terms. Now, to apply this analogy directly to the idea of beauty would be problematic, but there are some parallels: 1. Beauty, like health, is an undefined term. It is clearly culturally contingent, as my opponent pointed out. It is indeed tempting, within these parameters, to call beauty subjective. 2. This in no way detracts from the fact that there may be a person in this world to whom nobody is attracted. There may also be a person considered at least partially attractive by everyone (Consider, perhaps, a woman who is overweight but with a face considered attractive in the west; such a person would be thought of as at least partially attractive to both westerners and cultures such as the ones my opponent referenced earlier). That these two scenarios are unlikely does not mean that they are impossible. If true, what could it possibly mean to say that the two cannot be differentiated between in terms of beauty? Beauty is a word that we use to describe an aesthetic opinion, just as health is a word we use to describe an opinion about what is preferable in terms of our physical condition. But these are the terms of the discussion. We would be objectively correct, as objectively correct as it is possible to be, in calling a 30 stone person unhealthy. Would we be wrong (could we, in fact, be considered anything other than right) to call the person considered beautiful by everyone on the planet beautiful? 3. Those who describe a high degree of beauty as repulsiveness or terminal ill-health are not engaging in an intelligible discussion, or are doing so using terms that are essentially unrelated. There are, of course, schools of art which value problematic, disturbing, or otherwise aesthetically displeasing images above those considered traditionally beautiful, but I would reiterate that my argument is for the objectivity of beauty in terms of human attractiveness to other humans. An unattractive person considered beautiful from an artistic standpoint is only able to be considered as such because of a lack of beauty in the sense that I define it for the purposes of this debate. I look forward to my opponent's response to these points.