Beauty is Objective

Debate round 5 I'll begin my concluding argument with a last ditch defense of the hypothetical. The 'beautiful' person in my scenario was not someone who everybody on the planet considered truly beautiful; it was a person to whom everybody on the planet was at least partially attracted. I admit that it would be incredibly unlikely or any one person to be considered truly beautiful by all people, but a person for whom everybody shared some level of attraction seems realistic. I think that if such a person existed, and I imagine they do, it would be empirically negligent of us to refuse the conclusion that he or she possessed some quality intrinsic to their appearance that caused a particularly high degree of aesthetic or sexual response in observers. For me, the question would no longer be 'Is this person beautiful?'; beauty is an aesthetic category, and as such should be measured by aesthetic response. When the response is positive, even minimally so, across the board, we must conclude that the object responded to fulfills the criteria for possessing that quality. The question we would have to ask at that point would be: 'Why is this person beautiful?'. A positive aesthetic or sexual response is not arbitrary. There will always be a complete and theoretically discoverable set of reasons for that response. It may be, for instance, that that person carries a particularly high number of signs of evolutionary 'capital' i.e. the external signifiers of good genes/survivability/health. Alternatively, it could be that such a person fulfilled enough of the world's many and varied cultural criteria for beauty to be considered (again, I must stress, at least partially) attractive by persons from every culture. For example, a large nose may be considered a symbol of female attractiveness in one culture, perhaps on historical or religious grounds. A large nose is not considered particularly attractive by most men in the UK, but large breasts are. A woman with both a large nose and large breasts would therefore be considered at least partially attractive by both cultures, regardless of how disparate those culture's tastes, in a larger sense, may be. Again, it may seem as though this hypothetical stretches the boundaries of believability, but consider the scope for facial and body manipulation in the future, when plastic surgery and even cybernetic technologies have reached the heights of science-fiction. I would be truly amazed if it were not possible, given the possibility of designing person's appearance down to the smallest detail, to create a body that was not, at least partially, attractive to everybody. Now, while I don't want to dodge my opponent's challenge to deliver an objective standard of beauty as a foundation for my claims, I feel it necessary to take another leaf from Harris's book. While Harris does argue for the objective value of well-being, he does not present a firm, unarguable foundation for what well-being is. Rather, he posits that well-being consists of something like the absence of suffering, and indeed the presence of happiness, in the experiences of conscious creatures. Of course, the experiences of conscious creatures are subjective, but the brain states that cause those experiences are not. Building on this point about the material reality of experience, Harris argues that science can help us decide what a morally good action is because science is well placed to describe the various brain states that arise as the results of our actions. What I'm arguing is that, just as we can come, through scientific endeavor, to understand the complexities of the brain states than coincide with happiness and suffering, so too, through empirical study, can we come to understand the qualities and attributes that human beings find beautiful, and why. As our knowledge of these relationships grows, we come ever closer to a complete conception of what a beautiful thing must be, in order to provoke these responses. 'Koinophilia', an evolutionary theory that describes why sexual creatures, when choosing a mate, are more likely to choose inividuals with a large number of 'average' or 'common' features, due to those features having proven their evolutionary value, is an example (if true) of an instance in which the empirical observation of an objective reality brings us closer to that understanding. [1] To conclude then, the prevailing myth that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' does not ring true. To come at the problem of personal judgment from a different angle, perhaps beauty should be regarded entirely apart from opinion, as a truly objective substance. To take this hypothesis to its end-point, when the mechanics of sexual selection are truly well understood, it should be possible to say that a man who describes a particular woman, a woman which study tells us is particularly gifted in terms of sexual suitability, as ugly, is in fact wrong. That differences of opinion exist is only enough to conclude that individual observers' apprehension of reality is inconsistent. Thanks to Con for giving me a really enjoyable first debate on the site, one in which I must admit to having played devil's advocate. The more contentious the subject matter, the more interesting the debate! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org...