Beauty is Objective

Firstly, thanks to Bieber (if I can call you that!) for accepting this, my first debate on the site. I'll begin with a hypothetical piece of research to illustrate my second contention, hopefully using it as a foundation for the somewhat more abstract first contention. To clarify, this is not a piece of research which I, nor to my knowledge anyone else has done; the aim here is present a scenario and what I think its outcomes would be. My opponent is of course free to disagree with both the predicted outcome and my analysis of what that outcome would suggest. Photographs are taken of 1000 couples. For the sake of ease when sorting through, all of the couples are heterosexual. Care is taken to choose couples randomly; the people choosing the couples to photograph are not given any information about the experiment, and will therefore be unbiased. Each partner in the couple is photographed seperately, with one close-up of the face and one full body shot. The photographs are separated into male and female piles, throughly shuffled then placed into two large plastic wallets, each containing 500 photos (one wallet for men, one wallet for women). Both wallets are then given to a neutral third party. Obviously, this third party has no idea which man is coupled with which woman. The third party is then given the instruction to rate every person, male and female, out of 10 for attractiveness, writing the number in the bottom corner of each photograph. After this has been done, the people who origonally took the photographs come back in and sort the couples into the correct pairings. I put it to my opponent that there are two possible outcomes to this experiment, one which would suggest that beauty is subjective, the other that it is objective. The outcome which would suggest the former would be that there is little or no correlation between the numerical value for attractiveness assigned by the third party, and the partners that people have chosen in real life i.e. there are plenty of 10's with 3's, 2's with 7's, 9's with 1's and, of course, 5's with 5's and 6's with 6's. If this were the outcome, we would rightly infer that the third party's evaluations of each person's attractiveness was subjective. If, however, there was significant correlation, a very different picture emerges. Let us say, for instance, that in 90 percent of cases, couple match up within 1 'attractiveness point' of one another in either direction e.g. 5's with 6's, 5's and 7's, 9's with 8's, 9's and 10's etc. This would be a far more difficult outcome to decode. We might be tempted to say that the results are largely coincidental, but what if the experiment were repeated ten times over, with different couples and different third parties with the same results? At some point, we would have to recognize a greater stucture at work. I put it to my opponent that the following conclusions should be drawn from this second outcome, which, for the record, I regard as the far more likely of the two. 1. There is a standard of beauty that the vast majority of people share. 2. That the couples corellated with the third party's evaluations of their attractivenesses shows that not only that he is subject to this standard, but also that the majority are the couple are 'plugged in' as it were. 3. Where there are exceptions to this correlation, the rule is proved further. It would be absurd of me to say that all people follow the standard religeously, but to say that most people do to some significant degree seems obvious. 4. People instinctively, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say empirically, place both themselves and others along a continuum of attractiveness that is largely shared. Moreover, couplings tend to adhere to that hierarchy, rooted in kind of evolutionary-capitalist logic of supply and demand. Average-looking people, aware of their position, will tend towards other average looking people, and even when they aspire to be with persons higher up the scale, those higher up the scale correct for this by denying them access. I'll leave it that for now and let my opponent respond to this hypothetical and my conclusions. Of course, I've only just stratched the surface here, not to mention having largely avoided contention one for the time being, so I look forward to seeing what new directions my opponent takes us in :)