Asks whether Is It Morally Bad to Prefer Attractive Partners; this poster, an ugly guy, although clearly disfavored by others because of this preference for beauty, thinks it is not morally bad that others prefer the cute ones (said with clear sadness :-( )

Is It Bad to Prefer Attractive Partners? William D’Alessandro. Forthcoming in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. Archived Jan 17 2022, contents seem to be from 2018. https://philarchive.org/archive/DALIIB

1 The issue

In a variety of ways, our society favors attractive people and disfavors unattractive people. Social scientists have observed, for instance, that cuter children get more positive attention from their school teachers (Adams & Cohen 1974), that better-looking defendants are treated more leniently by the justice system (Mazzella & Feingold 1994), and that beautiful people are generally perceived as more honest, kind, competent and friendly (Jackson et al. 1995).

These forms of discrimination deserve to be discussed more widely and taken more seriously than they usually are. But treatments of “lookism” by philosophers have condemned most forms of the practice in unambiguous terms (cf. (Chambers forthcoming), (Davis 2007), (Mason 2021), (Minerva 2017). And rightly so: it’s easy to see that cuter kindergartners aren’t entitled to a better educational experience, that ugly convicts don’t deserve harsher punishments, and so on. 

Treating people differently in these ways for these reasons is bad, just as it would be morally unacceptable to favor white students or wealthy defendants.

There’s another type of lookist discrimination, however, that’s both extremely common and widelycondoned by people of all moral persuasions. The attitude I’m talking about is the preference for attractive sexual and romantic partners. Of course, it would be an understatement to say that we merely tolerate this type of discrimination. It’s not only acceptable but thoroughly normal, and in fact normative, in the sense that we expect people to prefer attractive partners and deviant preferences are often met with surprise and disapproval. This impression survives empirical scrutiny: as one researcher writes, “abundant evidence has been collected to show that people clearly prefer physically attractive potential partners over less attractive potential partners” (Greitemeyer 2010: 318).

Philosophers have yet to give this phenomenon much thought. This paper sets out do so, by trying to answer the question posed in the title: Is it morally bad to prefer attractive partners? Or is this a form of discrimination we should accept, and perhaps even promote?

I consider arguments for both views. In broad strokes, I think there’s at least one strong argument that preferring attractive partners is bad. The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. In particular, a case can be made that the preference for attractive partners is both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.