Comment by YurgenJurgensen
10 hours ago
You say ‘somehow’ like the reasoning isn’t obvious. Physical attractiveness is a signal of reproductive fitness when it’s genetic, and not otherwise.
10 hours ago
You say ‘somehow’ like the reasoning isn’t obvious. Physical attractiveness is a signal of reproductive fitness when it’s genetic, and not otherwise.
The reductionist biological explanation might be obvious to you, but in the actual world, the reasoning and the moral condemnation of things like plastic surgery is never explicitly about giving false signals regarding one's reproductive fitness. Reasons "haters" cite are about vanity, narcissism, refusing to look your age, etc.
That too is pretty obvious from the same perspective: Admitting you only care about someone’s genes is itself considered shallow, so people make up other justifications based on other, more accepted values.
For me, motivation matters. If you want to learn social skills to make your life easier while not harming others, that's perfectly fine, admirable even, but if you learn it to damage others for your own profit, that's immoral.
Same for the motivation of surgeries. You might not be comfortable with yourself, and want to change something, and that's perfectly fine, but again to changing appearance signal something to benefit you and harm others with less effort, it's immoral again.
And, I believe, if you need to change how you behave or look to get acceptance from a circle, this means the circle is toxic and you'll be far happier elsewhere.
[dead]
> Physical attractiveness is a signal of reproductive fitness when it’s genetic, and not otherwise.
Nay, artificial physical attractiveness is also a signal of reproductive fitness. It isn't a given. It's the subject's genes that made a brain that was able to design (and to arrange to pay for!) the improved attractiveness.
It's not qualitatively different from brushing hair.
Yes, technically, having spare resources to devote to your own appearance is considered a positive signal, but it is an unreliable one, and often one not as valued by the people making the judgement. If there are many ways to signal wealth, a signal that has some intrinsic downside will lose its value if lots of people are sending the other wealth-signals.
This is a bullshit rationalization for horrible behavior.
The people doing the judging certainly aren't gonna reproduce with 99.99999% of the people being judged, and I'm being extremely generous here.
You might think that those people’s opinions don’t matter, but it turns out that ‘lots of other people value me highly’ is in itself a signal.
And yes, it is horrible, but if you want to solve a problem, you must first understand the problem, and ‘some people are just born with Evil in their hearts’ is not a very good sociological model.
While I certainly agree that it is an example of poor judgment and perhaps weak character to be broadly judgy about cosmetic efforts in general, I can understand the theoretical plight of someone who might be taken in by a deceptive person in that regard.
If you steelman the argument you can see the point, but it’s also unreasonable to assume that a person is living the steelman version of life (and being a deceptive person) just because they had a facelift.
OTOH, if you are admiring people’s genetics using their appearance as a proxy, I can see why it might seem like “cheating”
But the problem is not admiring good looks if they're natural, or expecting someone to be truthful, or anything of the sort that might or might not theoretically happen.
The problem is clearly with the bullying. And the assumptions around character. And basically using "changing yourself" as a proxy for hallucinating all sorts of completely unrelated bad characteristics. And the rationalizing around it.
It's the same for behavior: people are fine with the behavior of "naturally charming" people but as soon as someone mentions "learning how to do it" people immediately jump to conclusions and call it manipulative.
2 replies →
Sure, but why would they care? And why do you think it matters?
That's precisely my point. If you're not gonna reproduce with someone, their "reproductive fitness" is none of your business.
Once again this is just a rationalization for horrible behavior.
9 replies →