Andrew MacKie-Mason

What is it to treat people with respect when commenting upon their appearance? What duties does widespread vulnerability to body anxiety impose on us concerning the remarks we make about people’s looks? I provide partial answers to these questions by engaging with three proposals. First, the account of aesthetic exploration developed by Sherri Irvin. Second, the principle of the unmodified body defended by Clare Chambers. Third, the ideal of body reflexivity advocated by Kate Manne. I argue that none of the moral duties these accounts point towards can be justified straightforwardly as a requirement of treating people with equal respect, but the idea that it is disrespectful to treat a person’s appearance as inadequate can be defended when hierarchies of attractiveness translate into differences in perceived moral status. Furthermore, qualified versions of each can be justified by the protection they provide when body shaming is liable to cause debilitating anxiety.

Appearance discrimination, or lookism, occurs in many different contexts, including education, politics, the criminal justice system, employment, and personal relationships. We shall focus on two of these contexts, namely, employment and personal relationships, and consider when appearance discrimination in them is morally objectionable. In doing so we shall draw upon a number of theories of what makes discrimination wrong when it is wrong: Deborah Hellman’s theory that discrimination is wrong when it is demeaning; Larry Alexander’s and Benjamin Eidelson’s theories that discrimination is wrong when it is disrespectful; Sophia Moreau’s pluralist theory that considers the impact of discrimination on subordination, deliberative freedom, and access to basic goods; and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s theory that discrimination is wrong when it fails to maximise moral value, e.g. when it harms people who are (undeservedly) worse off than others.

A number of egalitarians have reached the conclusion that inequalities are just provided that they are the outcome of holding people appropriately responsible for their choices, and that only inequalities which can be traced back to the circumstances in which people happen to find themselves are objectionable. But this form of egalitarianism needs to be supplemented with an account of when it is appropriate to hold people responsible for their choices that is properly sensitive to the profound effects of socialisation. Two of the most promising attempts to develop such an account-those of Ronald Dworkin and John Roemer-are found to be problematic in the light of a range of cases where gender socialisation influences values and aspirations.