Topics Ethics

Question If intelligent people incur a moral obligation to society, can the same argument be made for other forms of (for lack of a better word) power? For instance, being beautiful gives you social influence to wield: on this line of thought, would beautiful people have an obligation too?

Accepted:
June 19, 2014

Comments

Interesting! I suggest that one needs more of a foundation or framework to infer from someone having intelligence or some other talent, ability or good (such as beauty) to the conclusion that one has certain obligations to one's society. There are foundations or frameworks to consider: in a case where a person comes to have some good like intelligence through the sacrificial contributions of others (imagine one's family and community pool together resources to pay for your medical education and you have the medical skills and intelligence due to others), a person may have a debt of gratitude (of some kind) to benefit those who helped one. Or an intelligent person may have an obligation to contribute to her or his community if she has volunteered or promised to do so or perhaps everyone in a community has agreed to donate their time and talent to the good of group as a whole. In the last case, perhaps someone who is intelligent or talented at building roads might have an obligation to offer to build roads and someone good at dentistry to do dentistry.... About BEAUTY? A cheap way to dismiss the question would be to claim that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and that it is too subjective to be the grounds for any obligation to anyone. BUT let's grant that beauty is real and that if it is in the eye of the beholder, then there can be reliable (perhaps beautiful?) beholders.

So, imagine someone is actually beautiful and she or he fills others with rapture, a sense of transporting delight. We are all familiar with cases of when the desire to control or possess beauty goes wrong, but what if we bracket such options and adopt a position hinted at by the philosopher Iris Murdoch that the appreciation of something beautiful (in one of her examples, this involves being captivated by a kestrel, a beautiful bird) can take us away from our self-centered, selfish desires and help us see values quite independent of our (to borrow a phrase from another British philosopher) "grubby little egos." In such a case, would the beautiful person (using a gender neutral name) let us call Pat have an obligation to use Pat's beauty for the good of the whole or of society or the good of others? There are moral teachings from Marxism to Christianity that to whom much is given, much is required, but in terms of general moral intuitions, I suggest the following: it may be that it is both good and a duty for Pat to use Pat's beauty for good ends (perhaps this is the way people think of Angelina Jolie being a representative of those concerned with children in dire straits?), but I suggest that there is a strong and long-lived tenant in much reflection on beauty over the centuries that "beauty" should not be subject (or is not subject) to control or manipulation. That is a broad generalization that other philosophers might find outrageous, but I am thinking of William Blake's notion that if one seeks to cage or control one's beloved, she or he (or love itself) will die. In this tradition, the love of beauty requires a surrender of the desire for possession. You can see this (or so I suggest) in Plato's dialogue on love and beauty in the Symposium and in the display of love in Dante's Divine Comedy and elsewhere.

Sorry to go on so long, but I suggest (in summary) that while things that are beautiful and persons who are deemed (and perhaps who truly are) beautiful, can be the cause or occasion for ugly things, any obligation that a "beautiful person" has to do good must (fundamentally) be voluntary or freely given. Once the obligation of someone of beauty is imposed or enforced, there is more than a slight scent of ugliness, going back to the practice in ancient warfare (and not unknown today) of when, a defeated city or state or kingdom is subject to the killing of all males of military age (and sometimes of any age) and the enslavement of women and children.

I really will conclude now: If you are truly (or widely regarded as) beautiful (in, as it were, body and soul --using these terms in a non-technical fashion), then I dearly hope and encourage you to use that beauty for the good (e.g. do not appear in advertisements for products that contribute to climate change that will bring about grave harm).