The Moral Salience of Beauty

On the Convertibilty of the Transcendentals

The Transcendentals are convertible. In terms that sound a bit more like English: Truth is Goodness is Beauty (and in whatever order you may please). Truth is good and beautiful; goodness is true and beautiful; beauty is true and good. To deny any Transcendental is to deny them all, and to deny the Transcendentals is, ultimately, to deny God, for the Transcendentals are His nature — God is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Most will not object to the moral salience of truth and goodness, but many will recoil when told that beauty is equally morally salient. Of course, part of this is simply a lack of education or understanding, but there is also another layer: The moral salience of beauty is taken as a sort of personal attack by many. This is similar to how many react to the concrete and measurable reality of IQ. If beauty is morally salient, and beauty is unequally ‘distributed’, then we are immoral in some sense or way and to some extent due to circumstances at least partially and in some ways totally outside our control. As the fact of beauty’s unequal ‘distribution’ is undeniable, those who want to avoid the conclusion (whether consciously or not) must deny the moral salience of beauty. Of course, the problem with objecting to the conclusion — at all — is that doing so is tantamount to rejecting a core doctrine of the Christian faith (i.e., original sin), and thereby amounts to apostasy.

To contend that moral salience must be a matter of intent (i.e., the underlying or ‘smuggled’ presumption or premise of those who object to the moral salience of beauty) is a demonstration of a dire sort of ignorance (or wickedness). You had no intent with regard to original sin, but you are guilty and suffer the consequences of it; no man intends to be born with a hunchback or a single testicle, but such men were still barred from serving in the Tent of Witness or the Temple. The elevation of ‘intent’ to the sine qua non of morality or moral salience is a modern idea that is alien to Scripture and thereby demonstrably also to the God of Scripture. Intent can certainly exacerbate a moral transgression, but not all such transgressions require intent as an element. In a sense, it seems very much like we have taken a concept from our criminal law and read it back into our theology, into our understanding of sin, and, while this impulse is not entirely perverse (sin and salvation are juridical concepts, after all), it is still inappropriate — sin does not necessarily require any intent. In fact, even a good intent (e.g., to save the Ark from touching the ground) may be met with swift punishment, having not changed the nature of the transgressive act.

We have largely abandoned the concept of status crimes (the wisdom of this could be debated), but God has most certainly not abandoned them. You are doomed to die because you are a sinner — a status crime. Even if you never personally sinned (which is, of course, impossible), you would still die because you are a sinner, you would still be punished because of your status. We do still retain some aspects of this in certain areas of our laws. For instance, if you are an expert, you may be held to a higher standard because of your status as an expert. We also have certain victim categories (e.g., young children, the disabled, the elderly) whose status exacerbates the crime (i.e., usually demands a harsher sentence).

Morality is, more or less, a measure of accuracy — an action or a status is immoral insofar as and to the degree that it misses the mark (i.e., is inaccurate). This analysis can be run for each of the Transcendentals. The easiest is truth, for a thing is generally true or false (and the degree to which something deviates from the truth is relatively easy to measure or calculate). Goodness is a more complex analysis, but still not an overly difficult assessment to run. And then we come to beauty, not only a more complex matter, but also a much more difficult analysis. The beauty of the rose is and is not the beauty of the mountain is and is not the beauty of woman. Beauty is objective, but it is also relative in the relational sense of being scoped to the instance with reference to the form.

Again, to express this in something that looks more like English: There exists a perfection with regard to beauty that is specific for each creature. Insofar as you deviate from this perfection, you have missed the mark — that is a moral failing. To be blunt: It is a moral failing to be ugly. This may seem or sound harsh, but to say anything else would be to compromise another of the Transcendentals: truth. Now, not to (unduly or impermissibly) soften things, but, rather, to ensure that they are as clear as possible: Not all moral failings are personal failings in the sense of personal moral culpability (more or less the nexus with intent). You do not need to ask for forgiveness for being unattractive — that is not what is in view here; rather, what is in view is that we live in a fallen and sinful world and we are all affected by this, but not all to the same degree. We more readily accept this with regard to things like disease (even terrible diseases like cancer), but the matter is not significantly different with regard to beauty. Both your chance of getting cancer and your physical beauty are a matter of biology and environment (and, perhaps, misadventure). The reasons that many (undoubtedly most, actually) take the beauty issue more ‘personally’ are so obvious that they can be left unstated, but the moral analysis does not differ.

Ugliness is the measure of missing the mark that is beauty; just as disease is the measure of missing the mark that is health. You are not less of a person because you are less physically beautiful than another person, but you are further from the mark and that is a moral failing, because all deviation from God’s perfection is a failing. The analysis holds for all of the Transcendentals: To deviate from the truth is a moral failing insofar as and to the extent that you fall short; to deviate from the good is a moral failing insofar as and to the extent that you fall short; and to deviate from the perfection of beauty that would have been yours in an unfallen world and will be yours in Paradise is a moral failing insofar as and to the extent that you fall short. To object to this would be to reject truth — another moral failing.

There are many reasons (both conscious and unconscious) why so many object to the rather simple truth that beauty is morally salient, and, to be entirely fair to the reader, some of them are much more obvious than others, but none of them is compelling and all of them must be (summarily) dismissed. In truth, only the first sentence of this article, which I will reproduce here, is necessary: The Transcendentals are convertible. If Goodness is Beauty is Truth, then beauty is, of course, morally salient, for the Transcendentals are themselves the index and the measure of the moral.

QED.