"Winged Man, in Idealistic Clothing, Playing a Lute,"
from Drawings by Albrecht Durer

You found Scarry's (and, to a lesser degree, Gebara's) arguments

• unrealistic and idealistic
• failing to acknowledge the comparative quality of beauty
• failing to acknowledge the changing standards of beauty.

Rachel: I found "On Beauty and Being Fair" a little unrealistic.... Don't we thrive on diversity? ....My "social empathy" is jumpstarted by asymmetry and injustice, not "beautiful things"....Isn't the very beauty standard of our society built on the fact that only a select few are able to attain it?...If beauty is...ever changing, then isn't a justice motivated or guided by beauty going to likewise change and shift...?

Amy: I had to question how her notions of distributional beauty would really make the world a more just place....she was being so optimistic...I couldn't help but think of the current ...disregard of the world's natural beauty/ natural environment...

Alanna: "dreaming" is right....Gebara seemed to have forgotten to mention how exactly we should go about achieving beauty and justice in a world where injustice is the norm....where people don't all share the same ideals....people in general need to re-think their own attitudes...to not see beauty as power, self-worth, manipulation, etc.

eebs: i also thought that her thinking was a little unrealistic to apply to the 'world of profit' we live in....beautiful people...portray themselves as more... fragile...beautiful people use their gift to get ahead....a result of luck at birth...everyone else can praise the other types of luck at birth...

Alice S: I found this view of beauty, well, beautiful...I do think it is a bit idealistic....This made me think of some of our conversations in class about unattainable standards of beauty. If we did not have a standard, we would not have the motivation to fight for something better.

Meera: By being critical, "ugly", judgemental and attached we lose the progress to defining justice....if most of us find something beautiful we tend to examine it and cherish it more closely and thereby can save it or save ourselves.

Muska: I thought the whole concept of beauty was based on a spectrum. Defining something as beautiful required defining all the things that were not considered beautiful. In fact, it seemed as if the concept of "beauty" benefits from a system of injustice. The only way one thing can be categorized as "beautiful" is if there is something else categorized as "ugly."

Catie: The fear in judging human beauty comes from the idea that those perceived as ugly...are disadvantaged....another big question addressed here is the ethics of beauty. The fairness and unfairness of different ways of judging beauty.

Mo : I found Scarry's almost too methodical...argument...seemed so based on the perfect fitting of pieces in a puzzle: symmetry, proportion, equality and lateral disregard....I think the beauty and justice are both too complex and morphing to be pinned down so precisely.

Katy : I was frustrated by this week's readings.... which said virtually nothing on what we must do and how we must use beauty as a tool for eradicating injustice.

Lauren: Plenty of hideous acts have been performed in the name of justice....

So, let's see if we can do a little better than that...?

From University of Oklahoma College of Law

Why was Justice (Traditionally Portrayed as Being) Blind?

A common representation of Justice is a blind-folded woman holding a set of scales....To the ancient Greeks she was known as Themis....Classical representations of Themis did not show her blindfolded (because of her talent for prophecy, she had no need to be blinded) nor was she holding a sword (because she represented common consent, not coercion)....The Roman goddess of justice...was often portrayed as evenly balancing both scales and a sword and wearing a blindfold. She was sometimes portrayed holding the fasces (a bundle of rods around an ax symbolizing judicial authority) in one hand and a flame in the other (symbolizing truth). --From University of Washington School of Law

Elaine Scarry has a very different idea--
justice based on increased visual perception.

(Perhaps well illustrated by Salvador Dali's ""Goddess of Justice"?)

From Hamilton-Selway Fine Art

...beauty actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice...by requiring of us constant perceptual acuity...Noticing beauty increases the possibility that it will be carefully handled....The structure of beauty appears to have a two-part scaffolding: first, one's attention is involuntarily given to the beautiful person or thing; then, this quality of heightened attention is voluntarily extended out....beautiful things...serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness ....

Scarry's argument is grounded in a classical ideal of beauty:

Brittany : When Scarry says "justice," she means our twentieth-century, equal-rights, humans-deserve-humanity form of justice....far back into history, "justice" becomes an eye for an eye....And technically that's what the term implies: a sort of universal equilibrium. A world governed solely by justice would strictly abide by the (usually scientific) principle that "every action has an equal and opposite reaction"....personally I think mercy is *more* beautiful.... Justice, in its purest form...'s absolute---the scales are balanced perfectly.....

Flora: Screw Symmetry-- Maybe it's my inner physicist talking, but the whole concept is just scary. A perfectly symmetric world would be perfectly balanced between all things...it would be horrible....I'm going to try to explain a qualitative concept in quanitative terms....Many people are familiar with the concept of conservation of energy....in one system there is only a finite amount of energy....Say there's only a finite amount of beauty in the entire world....in this symmetrical argument, everytime you do/have/see something good, you're taking that goodness away from someone else, because therešs only a finite amount....there's nothing beautiful about it, unless the goal is to try to distribute everything evenly....The world would have none of Scarry's "wake-up calls" because all beauty would be equal in all things....where's the excitement? Where's the beauty?...

Sharon: Flora showed how undesirable a symmetry requirement of beauty can be when the symmetry inherent in the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy, is applied to beauty. I thought of another fundamental physical principle, the second law of thermodynamics: The total entropy of the universe increases. This law in contrast is asymmmetrical. It's not hard to find the promise in applying it to beauty: Universal beauty increases. And that is not unlike what both authors write about, how appreciating and caring for beauty in one place can make it more likely for beauty to be seen and cared for elsewhere.

Kat: I'm very intrigued by the Flora/Sharon conversations about effectively inserting beauty into the laws of thermodynamics...they provide such a nice model of (yet another) dichotomy: that of beauty being fixed in amount (beauty=symmetry=justice=equality) versus that of beauty being unbounded (Beauty somwhere means more beauty elsewhere). Muska seems to be in the same camp as Flora, stating "the concept of 'beauty' benefits from a system of injustice. The only way one thing can be categorized as 'beautiful' is if there is something else categorized as 'ugly.' " So, maybe there is a way out of this after all?

Tanya : I loved Dr. B's argument that the universe is becoming increasingly beautiful because of increasing entropy ...beauty is describe as too much of an extreme and has caused it to be regarded as a troublemaker leading to injustices....I admire her attempt to stand up as beauty's attorney, defending it to the point of making it a victim...but I still think its crimes are pretty severe and I'd vote guilty.

From Ernst Mayer, What Evolution Is, as discussed in The Story of Evolution:
"It is sometimes claimed that evolution, by producing order, is in conflict with the "law of entropy" of physics, according to which evolutionary change should produce an increase of disorder. Actually, there is no conflict, because the law of entropy is valid only for closed systems, whereas the evolution of a species of organisms takes place in an open system in which organisms can reduce entropy at the expense of the environment and the sun supplies a continuing source of energy."

The Essential Link Between (with apologies...)
the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Beauty and Justice

• The first law says that, in any closed system, the sum total of mass and energy is constant.
• The second law says, the total amount remains constant, but the amount of useful energy is always declining.
• In short, in the game of thermodynamics, you can't win and you can't come out ahead.

Some additional problems/tools:
From MINORITY PERSPECTIVES IN JUSTICE ETHICS
Kohlberg's ethics of justice, vs. Gilligan's ethics of care
(idealist, abstract, top-down, procedural, vs.
pragmatic, concrete, bottom-up, process-oriented)

Mal: How is me loving my mother, which is a beautiful experience, going to help me be more just.
(i.e. how will "lateral regard" help us to attend to those we don't care for?
Cf. Gebara: Justice is concerned...about the one...whom I do not love spontaneously....)

Liz: one portion that I did find to my taste was this concept of finding a group of people who were unaware of their own identities...because they were blank slates/neutered/veiled, they were willing to accept beauty in as many ways as possible, even if there was a chance that they would never get to experience this beauty....
(i.e.: can you use Rawl's infamous "veil of ignorance" to design a new society?
In which no one knows what their distribution is going to be...?)

Reporting back...?

Elaine Scarry


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