Bigthink - Idea Comments Feed

Comment on: Re: Beauty versus Morality

Bigthink — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:56:11 +0100

Beauty as you said is a virtue by deffinition. Because what the word beauty means is that a said person finds something pleasing to either look at, or to touch, or to smell which is by deffinition good. Beauty means it is pleasing to a said persons sences, and that being the case, that aspect of anything, is to that individual good. Now he may not like other aspects of the object, but that does not matter. So yet again morall means good, and if someone finds something beautifull there is atleast something in it that he sees as good.

Comment on: Re: Beauty versus Morality

Bigthink — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:11:25 +0100

Liking an idea is not the same as finding something beautiful. Just because I might want to see a particular country bombed (I'm not saying I do) that doesn't mean that I would find that explosion and resulting destruction beautiful. You can like or want something that you know is bad or wrong.
Although, I would like to point out that the person who finds true beauty in pointless death and destruction almost certainly has a skewed sense of morality and would still find a connection there between beauty and morality.

Comment on: Re: Beauty versus Morality

Bigthink — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:20:37 +0100

I think I find myself in agreement with the Skeptic(44). If someone sees beauty in something, there must be some aspect of "good" that he also sees in it. That is not to say that he is therefore in agreement with what he sees, only that he recognizes some aspect of it as good.

I suppose this puts me in partial agreement with more than one person. I am in agreement with the Skeptic(44), but also can realize that some good lingers around a pink bomb (since in this example I find pink beautiful and have said that I will accept beauty as a good) so I am also apparently in some agreement with genevil.

Interesting thought. Beauty and Morality obviously aren't the same, but it seems fair to say that they aren't mutually exclusive either.

The issue I have is this.

Given that I accept that "beauty is good" it does not logically follow that things that are beautiful are morally good.

I will accept "Beauty" as a good, in and of itself, but it is an end. Looking at a set of things that has perhaps one beautiful thing in the set does not even logically mean that the set should be called beautiful.

Here's my example. Say one has a bomb and it is intended to be used for something bad/immoral/negative (however you define it). If I paint it pink, and I happen to find pink things beautiful, I do not necessarily think that the idea of using the bomb is beautiful, even if I think the pink bomb shell is beautiful.

Comment on: Re: Beauty versus Morality

Bigthink — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 02:23:21 +0100

Beauty and morality are both completly subjective concepts. It is imposible to define something as beutifull outside ones own perception. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, it is more then just a Clich�. And the same goes for morality, what is good and what is evil is subject to the individual. But interestingly enough they do coincide, as subjective concepts, because if someone perceives something as beautifull or pleasing to the eye he by definition also thinks of it as good, or atleast that aspectr of it as good.

Comment on: Re: Beauty versus Morality

Bigthink — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:22:23 +0100

Is that a naive view? For instance, large numbers of people around the world find it pleasant to think about the destruction of other people: for instance, the idea of the nuclear incineration of Muslims probably appeals to a number of people in India, the United States, and other industrialized, nuclearized countries. Now, I find that to be a reprehensible view, but for the bloodlusty, beauty is something many others would find easily immoral, to wit, the mass slaughter of civilians. Or do the sentiments that attach usually attach to widely-held virtues? For instance, the beauty of a mother with a child is considered lovely in almost all cultures and the moral innocence of the act of motherly affection is nearly a consensus across cultures. Do you think the stability of such agreements tend to be greater around the virtue of beauty more than the virtue of morality? This may have implications for how to get ostensibly dissimilar cultures to agree: what is the more likely basis for agreement, rules or paintings?