A First Look at Lookism
You give preference to attractive people. Whether grading papers, hiring employees, writing performance evaluations, or negotiating contracts, when you have physical or visual interaction with others, evidence overwhelmingly indicates that you will bias your behavior to favor the beautiful.
Let’s say that ‘lookism’ refers to a pattern of morally inappropriate discrimination based on the degree to which others approximate, or fail to approximate, standards of beauty. The more beautiful the individual, the more likely he or she will receive unjustified positive discrimination. The more ugly, the more likely he or she will receive unfair treatment.
Lookism is as real as racism and sexism, the more familiar pair of patterns of morally inappropriate discrimination. True, the effects of lookism are not as clearly appalling. Lookism lacks the history—moral, legislative and cultural history—of racism and sexism. But lookism calls to mind many of the conceptual and ethical issues familiar from them. In this essay I intend to explore several of those connections and, by doing so, reflect on the moral status of lookism. I place an emphasis on raising—not answering—questions through reflection on literary science fiction.
