What makes you handsome or beautiful?

Think about it - why are you handsome, or beautiful?

It's not actually the designer clothing, the work-out sessions, make-up, or cosmetic surgery, no. I agree, these are agencies of possible aesthetic rehabilitation but, there has to be something for them to work with - a form, some physical substance. Clothing, make-up, work-out, and surgery are not always capable of aesthetic wonder when there is a glaring lack of skeletal integrity in the individual on whom they are applied.

To a large extent, good looks are fortunate accidents of Providence, wanton genetics, or even complete mystery. Like the colour of your skin. Like some innate human skills or conditions. The individual can contribute, by effort, to his own visual profile, but the larger share of the glory goes to Providence and the other prenatal collaborators in the allocation of that fortune.

Therefore, I find it morally wrong for someone to be ridiculed for being ugly, or praised for being good-looking. Now, there is a difference between praising and appreciating good looks, but that's an aside. I believe that praise or ridicule, being instruments of encouragement and censure in society, ought to be deployed on deliberate human actions. They should not be applied to things whose fashioning predates the individual, things outside the exercise of his influence.

It's unethical to stigmatize people for their natural looks.

Achievements. Human actions. How much value one has added to society - rather than vain luck, these are what should occupy the critical interests of a modern world. The world is loquacious, virtually idle, because it has a lot of good-looking people who are eloquent, who own large mirrors for domestic self-licking.

I love art, and I agree that aesthetics are wonderful, but only in themselves: the beauty we attach to a work of art stops at mere appreciation, since that beauty does not, on account of its looks, advance the human condition. All other things being equal, content is superior to looks.