We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called “lookism”). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three (...) ways of responding to these questions: beauty advo- cacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal charac- ter. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revision- ists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first-personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. (shrink)

In this article we consider Putnam’s project of an “ethics without ontology,” focusing on some of its crucial aspects, namely, the entanglement of fact and value and the idea of forming and “imaginatively identifying” with a “particular evaluative outlook.” We use that approach to shed light on the issue of value objectivity. Putnam’s “pragmatist enlightenment” suggests a way of abandoning the traditional project of grounding ethics and aesthetics on metaphysics, preserving the idea of realism and objectivity about values. Ethical and (...) aesthetic discriminations may be contextually specific and depend on the responses and the socially embedded experience of observers, but they are brought about by certain features of reality, far more complex than a domain of “objects” that would “correspond” to values. With our eyes set on these aspects, we draw important lessons for the project of a joint approach to aesthetic and ethical value, taking seriously the pervading entanglement of both, as suggested by the way we are able to apply the so-called thick concepts. This provides us with the outline of a contextualist approach to aesthetics that draws on Putnam’s project for ethics. We conclude by suggesting that a fruitful way of pursuing this connection could be found in co-opting resources from virtue ethics. (shrink)