Abstract

People can come to seem to us more beautiful the better we get to know their personalities. Some have taken this to show there is a moral kind of beauty. According to the moral beauty view, moral personality traits realise moral beauty in people. Here I present a problem for the standard articulation of the moral beauty view, namely that it is not a logical truth that people inherit the beauty of their virtues. I call this the ‘inheritance problem’. I present an alternative articulation of the moral beauty view that does not give rise to the problem. On this alternative articulation, the moral beauty view is not as revisionary as it is standardly taken to be.