Beauty is often dismissed as superficial, but philosopher Heather Widdows argues it has quietly become the most valuable good in modern life. From risky cosmetic procedures to the relentless gaze of social media, we repeatedly prioritise appearance over health, education, even safety. If beauty now shapes our opportunities and life chances so powerfully, it can no longer be dismissed as a private obsession: it is a political and ethical issue that calls for serious public scrutiny and stronger regulation.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” Beauty, we are told, is trivial and unimportant. To care about how we look, whether we are thin, firm, smooth, and young enough, is to care about the wrong things. Beauty is valued by the superficial, the young, the unserious. Not by the serious, clever and wise.

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Most of us do value beauty and believe that being attractive makes life go better. This isn’t a niche view.

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If this is true in general, it is even more true in philosophy. Socrates said that “the genuine philosopher disdains fashion,” and Kant dispensed with fashion, declaring it “foolish”. Indeed, so ingrained in philosophy is this view that caring about appearance can be taken as proof someone is unphilosophical, even unintelligent. This is illustrated in a 2019 social media post; in reply to the question “What is the meanest thing one of your superiors ever said to you?” the answer was:

One of my first ever (male, because of course) ethics professors said ‘there is an inverse relationship between how well a woman philosopher dresses and how smart she is.’

But philosophers rarely give reasons for why beauty is not valuable. We can only assume that this is because they think it is obvious, a view that doesn’t need defending. To give just one example, consider how Elizabeth Anderson writes of beauty in her famous paper, “What is the point of Equality?“:

When is a deficit in internal assets so bad as to require compensation? One doesn’t want anyone with any trivial personal dissatisfaction, such as having bad hair, to be entitled to compensation.

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“Bad hair,” Anderson assumes, is obviously trivial, and she can count on her philosophical readers agreeing. She knows that not everyone thinks like this, but these people are wrong, morally wrong, suffering from the vice of vanity:

Suppose a vain person would get hysterical over the prospect of being genetically determined to have a hooked nose. A person’s anxiety over this prospect might be enough to make it rational for her to take out insurance for plastic surgery before knowing how her nose will turn out. It is hard to see how such as preference could create an obligation on the part of society to pay for her plastic surgery. Moreover, many people don’t see hooked noses as such a bad thing, and many of these people have hooked noses: they would rightly feel insulted if society treated having a hooked nose as such a grievous defect that it was entitled to compensation.