The COVID-19 pandemic has issued a long-overdue battering to the unhealthy dogma of the body positivity movement, which, like all movements adopted by political activism, began with a valid premise (no individual deserves to be abused by another for how they look) and mutated into something dangerous (obesity is good and risk-free). It goes without saying that abusing people for being fat is unacceptable, but denying that being overweight comes with serious health complications is no better than promoting anorexia as a harmless way to live.
One of the body positivity movement's bugbears is the 'beauty standards' by which societies supposedly define what is considered attractive and what is not. Although used disingenuously by the movement - beauty standards can be basically summarised as aligning with whatever best represents good health and prosperity in that time and place - it raises a more interesting question of the significance and role assigned to beauty in our society and whether it goes beyond simple aesthetics and into having actual moral value.
When raising this question, one has to begin by addressing the elephant in the room: eugenics. Eugenics is the discredited practice in which certain physical or aesthetic traits in human beings are considered superior to others and the attempt to breed out on a society-wide scale those deemed inferior. It is literally the attachment of moral value to the aesthetic, right down to the etymology of the word, a combination of the Ancient Greek words for 'good' and 'growing'.
To be absolutely clear, eugenics is a sinister and abhorrent practice. If the intersection between beauty and morality is to be debated on any level, it must be on the basis of individuals making themselves the most attractive they can be, not the state or any other powerful body determining a uniform appearance into which populations must be engineered. It may sound trite, but diversity is indeed beauty: the way in which one person is or can be beautiful will never be the same as any other person.
Even while broad attributes like good health and confidence (along with certain sex-dependent qualities) align closely to what is widely seen as attractive, it is the unique characteristics of each person's features and presence which makes them beautiful. If everyone looked the same, nobody would be beautiful. Uniformity and attractiveness are not and never have been thought synonymous, as those arguing against 'beauty standards' suggest: in fact, they are in direct opposition.
The question is therefore not 'does a person have a moral duty to align as closely as possible to a single, unchanging form of attractiveness', because the answer is obviously 'no'. The question is 'does a person have a moral duty to present themselves in the highest form of their individual attractiveness?'
Given how Western cultures presently emphasize comfort and rights ahead of accomplishment and responsibility, plenty would probably continue to answer 'no'. It's not an unreasonable case, either: if you are doing no harm to others, is there any value in making yourself uncomfortable to benefit others in a purely superficial way? There might be specific circumstances in which an obese person might cause more discomfort to others than a slim person - taking up already limited space in aeroplane seating, for instance - but they are highly specific, of limited discomfort and sometimes more damning of the situation people are forced into than the people themselves: shouldn't airlines give people more seating space in flights generally?
An essential question is how to define 'moral value'. In the broadest sense, doing what is moral is doing what is right. That naturally leads to the next question, which is how we know what is right. That's a question which has been debated for centuries in endless permutations, from consequentialism to utilitarianism, deontology and countless other terms I can only feign a sufficiently surface-level understanding of to convince people I might once have watched The Good Place.
To attain some degree of clarity, I'll rephrase the question as 'Is it right to look as attractive as you can?' To answer that, let's consider what being attractive actually means both to oneself and others. For yourself, it is a sense of confidence at being the most appealing version of yourself, with the cost of having to work hard to maintain it. It is also, perhaps, superficial. As you get older and care less about what others think about you, or have less need to be validated by others, outward attractiveness becomes considerably less important than when you are young.
For others, it is being presented with someone who is aesthetically pleasing. From this perspective, the moral value seems clear, even if it is small. Beauty is something which gives pleasure: we choose holiday spots which will inspire and elevate the soul not only because of their culture and activities, but their aesthetics. It's not going out on too much of a limb to suggest that virtually everyone who has the means would choose to visit an aesthetically pleasing location like the beaches of Hawaii or the rugged natural grandeur of Iceland rather than a less appealing option like... Slough.
If doing something which makes the world better for others can be considered a moral act, and attractive aesthetics are more pleasing to people than less attractive aesthetics, beauty must surely have some moral value. There is a cost to oneself in terms of discomfort, but that cost also comes with a number of benefits in terms of health and confidence. Morally, the value might be small - surely nobody but the most ardent narcissist would deny that how one behaves vastly outweighs how one looks - but in terms of making the world a slightly preferable place for others, it is surely there.
The follow-up question - other than 'What's the point of even asking about this?', to which I'd answer 'It is just something I've been aimlessly wondering about and thought I'd write down in case something interesting came out of it' - is that if beauty has moral value, should it ever be acknowledged? As per the issue of eugenics, or the personal abuse which the body positivity movement originally set out to combat, there is a long and inglorious history of assigning value to aspects of the human body. The pursuit of beauty has a tendency to bring out humanity's ugliness, so even if beauty could be determined as a moral positive, would the historic dangers of acknowledging it not far outweigh any small benefits?
Doing so directly is almost certainly a bad idea, given the history of bad actors ready to weaponise an aesthetic value system against others. That said, a renewal of appreciation for the individual traits which combine to make a person more attractive, even if not necessarily working towards that specific goal, would be beneficial. That obesity is a potent factor towards COVID-19 fatalities needs to awaken us to the fact that healthy lifestyles should be celebrated and encouraged, while it should no longer be acceptable to deny or even celebrate the dangers of being unhealthy and overweight (even if, again, nobody should be abused by anyone else). Values of hard work, independence and self-sacrifice need to be elevated over dependency and complacency. Perhaps beauty in itself only has a small moral value, but the qualities going into achieving it are worth so much more.
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