I have to admit that when John Perry first suggested that we do a show on the emerging field of neurcosmetology, I was a little hesitant. I had never even heard of the subject until John brought it up. As John mentions, if you Google neurocosmetology all that comes up are links to our own web page announcing the topic. And to top it off, google asks if you don’t really mean”neurocosmology.”
Progress in neuroscience may soon make possible an age of neurocosmetology: the use of drugs to let people affect the way their brains work, so as to make them more effective, more attractive, and more like their “cognitive ideal.” A world where all the women are beautiful and all the men handsome might be bearable if boring. But would a society full of type-A’s work at all?
There is, I think, such a thing as beauty that haunts. This is the beauty of movies like Requiem for a Dream. Imagine a work of art dedicated to doing nothing but portraying the psychology of evil, not in such a way as to praise or condemn, not to represent it as other, alien and incomprehensible, but merely to make us see it as it is.
There is such a thing as beauty that is only skin-deep. It is the beauty of appearance, what we call “looking good.” It has little to do with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities.
During our episode on Religion and the Secular State Robert Audi claimed that some religions are non-dogmatic He might be right about that, I am not sure which ones he had in mind. On the other hand, John was pushing the line that many of our “secular” beliefs have pretty much the status and function of dogmatic religious beliefs. At least for some people, he might be right about that.
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Since lots of beautiful things don’t have skin, whoever first said that beauty is only skin deep was clearly mistaken. When I was a kid, by the way, we used to continue “…but ugliness is to the bone.” Of course, the speaker was probably being metaphorical. Perhaps he or she was trying to say that beauty is the least of the virtues that a thing can have. But is it really an apt metaphor?
Is beauty like a secondary quality, mind-independent, but intersubjective? That is, if people are in the right conditions, will they agree on what is beautiful and what is not? What would the right conditions be? Not just good lighting, but also, perhaps, a proper upbringing, a well-trained eye, ear, or palate. I have some sympathy with this idea.
It seems to me that there is a pretty good argument that allowing the Ten Commandments to be displayed does not violate the amendment. They do play an important role historically in the development of the idea of the government by law rather than the whims of individuals. Most of the commandments aren’t all that controversial.
Assuming that religious beliefs are in some sense less than fully rational, what follows for how they ought or ought not to be respected and acknowledge in private and public life? You might think that the answer is straight-forward on this assumption. But even if we assume the thoroughgoing epistemic unreasonableness of religious belief, it still turns out to be complicated.
Hi all. I just read in the Los Angeles Times that “[o]fficials decided today to…