> Physical attractiveness is a signal of reproductive fitness when it’s genetic, and not otherwise.
Nay, artificial physical attractiveness is also a signal of reproductive fitness. It isn't a given. It's the subject's genes that made a brain that was able to design (and to arrange to pay for!) the improved attractiveness.
It's not qualitatively different from brushing hair.
Yes, technically, having spare resources to devote to your own appearance is considered a positive signal, but it is an unreliable one, and often one not as valued by the people making the judgement. If there are many ways to signal wealth, a signal that has some intrinsic downside will lose its value if lots of people are sending the other wealth-signals.
The reductionist biological explanation might be obvious to you, but in the actual world, the reasoning and the moral condemnation of things like plastic surgery is never explicitly about giving false signals regarding one's reproductive fitness. Reasons "haters" cite are about vanity, narcissism, refusing to look your age, etc.
For me, motivation matters. If you want to learn social skills to make your life easier while not harming others, that's perfectly fine, admirable even, but if you learn it to damage others for your own profit, that's immoral.
Same for the motivation of surgeries. You might not be comfortable with yourself, and want to change something, and that's perfectly fine, but again to changing appearance signal something to benefit you and harm others with less effort, it's immoral again.
And, I believe, if you need to change how you behave or look to get acceptance from a circle, this means the circle is toxic and you'll be far happier elsewhere.
To me, a big factor that I subconsciously evaluate on is the "fakeness" of the appearance itself. Instances where plastic surgery results in the uncanny valley of "should be good but looks too perfect or messes up a critical aspect" disturb me. Plastic surgery isn't as powerful as Photoshop. Maybe that's more on the surgeon, and subjective criterion of attraction (such as mine), but it simply isn't the case that plastic surgery makes someone look good.
I guess that's totally fair. People are hard wired to pattern-match faces, and someone who deviates from the norm will attract attention.
I was more talking about judgement of people who did just to still look normal but better, similarly to the judgement of people who learn "social skills" like the TFA discusses.
That too is pretty obvious from the same perspective: Admitting you only care about someone’s genes is itself considered shallow, so people make up other justifications based on other, more accepted values.
While I certainly agree that it is an example of poor judgment and perhaps weak character to be broadly judgy about cosmetic efforts in general, I can understand the theoretical plight of someone who might be taken in by a deceptive person in that regard.
If you steelman the argument you can see the point, but it’s also unreasonable to assume that a person is living the steelman version of life (and being a deceptive person) just because they had a facelift.
OTOH, if you are admiring people’s genetics using their appearance as a proxy, I can see why it might seem like “cheating”
But the problem is not admiring good looks if they're natural, or expecting someone to be truthful, or anything of the sort that might or might not theoretically happen.
The problem is clearly with the bullying. And the assumptions around character. And basically using "changing yourself" as a proxy for hallucinating all sorts of completely unrelated bad characteristics. And the rationalizing around it.
It's the same for behavior: people are fine with the behavior of "naturally charming" people but as soon as someone mentions "learning how to do it" people immediately jump to conclusions and call it manipulative.
Someone having one consciously developed ulterior motive… does increases the likelihood of them having other consciously developed ulterior motives that might be hidden away?
The linkage isn’t as strong for unconsciously or subconsciously developed ulterior motives. Hence the huge gap in how people behave towards that.
Calling it "ulterior motive" is already a judgement call.
Being better at socialization is virtually demanded by society. "Not looking good" is also punished. There is nothing ulterior about anything.
The fact that a certain chunk of society demands both perfection and authenticity already makes it necessary for people to not be transparent about such things.
You might think that those people’s opinions don’t matter, but it turns out that ‘lots of other people value me highly’ is in itself a signal.
And yes, it is horrible, but if you want to solve a problem, you must first understand the problem, and ‘some people are just born with Evil in their hearts’ is not a very good sociological model.
But this is the neurodivergent ‘just world’ blind spot.
The world isn’t just. People like people with good genetics, because being friendly with the strong gets you benefits more than it gets you costs. Especially if you’re able to influence (or even pathologically manipulate) them.
Most people just know this, subconsciously. So they would probably even deny it. But it’s transparently easy to test, and even easier to see evidence of by just looking around.
Also, most attractive people work to be attractive because it’s often mutually beneficial (assuming they can counter manipulate or influence appropriately). Having people attracted to you gives you the ability to use other people’s resources for your benefit.
Most attractive people just know this, subconsciously. So they would probably even deny it. But it’s transparently easy to test, and even easier to see evidence of by just looking around.
This is generally kept covert, because like most covert power, it attracts negative attention if brought to conscious awareness - as then it’s perceived as manipulation, not influence, or encourages more jealousy, etc. as it’s not fair.
But life isn’t fair, except where we make it, and making something fair requires power.
And acquiring and maintaining power is fundamentally unfair.
Or it could still be, but have other explanation. E.g. you're called out if you ruin the signal to noise ration, but you're also called out if you genuinely give the unfit signal.
(Don't approve doing this or anything, just pointing the blind spot in your dichotomy, interested in the argument on a purely technical manner).
