We are posting this on behalf of Professor Heather Widdows (University of Birmingham) who recently gave a talk on beauty as a topic in philosophy and ethics at the Hay Festival . Heather Widdows I'm John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics in the department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. My current work is on ideals of perfection and beauty and I'm in the progress of writing Perfect Me! (under contract with Princeton University Press). In this book I’m exploring contemporary ideals of beauty and all the gory details which attach to messy, smelly, hairy, saggy and ever-changing human bodies from the perspective of moral philosophy. In Perfect Me! I consider three key ways in which the (moral) ideal of beauty functions. First, as an individual’s aspiration to perfect themselves (‘I want to be perfect’) – a value judgement – that this type of beauty is worth having – a moral claim; second, as assertion of what being perfect is (‘this is what I would be i...
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