It does seem like there are tree options to reduce beauty-based inequalities:
Make less beautiful people more beautiful (which may indeed involve routine surgery in the future).
Make the beautiful people less beautiful (e.g. the Handicapper General).
Make people care about beauty less (feasible in the future, but only partially effective in the present since so much of perceptions of beauty seem biologically predisposed).
I support #1 in the present, and some combination of #1 and #3 in the future, when we have more effective ways of changing people’s preferences.
It might also be possible in future to mimic the effect of options 1 and 2 by altering one’s own perception of who is beautiful and who isn’t. (For example, instead of handicapping beautiful people, I could get my brain reprogrammed to see as ugly the people others see as beautiful.) This is like #3 in that it’s about altering someone other than the beautiful/non-beautiful people themselves, but different in that one changes what one sees as beautiful instead of how much one cares about beauty.
Thanks for the recommendations.
It does seem like there are tree options to reduce beauty-based inequalities:
Make less beautiful people more beautiful (which may indeed involve routine surgery in the future).
Make the beautiful people less beautiful (e.g. the Handicapper General).
Make people care about beauty less (feasible in the future, but only partially effective in the present since so much of perceptions of beauty seem biologically predisposed).
I support #1 in the present, and some combination of #1 and #3 in the future, when we have more effective ways of changing people’s preferences.
It might also be possible in future to mimic the effect of options 1 and 2 by altering one’s own perception of who is beautiful and who isn’t. (For example, instead of handicapping beautiful people, I could get my brain reprogrammed to see as ugly the people others see as beautiful.) This is like #3 in that it’s about altering someone other than the beautiful/non-beautiful people themselves, but different in that one changes what one sees as beautiful instead of how much one cares about beauty.
Some would suggest this gives you all sorts of practical benefits.