The Ethics of Cuteness

[Received]

It is ethically justifiable, or you don't at the least deserve any ethical justification, to help something because it's cute, because we respond to cuteness immediately. (Why? Because cuteness is an evolved trait that registers as helplessness for the animal or person we perceive as cute.)

I think if you use this assumption, you see that a whole freaking lot of what people do really isn't ethically motivated, because it isn't motivated by doing the right thing, but rather because, if something that's cute involuntarily invites our supportiveness, it therefore means we have no credit for actually ethically "working" for it.

What does it mean to ethically "work" for something? To do the right thing against the grain; doing the right thing ethically always means some degree of work or unpleasantness. How do we respond to things that are cute? Involuntarily with a sense of support; we can't help but support, and couldn't live with ourselves if we didn't support, the cute thing.

And you see this a lot. Denis Leary joked about how people are all about saving the fish, but this is only the really cute fish. Or take babies. They're really cute, so that makes being motivated to help them incredibly easier, or at least harder not to do, than if you were to help a baby that looked like, I don't know, a grown-up version of my uncle David. Am I saying that mothers of ugly babies don't help them? Not at all. I'm saying that any mother, or any person at all especially, deserves credit for helping a cute baby (or anything at all, animal or human) insofar as the cuteness response is exhausted or isn't a factor. It's a totally different thing to help a baby because it's cute, and another to help it because it's a baby who needs help, you know.

Conclusion: the people who want to save cute animals deserve very little, if any, ethical justification, because their motivation is basically necessary -- they couldn't not respond with a good conscience, at the very least. In a sense, then, cuteness prevents us from becoming fully ethical (given that ethics involves work, putting forth effort, and responding to cuteness involves no effort, the effort being done for us as it were), but it also offers us a chance to become ethical, given that anything cute that we come across for more than just a passing glance will have its cuteness exhausted the longer we're relating to it. Ask any mom this; don't matter how cute her baby is, she's still there in the middle of the night when a screaming baby is sounding like the very opposite of cute.

I, for one, think the most ethical people are the ones who deal with not-so-cute people the most voluntarily. Even if that means looking in the mirror.

 

[dumpsterdiver45]

Good points. At the end of the day doesn't our response to cuteness fall under the category of emotional [as opposed to rational] ground for our judgments and actions?

I personally am very tired of people fawning over my cuteness. It's sort of a curse, just my cross to bear I suppose.

 

[Received]

Good points. At the end of the day doesn't our response to cuteness fall under the category of emotional [as opposed to rational] ground for our judgments and actions?

Yes, that's exactly it. Kierkegaard would say that responding to cuteness involves responding aesthetically rather than ethically.

I personally am very tired of people fawning over my cuteness. It's sort of a curse, just my cross to bear I suppose.

I know. It is a cross to bear.

 

[variant]

Aesthetics is an important and often irrational part of human ethics, so it's not that it's not a good enough justification, it's just that it isn't a very rational one.

To say it isn't ethical though is missing the mark, human ethics simply aren't as well founded in reason as philosophers make them out to be.

 

[variant]

Yes, that's exactly it. Kierkegaard would say that responding to cuteness involves responding aesthetically rather than ethically.

The question becomes how do I define what is good without relying on my aesthetic judgments.

Ethical systems are going to be hard to derive without a sense of what is good.

 

[Chesterton]

I don't have anything meaningful to contribute, but yeah, that is very interesting.

I remember back in the '80's there was this commotion about boycotting eating tuna because dolphins got trapped in tuna nets. Wait, what about the tuna?

I also remember on a walk one day I came across a butterfly struggling as it was trapped in a spider's web. I figured the spider would come around and eat it eventually. I wanted to try and set the butterfly free but I also remembered the spider's gotta eat, y'know? Butterflies are beautiful and symbolically good, and spiders are ugly and symbolically sinister, but honestly I don't remember what I did.

 

[Received]

I don't have anything meaningful to contribute, but yeah, that is very interesting.

I remember back in the '80's there was this commotion about boycotting eating tuna because dolphins got trapped in tuna nets. Wait, what about the tuna?

I also remember on a walk one day I came across a butterfly struggling as it was trapped in a spider's web. I figured the spider would come around and eat it eventually. I wanted to try and set the butterfly free but I also remembered the spider's gotta eat, y'know? Butterflies are beautiful and symbolically good, and spiders are ugly and symbolically sinister, but honestly I don't remember what I did.

And notice how often in media the not-so-cute are much, much more likely to be bad or evil than the cute. We're so blinded by cuteness than we associate it with the goodness of the cute thing.

 

[Received]

The question becomes how do I define what is good without relying on my aesthetic judgments.

Ethical systems are going to be hard to derive without a sense of what is good.

I should qualify that for K the aesthetic is one sphere of existence, which means you view life from afar and aren't involved in it in terms of personal becoming. Ethics undoubtedly has an aesthetic or imaginary part to it. When referring to babies, however, the question is whether you're letting yourself be pushed and pulled without any exertion on your own part, or whether there's exertion, and you can't get ethical credit for anything without exertion.

 

[variant]

I should qualify that for K the aesthetic is one sphere of existence, which means you view life from afar and aren't involved in it in terms of personal becoming. Ethics undoubtedly has an aesthetic or imaginary part to it. When referring to babies, however, the question is whether you're letting yourself be pushed and pulled without any exertion on your own part, or whether there's exertion, and you can't get ethical credit for anything without exertion.

What should we spend such credit on?

It's not just babies and kitty cats here, we found our notions of good based upon our preferred experiences.

Babies are cute for a reason as well, so it's not as if this system is necessarily dysfunctional or unethical regardless of how it is worked out.

 

[Received]

What should we spend such credit on?

It's not just babies and kitty cats here, we found our notions of good based upon our preferred experiences.

Discussing preferred experiences is different than discussing the involuntary attraction toward cuteness as negating ethical credit. Or what do you mean?

 

[variant]

Discussing preferred experiences is different than discussing the involuntary attraction toward cuteness as negating ethical credit. Or what do you mean?

I question why credit is important first of all.

If the evolutionary system adds to our ethical framework is that a problem?

We derive other things from evolutionary frameworks like socialization too but that doesn't make them invalid in our ethical frameworks, nor does anyone need "credit" for them as useful tools.

 

[Received]

I question why credit is important first of all.

If the evolutionary system adds to our ethical framework is that a problem?

We derive other things from evolutionary frameworks like socialization too but that doesn't make them invalid in our ethical frameworks, nor does anyone need "credit" for them as useful tools.

It's not a problem at all. I'm talking about ethical credit, though. You can only get ethical credit for doing something that has ethical repercussions that involves work. Work is what confers credit, be it physical or intellectual. Credit is important because it's what allows a person to gain legitimacy as being ethical at all.

 

[variant]

It's not a problem at all. I'm talking about ethical credit, though. You can only get ethical credit for doing something that has ethical repercussions that involves work. Work is what confers credit, be it physical or intellectual. Credit is important because it's what allows a person to gain legitimacy as being ethical at all.

Why can ethical legitimacy only be derived from what you do as a person and not how you are constructed as one?

 

[Received]

Why can ethical legitimacy only be derived from what you do as a person and not how you are constructed as one?

Because your ethical faculties aren't the same thing as your ethical actions. Just like a gun isn't the act of shooting.

 

[variant]

Because your ethical faculties aren't the same thing as your ethical actions. Just like a gun isn't the act of shooting.

Guns don't run on autopilot, people do.

How you were constructed as a person, the evolutionary framework, is part of your ethics whether you like it or not. If it isn't legitimate in multiple places of your core social/ethical framework neither are you.

 

[agua]

It is ethically justifiable, or you don't at the least deserve any ethical justification, to help something because it's cute, because we respond to cuteness immediately....

I, for one, think the most ethical people are the ones who deal with not-so-cute people the most voluntarily. Even if that means looking in the mirror.

I think you may have nailed it, aside from one thing. Cute people deserve the same consideration as the non cute; and also there's nothing ethically incorrect about having a best friend, for arbitrary reasons.

 

[quatona]

I sense this is basically a variation of the good old protestant "if it doesn´t hurt, if it isn´t hard work, if it isn´t a sacrifice, if it comes naturally...it isn´t good" attitude.

 

[dumpsterdiver45]

I wouldn't necessarily say that aesthetics is not rational. In my world, all value derives from (or stands in opposition to) truth. An analogy of this relationship would be that beauty is the sweet "odor" of truth-ordering. Thus, while aesthetics isn't rational per se, it's derivative of the highest and purest that which produces rationality, truth itself and follows logically from it.

 

[Received]

I sense this is basically a variation of the good old protestant "if it doesn´t hurt, if it isn´t hard work, if it isn´t a sacrifice, if it comes naturally...it isn´t good" attitude.

You'll have to say how, because I don't like Calvinists, much less protestant work ethics.

 

[Received]

Guns don't run on autopilot, people do.

How you were constructed as a person, the evolutionary framework, is part of your ethics whether you like it or not. If it isn't legitimate in multiple places of your core social/ethical framework neither are you.

I know, this is why I'm comparing me being constructed (against my will, involuntarily) and how I run on autopilot with ethical faculties or with being a gun, as opposed to using your ethical faculties or shooting the gun.