Abstract
This paper considers the potentially wrongful discriminatory nature of certain of our dating preferences. It argues that the wrongfulness of such preferences lies primarily in the simple lookism they involve. While it is ultimately permissible for us to date people partly because of how they look, I argue that we have a duty to ‘look behind’ people’s appearance, which I take to mean that we ought not, on the basis of their appearance, to regard them as absolutely out of the question for us to engage with in a romantic setting. Further, constraints similar to those suggested by a duty to look behind people’s appearance gain support from another duty we have, namely, a duty to counteract, also in our daily lives, the fact that people are undeservedly disadvantaged in various ways.
Funding source: This work was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF144).
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the members of Work Package 4 at Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Department of Political Science, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, DK―Andreas Albertsen, Marion Kathe Godman, Nils Holtug, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Viki M.L. Pedersen, and Frej Klem Thomsen―for useful comments and suggestions. In addition, I am indebted to Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic, Simone Sommer Degn, Jonas Franzen, Renaud-Philippe Garner, Esma Baycan Herzog, and Astrid Fly Oredsson, and to students in my course AUG1 F21 Lookism – I’ve Got the Brains, You’ve Got the Looks, Let’s Make Lots of Money. This work was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF144).
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