Ethics Untangled
Ethics Untangled is a series of conversations about the ethical issues that affect all of us, with academics who have spent some time thinking about them. It is brought to you by the IDEA Centre, a specialist unit for teaching, research, training and consultancy in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds.
Find out more about IDEA, including our Masters programmes in Healthcare Ethics and Applied and Professional Ethics, our PhDs and our consultancy services, here:
ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics
Ethics Untangled is edited by Mark Smith at Leeds Media Services.
Music is by Kate Wood.
Ethics Untangled
11. What Should We Do About the Beauty Ideal? With Heather Widdows
Heather Widdows is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick, with expertise in applied ethics, global ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. She's interested in the demands that the beauty ideal places on people, particularly women. Her book Perfect Me was described as 'ground-breaking' by Vogue, and listed by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2018. In it, she argues that beauty is now an ethical ideal. Not only are women held to an impossible standard, but failure to live up to that standard is seen as a failure of moral character.
In this interview, we talked about several topics connected to beauty, including whether it's reasonable to expect women to refuse to conform to the beauty ideal, and what other effective responses there might be. We also talked about why Heather thinks 'lookism' should be recognised as a form of discrimination based on looks, comparable with sexism or racism.
Perfect Me is available to buy here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfect-Me-Beauty-Ethical-Ideal/dp/0691160074
You can find other pieces of writing, talks, interviews etc. featuring Heather here: http://www.heatherwiddows.com/
If you want to join the #everydaylookism campaign, you can do so here: https://www.everydaylookism.com/
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangled
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/