Empirical relationships between beauty and justice: Testing Scarry and elaborating Danto.

Abstract

Elaine Scarry (1999) proposes a correspondence between engagement with beauty and a sense of justice.Parallel to Scarry, Arthur Danto (2003) posits that 20th century artists avoided producing beautiful worksbecause of an offended sense of justice. In Study 1, the relationship between justice reasoning (DIT2;Rest et al., 1999a) and engagement with beauty (Diessner et al., 2008) is examined; there is a significantraw correlation ( r .23; p .05; N 132), which reduced to a nonsignificant r .01 when Opennessto Experience was partialed out. Study 2 examines the relationship between fairness as a characterstrength (cf. Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and engagement with beauty, finding a raw r .35, p .001(N 113). After partialing out Openness to Experience the r is .25, significant at p .009. Althoughthere is no significant association between justice reasoning and engagement with beauty, whenjustice/fairness is viewed as a character strength, Scarry’s hypothesis is empirically validated. Thus,justice-minded artists need not avoid beauty, as beautiful art may increase viewers’ sensitivity to justice.Keywords: beauty, justice, DIT, character strengths, trait fairness