Louster
One of Freddy's beloved
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2003
- Messages
- 882
I was simply trying to escape the vagueness of "good" and "bad". My point is that if you look at either of these things from the same perspective, their "relative merits" in terms of that perspective are equal in kind.OblongChicken said:Okay, let me see if i understand your point. You're claiming that the attractiveness of fatness is relative to societal factors, and it just happens to be that these days fatness is bad. And this is parallel with the attractiveness of skin colour, which is also relative to societal factors, and the two ARE analagous. Both factors depend on arbitrary variables and that's how they derive their qualitative values. Please correct me if i've misunderstood.
From the perspective of pure biology, both weight and skin colour contain inherent good/bad things. This is a fact that's completely isolated from anything else.
From the perspective of attractiveness, the qualitative judgements within this perspective become arbitrary, and are heavily influenced by society and convention.
Basically I'm saying that, with what I've quoted above, you're mixing perspectives. Your "qualitative" judgement of "fatness" is a combination of both "attractiveness" and "biological value", and your judgement of "skin colour" seems to be essentially "worth of that person", or some other unspecified and vague perspective. You have to define in what way you're making your judgements. Saying that "skin colour doesn't have a qualitative value" is false in terms of both attractiveness (which is arbitrary) and biology (which isn't) but is true if you consider "a person's worth", which is why I brought that up. You're comparing different ways of looking at different features, which is why they don't mesh.OblongChicken said:The thing is, this discussion hasn't been about how attractive we find particular skin colours. You're shifting the goalposts. It's been about the apples and oranges of assigning a qualitative value to the attractiveness of fatness and not assigning a qualitative value to skin colour (not NOTE the attractiveness of skin colour, just what the colour is) because skin colour doesn't have a qualitative value in the same manner that fatness has
Heh, if you ask me, I'm trying to clarify a lot of things that were blurry to begin with.OblongChicken said:I think you're blurring a lot of distinct lines in your argument.
But I'm glad you've abandoned the idea that it's a fundamental truth, and yes, I do happen to agree that, in the present, "fatness" tends to be regarded as "inferior" for whatever reason. I'm not saying I necessarily agree that that should be the case ideally, however.