On Beauty and Being Fair Summary and Analysis

In "On Beauty and Being Fair," Scarry examines the moral implications of her reflections on beauty in the first part of the book. She calls the political complaints that have arisen around the notion of beauty (or those that had arisen in the later twentieth century) unfair and incoherent; critics at this time, she writes, wanted to banish beauty from intellectual or academic conversations on the basis that beauty either detracts attention from the evils of society, or that our gaze on beautiful objects is inherently destructive. However, Scarry finds that these notions fundamentally contradict one another.

Regarding the first point, Scarry writes that defenders can possibly distinguish two different kinds of perception, one passive and one active; however, she writes that the fallacy still stands. To prove her second point, she takes...