Beauty, Truth, Virtue, Justice

“Virtue aims at the beautiful (to kalon).” — Aristotle

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — John Keats

The beautiful is fair, and the fair is just. — Elaine Scarry

We typically think of beauty, truth, virtue, and justice as being very different things. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” according to the common saying, which suggests that beauty is purely subjective. When we think of “truth,” we think of how something corresponds to reality. Virtue and justice both allow us to be maximally social, though virtue tends to be individual (you are brave or not) while justice involves how we treat others in more direct ways (are we compensated the same as others doing the same thing?). Naturally, a great deal more could be said about these things, but I want to focus on how beauty, truth, virtue, and justice are related to each other, and how they are fundamentally similar to each other.

Let’s start with Truth.

What is a peacock? A peacock is a male peafowl, and peafowls are birds. We define a bird as an animals that is warm-blooded and has feathers. We typically think of birds as having wings, even if they cannot fly, but some of the (recent at only a few million years ago, well after the dinosaurs went extinct) terror birds had claws on their forelimbs. Do these birds have wings, or do they…