When is looking good wrong?

Is cosmetic surgery wrong? I think it depends. Take the following four cases:


1. A guy who wants to look ripped but doesn’t want to put in the effort get implants to make it look like he has bulging pecs and calves.

2. A woman has a breast augmentation to look and feel more attractive

3. A woman has a breast reconstruction after having a cancerous lump removed

4. A man is embarrassed by a birthmark on his face and has it faded out via laser treatment.


All four of those are commonly preformed procedures in cosmetically surgery, but if you’re like me, you probably don’t judge them all to be the same. 3 seems to be the most acceptable and number 1, if any, probably makes you the most uncomfortable. Let me explain what intuitions I think are at work. 3 is ok because the woman has just undergone a tragedy is trying to return to normal. She is not trying to change herself so much as she is trying to recapture how she was before. 1 makes us feel uneasy. I think that’s because at some level we feel that we are being deceived. A man’s muscular build communicates how he lives his life to a certain extent. The man electing to have the surgery is going to be putting out false signals saying that he works out and is physically fit, when in fact he is just full of silicone. In essence, the man’s body is telling a lie.


2 & 4 are a little bit gray, but can easily be resolved. They differ from 3 by the fact that they are not trying to restore who they were, and they differ from 1 because they are not sending out false signals. Since breast size is mainly genetic, if a woman has a breast augmentation she is not de facto saying anything about her lifestyle or who she is as a person. Granted, she will have larger breasts than before, but this isn’t deceptive at all since after the surgery it will, in fact, be true. I think the same holds true for case 4. The intention in 2 & 4 are to look and feel different, there is nothing duplicitous about that. One could argue that trying to covertly accommodate for what are genes gave us really is wrong and deceptive, but I think that casts too broad a net. If one goes this route, then we can just as easily criticize hair dye and contact lenses.


Consequently, I think one instance when cosmetic surgery is wrong when it is done with a certain intention, namely the intention to deceive.