Empirical Relationships Between Beauty and Justice: Testing Scarry and Elaborating Danto

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 works because 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 significant raw correlation ( r = .23; p < .05; N = 132), which reduced to a nonsignificant r = .01 when Openness to Experience was partialed out. Study 2 examines the relationship between fairness as a character strength (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. Although there is no significant association between justice reasoning and engagement with beauty, when justice/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.