The contingency of cuteness: a reply to Sanders. (2024)

In his critique of my article |Cuteness', John Sanders arguesthat my treatment of the distinctively babyish features which getinfants noticed and cared for by adults |is, if not an altogetherfallacious way of explaining the matter, at least an extremelymisleading one'.[1] The guiding hypothesis in my article, asSanders noted, was that |in the evolution of our mammalian ancestors,the recognition and appreciation of the specialness of the young hadsurvival value for the species. And so certain features evolved in theyoung which got them noticed and appreciated; these features constitutecuteness'.[2] The babyish features I discussed were drawn from theresearch of ethologist Konrad Lorenz: overall smallness; large head,forehead and eyes; round protruding cheeks; rounded body shape; shortthick extremities; soft body surfaces; and behaviour indicating weaknessand clumsiness.

From my explanation of cuteness, Sanders concluded that I held fourtheses: that cuteness is (1) a characteristic set of features now commonamong human infants; (2) a set of features which the infant offspring ofour mammalian ancestors once lacked; (3) a set of features which wasattractive to adult members of our ancestor species independently of thefact that infants had them; and (4) a set of features which was selectedspecifically because of this attractiveness (p. 162). Sanders objects toall four theses.

I did not, however, claim or imply (3) or (4). I agree with Sandersthat it is highly unlikely that early mammals found large heads, clumsybehaviour, etc., attractive before these became typical features of theyoung. The view that Sanders attributes to me, that |infants acquired acertain look because of its independent ability to attract and pleaseadults of the species' (p. 163) is not mine. What I said was thatat a certain stage in evolution, young mammals developed distinctivelybabyish features which served as |releasing stimuli' foraffectionate behaviour from adults. These features had survival valueand were passed on to succeeding generations. Earlier animals such asinsects and reptiles, whose young needed no parental care, did notdevelop such features.

Sanders's objections to (1) and (2) require more comment. I dohold (1), that cuteness today is a particular set of visual features.But I do not hold this to be a necessary truth as Sanders implies; Ihold it to be a contingent truth. He writes, |While it is no doubt truethat cuteness in humans may now be identified with some such set as theone mentioned in (1), there is nothing essential about the link betweenany particular set of features and "cuteness"; no set offeatures is intrinsically "cut"' (p. 163). I agree:mammals might have evolved differently, so that some other features ininfants were the distinctively babyish ones. On another planet rightnow, indeed, cuteness for some species may consist of having a brightgreen exoskeleton or flattened gelatinous tentacles. I was not trying togive cuteness ontic status, as Sanders implies (p. 164); clearly it hasonly functional status. Cuteness is visual features which get somebiological job done - the nurturing of the young.

This explanation also helps clear up my position on (2). Sandersrightly points out that earlier in evolution, other features than thosewe today call cute may have made infant animals attractive to theirparents. From that fact he wants to call into question (2), thatcuteness is a particular set of features which the infant offspring ofour mammalian ancestors once lacked. What I was claiming in the passagesfrom which Sanders derived (2) was simply that at some stage inevolution, when parental care of the young became important, visualfeatures made infants attractive to adults, and before that time therewere no cute features. Our invertebrate ancestors, for example, had noneed of cuteness. Throughout my article I focused on the features whichconstitute cuteness in human babies today, but I did not deny that otherfeatures may have constituted cuteness at earlier stages of evolution.

The gist of Sanders's objections to theses (1) and (2), then,is that the identity between cuteness and the particular set of featuresthat are cute in contemporary human babies is only a contingentrelation. Since I agree, his objections are misplaced.

Leaving aside our points of agreement, let me now consider anecessity claim which Sanders makes and I reject: that infants had to becute. He complains that |it is too easy to infer from Morreall'sline of reasoning ... that infants in general might conceivably neverhave developed cuteness' (p. 162). That in fact is my view; againstit he argues that children are cute by necessity. Sometimes he makes thenecessity sound logical, sometimes biological. In the logical argumenthe makes babies cute by definition. |For children, as a general rule, tobe unusual, would be a logical impossibility. But for the same reason itwould be impossible, as a general rule, for children to be uncute.Cuteness is just the attribute of looking like an infant (whatever it isthat infants look like)' (pp. 162-3). At the end of his article,Sanders says that |Anything that is typical of infants, within anyspecies that requires extensive nurture of parents for young, isdefinitive of cuteness for that species' (p. 164). But this simpleidentification of cuteness with all the features babies generally haveis incorrect. Babies' bilateral symmetry and their opposablethumbs, for instance, are not cute. Not even all of their distinctivelybabyish features are cute - consider their tendency to vomit withoutwarning. Cuteness is not |anything that is typical of infants'.Cute features, rather, are the distinctively babyish features whichelicit nurturing behaviour in adults.

Sanders also offers a biological argument that babies are cute bynecessity, according to which animals that need a great deal of care ininfancy |must always be disposed favourably to babyish lookingcreatures'. If they had not been so disposed, Sanders asks, |Howcould the raising of such infants ever have got going?' (p. 164).But this claim of biological necessity for cuteness overlooks the otherways in which parents are or might have been motivated to nurture theiroffspring, aside from visual attraction. The releasing stimuli fornurturing behaviour might have been solely auditory or olfactory, forexample. In many species today the young elicit nurturing from parentsprimarily by special calls or odours; in species such as moles visualstimuli play virtually no role in nurturing. And nurturing can bemotivated independently of how the young look, sound, or smell. A humanmother now is motivated to cuddle and nurse her infant by the hormoneoxytocin secreted by her pituitary gland. In a world where young humanslacked babyish features to attract adults, the, might still have beennurtured by parents with the appropriate hormones in their bloodstreams.

Cuteness is a powerful mechanism, to conclude, but it is neither alogical nor a biological necessity that babies are cute.

REFERENCES

[1] John T. Sanders, |On "Cuteness"', The BritishJournal of Aesthetit*, Vol. 32 (1992), p. 162. [2] John Morreall,|Cuteness', The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 31 (199I), p.40.