The Ethics of Fat Shaming

Fat people are the most openly stigmatized individuals in our society, with published data suggesting that weight stigma is more pervasive and intense than racism and sexism. There is well-documented bias and discrimination against fat people, particularly in the workplace, medical sphere and the media. In the workplace, discrimination exists with respect to hiring, wages, promotion and termination, as seen in Cawley’s paper, The Impact of Obesity on Wages, which found that fat white females earn 11.2 percent less than their non-fat counterparts. In the medical sphere, fat oppression is very much present; over 40% of physicians were found to have a negative reaction towards obese patients and physicians may be dissuaded from suggesting or performing certain procedures on obese patients. There are endless examples of weight bias in the media; from ‘fat Monica’ in Friends to The Biggest Loser and The Nutty Professor, fat people are depicted in a variety of degrading ways. Fat characters in TV and film are more likely to be seen eating and to be the objects of humour compared to their thinner counterparts, highlighting that even when fat bodies are represented, these characters are usually depicted as unattractive, ridiculous, contemptible, and even gross and disgusting. These alarming realities indicate that fatism is not considered as a serious form of bias, perhaps due to its normalisation or the vast attempts to justify this oppression.

There have been attempts to ethically justify fat-shaming, when the act is motivated by a desire to achieve a greater good, namely improved physical health or increased well-being. The greater good arguments i.e. the positive case for fat-shaming, assumes that the intentions behind fat-shaming are generally positive, aiming to inspire individuals to make healthier choices which could contribute to a better quality of life. The positive case for fat-shaming is particularly interesting to investigate, because the belief that weight loss results in a better quality of life underpins our social consciousness and our everyday practices pertaining to fatness. The idea that being overweight is bad for us is evident in the popularity of calorie counting app MyFitnessPal, with 19.1 million active monthly users in 2018 as well as weight loss products such as detox teas, meal replacement shakes and even appetite suppressant lollipops generating an estimated $37.5 million in revenue for lifestyle brand Flat Tummy Co. Research by Moisio and Beruchashvili explores the role of weight loss support groups, such as Weight Watchers, and describe the notion of the quest for well-being to describe support group members shared, ongoing attempts at improving their overall well-being. However, acts of fat-shaming underpin these weight loss support groups, which use public weigh-ins, positive reinforcements and rewards as motivation for individuals to achieve their weight loss goals. These programmes encourage members to share their weight loss journey publicly, posting their fitness goals and achievements on social media or finding an accountabilibuddy to ensure accountability. This notion of accountability is an implicit example of fat-shaming, where, if one is accountable and responsible for their weight loss journey, the fear of people on social media, or other members of their support group knowing that they have failed will provide motivation for persisting in order to achieve their goals. Social stigma in this instance, is seen as a positive, motivating force that will help us to achieve our weight loss goals, but this symbolises a collective distaste for fatness and deformed desire, which I will explore later on. If we associate weight loss with positive consequences, such as an improvement in an individual’s overall health, mortality and quality of life, then fat shaming in these instances could be seen as justified in the eyes of the consequentialist in order to improve someone’s life. Whilst this rationale seems intuitive, I will now proceed to explore the reasons why this view is misguided and why there is a competing moral demand which should take precedence.

The consequentialist arguments which attempt to justify fat-shaming for an overarching greater good, are unsuccessful for many reasons. First of all, the greater good arguments are dependent on the assumptions that fat shaming is an effective means of getting people to lose weight and that weight loss makes one physically healthier, both of these assumptions can be contested. In fact, fat shaming has been argued to be an ineffective means of getting people to lose weight and can potentially achieve the opposite, which I will now explore. A population survey, conducted by University College London, funded by Cancer Research UK, concluded that fat-shaming does not encourage weight loss and discovered that those who reported weight discrimination gained more weight than those who did not, concluding that weight discrimination is a part of the obesity problem and not the solution. Additionally, in N.A Schvey’s study which explores the impact of weight stigma on caloric consumption, its findings suggest that among overweight women, exposure to weight stigmatizing material may lead to increased caloric consumption. In addition, the belief which underpins the positive case for fat-shaming, that weight loss leads to increased well-being, can have adverse effects particularly on children. In 2019, Weight Watchers (WW) launched an application called Kurbo, for children 8 to 17 years old, which encourages children to track their food intake and intends to promote healthy eating habits from an early age. The app prescribes a traffic light system for individual foods, green items can be eaten freely, yellow should be consumed in moderate portions and red foods should encourage a child to ‘stop and think’ before eating. Weight Watchers have come under fire by actively enforcing the stigma of obesity and may as a consequence, lead to children developing disordered eating and unhealthy relationships with food. In light of this, as of April 2020, a change.org petition to remove the app has collected over 110,000 signatures, however, the app is still available to download. This example as well as the studies aforementioned, directly challenge the assumption that the pressure to lose weight in the form of weight stigma will have a positive, motivating effect on overweight individuals. With these matters in mind, Tomiyama and Mann’s paper, If Shaming Reduced Obesity, There Would Be No Fat People, makes the claim that if stigmatizing fat people worked, it surely would have done so by now.

The second reason why the greater good arguments are misguided is that we are rarely in a good position to know the underlying health conditions of someone else's body. In the context of fat-shaming, we cannot assume the conditions of an individual’s lifestyle based on their external appearance alone. The common stigma behind fatness, assumes that weight gain is caused simply by laziness or mere lack of self-control, however, this is not necessarily the case. Along with diet choices and lifestyle habits, often body size can be determined by metabolism, genetics, sleep, medication, financial stability, mental health or pre-existing health conditions such as hypothyroidism. This suggests that the ‘solutions’ to weight gain are not always as straightforward as eating less or exercising more, rather, fatness is a complex socio-economic, psychological and physiological phenomenon. The causes of fatness are so diverse and are often not a matter of individual choice which suggests that fat shaming is not an effective or appropriate way of decreasing fatness. I wish to take this thought one step further by arguing that fat shaming is not only unproductive, but morally impermissible. It is unethical to shame an individual for circumstances beyond their control, especially when weight gain is a consequence of complex trauma or personal difficulties. Even in instances where an individual is in control of their weight, it is morally impermissible to fat shame, firstly due to the discrimination that these practices perpetuate, but also because it is a serious burden to be placed upon an individual. Weight loss is a burden to individuals as it is not a quick fix, it is mentally challenging and often requires the time, money and willpower to dedicate to it. Therefore, fat-shaming manipulates individuals into feeling that they need to change, either over something that they have no control over, or something that they can control, but places a serious burden upon them. This counter argument raises serious doubts concerning the consequentialist argument, because even the positive case which claims that the intentions of fat-shaming generally positive and well-meaning, this justification misses the supposed force of its own argument, i.e. that there are good outcomes of fat-shaming on individuals.

Our attitudes toward healthy eating and dietary choices are increasingly important components of how we conceive of and judge ourselves and others and in this subsection, I will introduce orthorexia, a condition that would constitute a successful internalisation of the ideology behind fat shaming. In her paper, Eat Y’self Fitter: Orthorexia, Health and Gender, Van Dyke discusses society’s obsession with health and uses orthorexia as her central focus of study. Orthorexia Nervosa, meaning ‘eating obsession’, is a condition in which the subject becomes obsessed with identifying and maintaining the ideal diet by righteously following the orders of their mental paradigm. An orthorexic individual typically avoids the extremities of pleasure and experimentation by rigidly avoiding foods generally perceived as unhealthy. Van Dyke argues that orthorexia is a manifestation of age-old anxieties about human finitude and mortality, which everyone living in the 21st century western culture is prone to obsess about. Van Dyke raises an interesting point, which states that orthorexia often tends to involve a sense of moral superiority when an individual adheres to their idealised diet. In his paper, Health Food Junkies Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating, Bratman explains that unlike other eating disorders, orthorexia disguises itself as a virtue, where the subject gradually places healthy eating above other previously dominant values. Eventually, the quality of what they consume, and the purity of their diet become more important to the orthorexic than personal values, interpersonal relations, career plans, and social relationships, as food becomes the sole focus of their life. It is thus unsurprising that recovering orthorexic Edward Yuen states that orthorexia is the very behaviour that ultimately worsens the experience of the rest of your life.

The main reason why fat-shaming should be considered as unethical is because it is a malign restriction of freedom. Fat-shaming limits personal freedom because it results in deformed desires, which is significant for issues such as autonomy, agency, and responsibility. In Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Elster describes how a person acquires deformed desires, which is when they adapt their preferences without their control or awareness. Deformed desires are formed in response to unjust social conditions, which seems appropriate in this discussion where, as previously discussed, fat people are the most openly stigmatized individuals in our society. In addition, deformed desires typically involve deception about what an individual truly wants, or what is truly in their own interest or will promote their welfare. Deformed desires constitute a restriction of autonomy because they are unchosen and are not an indication of an individuals’ self-determination, but rather, the individual’s subordination to the system and its ends. The sentiments behind fat-shaming, both simultaneously create and are reinforced by the conditions of the oppression of fat people. From these points, we can conclude that fat-shaming satisfies the conditions of deformed desires, such as adapting an individual’s preferences without their control and deceiving them into believing that losing weight will promote their welfare. Therefore, fat-shaming is responsible for deforming our desires, by reinforcing the distaste for fatness, thus constituting a malign social pressure and presenting a legitimate threat to personal autonomy.

The second reason why fat-shaming threatens personal autonomy is because there exists an imposition of values, where we are projecting onto individuals what we believe their priorities in life should be. The existing beliefs concerning bodies and health, i.e. the distaste for fat bodies, emphasise the importance of our external appearance, stress what kind of bodies are ‘good’ and ‘bad’, associate weight loss with improved well-being and consider fatness as a physical state to be shamed for. When these values are enforced, it affects an individual’s ability to act according to their own reasons because they are being told what they should or should not eat, how much they should be eat, and that the size of their body should be one of their main concerns in life. It is undeniably difficult for any individual to make free choices when the sentiments of others are repeatedly imposed upon them, when they are ostracised for the way that they look and are negatively judged for their choices and lifestyle habits. To put this into context, imagine an example of a fat person who is subject to fat-shaming, they experience daily discrimination from their community and mainstream media is saturated with weight loss advertisements, negative representations of fat bodies and positive representations of thin bodies. The fat person in this example would have to be impossibly strong-willed and self-confident enough to feel comfortable in their own body and only ever decide to make changes to their body when responding to their own genuine desires, despite all of these manipulating forces. Eaton similarly emphasises that it is a challenge to resist internalising the aesthetic ideal of thinness because firstly, the stakes for being perceived as attractive are extremely high and secondly, the dominant standards of attractiveness in society are skewed toward the aversion to fat bodies. It is therefore morally impermissible to fat shame because fat shaming enforces a specific value system onto others, resulting in individuals pursuing ends that they would not have pursued naturally or from their own motivations, rather as a consequence of being manipulated into abiding by the dominant standards of attractiveness in society.

As previously discussed, fat-shaming attempts to condition individuals into adopting the sentiments which underpin fat oppression and supports the perpetuation of our malformed tastes. If we successfully internalise these sentiments, a natural consequence is that we adopt the skewed value system which characterises orthorexia, i.e. prioritising health, physical appearances and body weight above our genuine values. This defective value system can lead to eating disorders where one becomes obsessive in their behaviours concerning food, exercise and health and can have severe and sometimes fatal consequences. The common ideology which underpins both orthorexia and fat-shaming should thus be resisted due to these devastating and potentially life-threatening consequences. In addition, another potentially dangerous result of internalising the beliefs concerning health and fatness is that healthy or thin people would be considered as more virtuous than unhealthy or fat people. If attractiveness and physical health are considered as virtues, any virtues which would more likely promote well-being for an individual such as friendship, pride or honour are undermined. However, if health happens to be important to an individual, it is appropriate only when it is result of self-determination and not a consequence of deformed desire or our malformed tastes. Therefore, the belief system which motivates fat-shaming and enforces orthorexia, influences a skewed value system, which can lead to eating disorders and obsessive behaviours, as well as restricting the ability for individuals to determine their own priorities in life, inconsistent with a fully developed sense of personal autonomy.