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Ah. I understand what you meant, now - you're analogizing the "good" in "good genes" with the "good" in "good investment". I don't think people who use of "good genes" colloquially would define "good" in this context as "contingently socioeconomically valuable genes", which is a jarringly cynical way of seeing the world. I don't think that a woman faux-modestly boasting "Guess I just have good genes" when complimented on her beauty is saying "My genes make me a valuable market object in the society I live in". I think what she has in mind is some vague underlying belief in objective beauty standards. I think she would say that her genes would still be "good genes", and her looks "good looks", on a desert island. That's the assumption I've been arguing under. Perhaps you think the average American in 2026 is both more clued-in to the fundamental subjectivity of all aesthetic judgements and more ruthlessly mercantile in how they relate to the world around them, but if so, that's the crux of our disagreement/misunderstanding. I think that when people who joke about "good genes" they are flirting with an unexamined belief in an objective value system, and that belief in such a value system is potentially morally hazardous. If you think that they aren't doing that in the first place, fine.
Well, some genes certainly are "good" in the sense of an objective value system. If given the choice, no one would choose a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or ovarian cancer. All things being equal, people without such genetic predispositions are genetically superior to people with them.
In terms of beauty, progressives believe that what people find beautiful is contingent and socially constructed. This is true up to a point, and yet there are obvious commonalities in what's considered beautiful between vastly disparate cultures. Show me a culture where the average man finds middle-aged women more sexually desirable than women in their early twenties, or in which short men are seen as more desirable than tall men, and then we can talk about how malleable beauty standards really are. In pretty much every culture, most straight men are attracted to young petite women with symmetrical faces, healthy BMIs, narrow waists, wide hips and large breasts, while most straight women are attracted to tall men who are older than them with symmetrical faces, strong jawlines, wide wingspans and broad shoulders. (The fact that so many of these traits are clear proxies for reproductive fitness seems so obvious as to hardly even be worth mentioning.) Black guys place a larger premium on big asses and Asian men place a larger premium on slimness, but if you were to find the ideal female physiognomy (as rated by straight men) for every country in the world and compare them, I daresay they'd exhibit far more similarities than dissimilarities.
One of the ways Scott pointed out the lunacy of the "social model of disability" is by pointing out that being blind would be disadvantageous even if one got stranded on a desert island, in which the concept of "social accomodations" simply wouldn't apply. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, with the corollary that being beautiful is only socially advantageous if there are beholders around to behold you. If you were stranded alone on a desert island, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if you were a 2 or a 10. But the nearest equivalent thought experiment is: if Sydney Sweeney was teleported to another part of the world completely at random, would she be seen as more desirable than the average woman there, and could she convert that into social capital?
Beauty standards do vary from culture to culture, but my guess is that Sydney Sweeney would be considered unusually desirable in just about any culture in the world. This seems as close to "good in the sense of an objective value system" as makes no difference. Stranded alone on a desert island, being sighted is always preferable to being blind. When moving to a new town where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language, a petite young woman with a symmetrical face, healthy BMI, narrow waist, wide hips and large breasts will always have an easier time of it than a woman with none of these traits. I mean, is this even controversial? What's the difference between "my appearance would provide me with a competitive advantage in essentially any social environment" and "I am objectively attractive"?
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