Some time ago, I asked in two successive posts whether we really were afraid of beauty nowadays and whether that had significantly altered our approach to thinking about virtue. I wrote a response that was brief and not as comprehensive as I had imagined; it was merely putting pen to paper for a thought that was begging to be let out. Since then, I have had the opportunity to read more widely on the subject, and a book that has caught my attention is Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, which was delivered as the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Yale University in 1998.1 Scarry’s lectures are marvellous works, and excised of their drooling over the work of Matisse, asks an important question: how are beauty and justice connected? Can the beautiful be connected to the just? Scarry identifies two roles that beauty takes — first, as the progenitor of wonder; second, as creating what she terms the “pressure toward the distributional,”;2 — that are integral to our understanding and comprehension of the world. Through this essay, I will take some of Scarry’s ideas and apply them to areas of inquiry that I intend to probe further.