"That Dress is Inappropriate": A Kantian Perspective on Aesthetics and Assessing Professionalism

Student professionalism is a complex construct that intersects with individual behaviour, relationships, and politics and social discourse. A small number of authors have previously commented on the importance of aesthetics for understanding how professionalism is assessed in medical education. This paper develops a preliminary account of precisely what types of sensible responses occur when assessing one aspect of student professionalism. It argues that positive and negative evaluations of student appearance involve two fundamentally different subjective phenomena - Kant's judgments of agreeableness and mere feelings of displeasure. These different processes mean that positive, but not negative, evaluations can claim a degree of generality and objectivity. Because negative evaluations involve weaker and more subjective responses, they have the potential to be unjust. The potentially wider implications of this argument for assessing student professionalism are also considered.