The argument isn’t that basing sentencing on physical attractiveness is unfair because attractiveness is randomly distributed (“less a given”), it’s that it’s irrelevant a priori; accordingly your argument misses the point. In contrast: IQ and grit are by definition supposed to measure those traits which are relevant to success; fwiw they are NOT considered completely fair, but that is because of the extent to which many instruments end up measuring “belonging to a certain cultural group” instead of those relevant traits.

It'd be no less unfair to base sentencing on IQ.

The switch you've made here is between "success" and criminal punishment.

That's a weird comparison. Yes life is unfair and everyone of us is born with some genetic privileges or disadvantages. But IQ and beauty hardly sit on the same bench.

IQ has a pretty strong correlation with the quality of the work you can produce. Higher IQ is generally beneficial to the solution of any task. If you are trying to go to Mars or find a vaccine for COVID-19, you probably want very smart people in the room. Hell, you want smart people even if you are building yet another ecommerce website.

The same is hardly true for beauty. Excluding beauty-specific jobs, skills and experience should always prevail over look.

IQ: unfair to the individual, justified by society well being Beauty: unfair to the individual, no particular advantage for society

This is under the assumption that that IQ is used for a noble cause :-)

Giving an IQ test for a job is illegal.

> Giving an IQ test for a job is illegal.

No, it's not. Using any criteria that creates substantial disadvantage to a protected class is illegal if you can't show a sufficiently close nexus to bona fide job requirements/performance, which happened to be found to be the case with the IQ test that was adopted as a direct replacement for overt racial discrimination in the Duke Energy case. But the legal rule that comes from that case is not “IQ tests are illegal”, and in fact IQ tests are used in a number of places in hiring (including, as became notorious in another case where the practice was upheld, being used where a score above a threshold was disqualifying in a particular police department.)

The algorithmic questions used in software engineering interviews are just glorified IQ tests imo.