The 2027 John Locke Philosophy question asks: "Sydney Sweeney is paid to be looked at. Is there anything wrong with her posing or us looking?" It wants two verdicts, one on the person who poses and one on the people who look, and a reason why they might differ. Below are three readings to start with and the main arguments to weigh, from "nothing is wrong with either" to "both are wrong because the practice is wrong".
The question was shown by the John Locke Institute at its October 2026 events; the Institute's website will carry the official list.
The question at a glance
| Category | Philosophy |
| Exact wording | "Sydney Sweeney is paid to be looked at. Is there anything wrong with her posing or us looking?" |
| Word limit | 2,000 words for the essay body, not counting endnotes or bibliography |
| Who can enter | Any student under 19 on the submission deadline, from any country; under-15s are judged separately in the Junior category |
| What it tests | Objectification, the ethics of looking, and how far consent and payment settle a moral question |
What the question is really asking
Two acts, not one. The question joins two acts with "or": her posing and our looking. A strong essay gives a verdict on each and says whether they stand or fall together. They need not. A fee can make one act innocent and leave the other open.
"Paid to be looked at." This is the premise the question hands you, and it is worth examining before you accept it. A model in an advertisement is paid so that her image will draw attention to a product. The attention is what the brand is buying, and the viewer's look is, in a sense, the thing being sold. That makes this a question about commodified attention as much as about sex or beauty. It is also a partial description. Sweeney is an actor; "paid to be looked at" picks out one part of her work and lets it stand for the whole. Hold on to that, because it turns out to matter.
Objectification. The working definition comes from Martha Nussbaum, who lists seven ways of treating a person as a thing: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership and denial of subjectivity. Rae Langton later added three: reduction to body, reduction to appearance and silencing. Nussbaum's central claim is that these come apart and that not all of them are always wrong. Her phrase is "In the matter of objectification, context is everything."
The gaze. Laura Mulvey coined "male gaze" in 1975 to describe how film splits looking into an active, male role and a passive, female one. John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) made the same point about European painting and advertising. Both treat looking as something people do, with a shape that can be studied and criticised.
Consent. Her consent is real and it is paid for. The hidden question is what it covers. Consent is always consent to something. She agreed with a brand that her image could be used to sell its clothes. Did she thereby agree to every way in which a viewer might look at that image, and at people like her?
The live case. In July 2025 American Eagle launched a denim campaign titled "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans." In one video a poster reading "Sydney Sweeney has great genes" has "genes" crossed out and replaced with "jeans." Critics read the wordplay as an allusion to eugenics; on 1 August 2025 the brand said the campaign "is and always was about the jeans." Sweeney later told GQ, "I did a jean ad." This page takes no side in that dispute. It matters here for one reason: it shows that the meaning of a posed image is made by the people who produce it and the people who look at it, and the person in it has little control over either.
The trap
The trap is letting her consent answer the question about us. Many good essays spend 1,500 words establishing, correctly, that she chose the work, was paid for it and could have refused, then conclude that "therefore nothing is wrong with posing or looking." The second half does not follow. Her consent is a fact about her act. It tells you she is not wronged by being photographed and displayed. It does not tell you what a viewer may do with the image in his own head, or what that habit of looking does to the people he meets afterwards.
The mirror-image mistake is just as common: condemning the poser. An essay that ends up blaming the woman in the advert for the way she is looked at has answered a question about the viewer by passing judgement on the person viewed. Berger has a paragraph about exactly this move, and the judges will know it. A third, smaller trap is writing about the celebrity rather than the philosophy. The question names a real person to make the case concrete. It does not invite commentary on her career, her appearance or her views.
Three core readings
1. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Objectification" (1995)
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Objectification," Philosophy & Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 249-291. DOI 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1995.tb00032.x. A scanned copy is open at mit.edu.
This is the founding paper of the modern debate, and the judges will expect you to know it. Nussbaum breaks "objectification" into seven separate notions (p. 257) and argues that most of them are not wrong in every context: "In the matter of objectification, context is everything" (p. 271). Her conclusion (pp. 289-290) is that only instrumental treatment is always morally problematic, and even that becomes "a central form of the morally objectionable" only when it "does not take place in a larger context of regard for humanity." Two passages are directly on your question. Discussing Playboy (p. 284), she says that "it is the represented woman who is being objectified and, derivately, the actress whose photograph appears," and that the magazine "constructs for the reader a fantasy objectification of a class of real women." Use the seven-item list as an instrument: run the posing and the looking through it separately and see which items apply to which act.
2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972), Essays 3 and 7
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972). Penguin edition.
Essay 3 is the classic account of how women are looked at in European painting: "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (p. 47). For this question the sharpest passage is about mirrors. Painters, Berger says, put a mirror in a nude woman's hand and called the picture Vanity, "thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure." That is the best warning you will find against blaming the poser for the look. Essay 7, on advertising (Berger calls it "publicity"), supplies the economics: "The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour" (p. 131). It tells you that what a fashion advertisement sells is a look, and not always a desiring one: often it is the viewer's envy of a self she might become. That gives you a richer "us" than most essays will manage.
3. Paulina Sliwa and Tom McClelland, "Seeing Others as Objects: Perceptual Objectification & Affordances" (2025)
Paulina Sliwa and Tom McClelland, "Seeing Others as Objects: Perceptual Objectification & Affordances," European Journal of Philosophy (2025): e70027. DOI 10.1111/ejop.70027. Open access at the Cambridge repository.
This is the newest serious work on the half of the question most essays neglect: what it is to see, rather than treat, someone as an object. Their answer: "To perceptually objectify someone is a matter of perceiving the object-related affordances they present as opposed to their person-related affordances." An affordance is a possibility for action, so the account ties seeing to doing, and they discuss objectifying advertisements directly (p. 4). Their conclusion calls the objectifying gaze "a standing disposition" (p. 13). That gives you a way to say what is wrong with a way of looking even when the person looked at is a photograph who will never know: the look trains a habit, and habits travel. It is a 2025 paper, so few entrants will cite it, and it answers the objection your essay most needs to meet.
Also worth reading: Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18, DOI 10.1093/screen/16.3.6, for the origin of "to-be-looked-at-ness." The Stanford Encyclopedia entry by Lina Papadaki, "Feminist Perspectives on Objectification", gives Langton's three added features with definitions. Ole Martin Moen's short essay "Checking People Out" is the cleanest statement of the view that looking is wrong only when it harms, and the strongest objection any "some looking is wrong" essay has to meet.
Arguments to think about
Each of these can carry a 2,000-word essay. Pick the one you can defend against its strongest objection, and make sure your essay answers that objection directly.
The posing is innocent; some looking is not. She consents to being photographed and is paid for attention, so nothing in the posing wrongs anyone, and looking at an advertisement is not wrong in itself. But consent licenses attention, not every attitude. A way of looking that reduces a person to her appearance (Rae Langton's phrase) and trains a habit of seeing real women as things can be wrong, and on this view that wrong belongs to the viewer alone. Nussbaum's seven features of objectification give you the tools to say which kind of looking crosses the line. Do not let her consent answer the question about us.
Both are wrong, because the practice is wrong. A structural answer, built on Mulvey and the MacKinnon tradition Nussbaum discusses, says that individual consent cannot redeem a practice whose function is to train a way of seeing women. On this view the model's posing is a free choice that still feeds the practice, and the viewer's looking completes it. To defend it, you need to show that the harm to third parties is real and that one woman's consent cannot bind others. The weakness to meet is Berger's: it can end up blaming the woman in the picture.
Neither is wrong, and the moralising is the problem. A liberal answer combines Moen's harm principle for looking with Catherine Hakim's sociological work on "erotic capital." Her abstract argues that "a central feature of patriarchy has been the construction of 'moral' ideologies that inhibit women from exploiting their erotic capital to achieve economic and social benefits" (European Sociological Review, 2010). On this view a woman who is paid well for her image is using an asset, and the instinct to find something wrong with it is itself the sexist move. The challenge is to say why private habits of looking never wrong anyone, which is exactly where Sliwa and McClelland push back.
The posing is the harder case. Berger writes that a woman taught to survey herself "turns herself into an object," and Sandra Bartky (quoted by Sliwa and McClelland) describes the woman who takes "toward her own person the attitude of the man." An essay could argue that looking at an advert is harmless, but that a career built on being looked at risks a kind of self-objectification that is bad for the person who undergoes it, whatever it pays. This is the most uncomfortable line and the hardest to write respectfully. If you take it, argue about the practice and its pressures, never about the individual.
Most students find two of these persuasive and struggle to choose. Testing each one against its best objection, out loud, is the quickest way to find out which you can actually defend; it is also what our John Locke Essay Competition tutors do with students in the first weeks of a cohort.
FAQ
Is the Sydney Sweeney question a good John Locke question to choose?
Yes, for a student who will do the reading. It looks easy because everyone has an opinion about celebrity and advertising, which is exactly why weak entries will cluster on it. It rewards an essay that splits the posing from the looking, uses Nussbaum's seven features as a tool rather than a list, and meets the "no victim, no wrong" objection head on. If you would rather argue from opinion than from texts, choose another question.
What should I read for the John Locke Sydney Sweeney question?
Start with Martha Nussbaum's 1995 paper "Objectification," especially the list of seven notions on page 257 and the discussion of photographs on page 284. Then read Essays 3 and 7 of John Berger's Ways of Seeing for looking and advertising. For the ethics of the viewer, read Sliwa and McClelland's 2025 paper on perceptual objectification, which is open access. Mulvey's 1975 essay and the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on objectification are useful fourth and fifth reads.
Do I need to write about Sydney Sweeney herself?
Only as much as the argument needs. The question names her to make the case concrete, and a short, accurate reference to her 2025 denim campaign gives you an opening case. Keep to public, sourced facts and cite them. Do not comment on her appearance, her private life or her opinions. The judges are marking your philosophy, and an essay that drifts into celebrity commentary will lose marks for relevance and judgement.
What does objectification mean in philosophy?
Objectification means treating a person as a thing. Martha Nussbaum's 1995 paper breaks it into seven notions: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership and denial of subjectivity. Rae Langton later added reduction to body, reduction to appearance and silencing. For this question the point to take from Nussbaum is that these features come apart, and whether any of them is wrong depends on context. So objectification is not automatically wrong, which is why the question is worth asking.
Related
The John Locke Philosophy questions page carries this question with its trap and argument lines, alongside the 2026 Philosophy questions for practice. All ten 2027 questions, with the expected dates, are in our John Locke Essay Competition 2027 questions tracker. Two related 2027 questions: can you wrong someone without harming him (Law) and can a machine be a coward (Science & Technology). For the standard the judges reward, read our analysis of the published past winning essays.
