anotherpanacea

Tag: Status and Morality

  • Are Status Emotions Defensible as Character Judgments?

    One major defense of status emotions like deference and disdain is that they count as judgments of a person’s character. We defer to experts because they have a history of being right; we disdain scoundrels because they have a history of cheating or misleading us. In this sense, status emotions are akin to other reactive…

  • Jonathan Haidt’s Conflation of the Personal and the Partisan

    There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives. He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists identify…

  • The Great Stagnation and the Possibilities of Redistribution

    Tyler Cowen’s new e-pamphlet (The Great Stagnation) takes on the slowing gains to be had from social and technological progress and offers an interesting explanation of some of the trends that many people see as troubling: the flat arc of median incomes since 1973 and the apparently universal surprise that the last decade offered no…

  • Inequality of What? Socioeconomic Status and Amartya Sen’s Entitlements Approach

    Responding to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status, Peter Levine discusses some of the difficulties in measuring socioeconomic status: To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be admitted to certain snobby clubs. But having wealth and family connections might hurt your chances of hanging out with the cool kids…

  • Blame, Offense, and (again) Contempt

    1. Two studies suggest that women apologize more than men. The reason? They are more easily offended, and find more actions more offensive: In Study 1, participants reported in daily diaries all offenses they committed or experienced and whether an apology had been offered. Women reported offering more apologies than men, but they also reported committing…

  • Best blog post I’ve read today

    From Tyler Cowen: I would not say that “we are now at war with the terrorists” but our situation has some war-like elements. Any persistent war has required major social changes, if only temporary ones, in how the body is viewed and handled. If we are so unwilling to even consider these changes in body…

  • Walmart Coming to DC

    Walmart is planning to open several new “urban” stores in the District, and I’m pretty excited about it. (via) One of them will be just two blocks away from me, and I plan to shop there. Right now, I do most of my shopping at the rundown, overpriced Safeway or at the Costco off the 495…

  • Appiah’s Honor

    The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s new book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen chronicles how the concept of honor has been crucial in the fight against immoral practices like dueling, foot-binding, and slavery. In his press junket to promote the book, he’s discussed honor, moral revolutions, and the condemnation of future generations. Let me start with some…

  • Warning Signs: Beliefs that Signal Loyalty or Ability

    My last post has generated some controversy on Facebook, where the audience is a bit more diverse, faith-wise, than those who read the blog. I thought it might be useful to continue pressing on the critique of instrumental beliefs with an instructive list of warning signs that your opinions are primarily instrumental, from Robin Hanson.…

  • Deference Reduces Group Intelligence

    NPR has a story about group intelligence: Anita Woolley, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory, has been studying what it means to say a group is “intelligent.” So she created teams of two to five people, drawn from 700 volunteers, and asked the teams to solve various kinds of problems. “We had some…