Where the Polemical Meets the Edifying

Lappano, David

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198792437.003.0010

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“…"The Crowd is Untruth" is a well-known Kierkegaardian slogan, 31 and his analysis is widely recognised as anticipating many later analyses of crowd psychology. While much work has shown that the caricature of Kierkegaard as a straightforwardly anti-social or asocial thinker is greatly overblown (see, e.g., Pattison and Shakespeare 1998;Lappano 2017), it remains true that there are dangers in human collectives about which he is acutely concerned. Kierkegaard's account of various such collective entities ("the crowd", "the public", "humanity in abstracto" (SUD 31/SKS 11, 147)) tends not to distinguish between these overlapping notions in any systematic way.…”

Section: The Danger Of "The Public"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Kierkegaard, “the Public”, and the Vices of Virtue-Signaling: The Dangers of Social Comparison

Lippitt

2023

Religions

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Concerns about the dangers of social comparison emerge in multiples places in Kierkegaard’s authorship. I argue that these concerns—and his critique of the role of “the public”—take on a new relevance in the digital age. In this article, I focus on one area where concerns about the risks of social comparison are paramount: the contemporary debate about moral grandstanding or “virtue-signaling”. Neil Levy and Evan Westra have recently attempted to defend virtue-signaling against Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke’s critique. I argue that these defences fail and that a consideration of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers is critical to seeing why. The over-confidence to which they give rise exacerbates certain vices with the potential to do moral, social and epistemic harm: I focus in particular on self-righteousness (complementing Kierkegaard’s discussion of envy). I then argue that Kierkegaard’s contrast between the religious category of the “single individual”—the genuine person of “character”—and the person who effectively appeals to the authority of some version of “the public” deepens our understanding of why we should reject defences of virtue-signaling. It helps us to distinguish between two kinds of virtue-signaler (“superficial enthusiasts” and “clear-eyed cynics”), both of whom contribute, in different ways, to the negative impacts of the vice of self-righteousness. Contrary to Levy’s claim that virtue-signaling is virtuous, I conclude that typically it is closer to vice than to virtue.

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Section: The Danger Of "The Public"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Kierkegaard, “the Public”, and the Vices of Virtue-Signaling: The Dangers of Social Comparison

Lippitt

2023

Religions

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Where the Polemical Meets the Edifying

Cited by 1 publication

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Kierkegaard, “the Public”, and the Vices of Virtue-Signaling: The Dangers of Social Comparison

Kierkegaard, “the Public”, and the Vices of Virtue-Signaling: The Dangers of Social Comparison

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