Getting rid of guilt and shame as motivators of people is definitely admirable, but still leaves a moral/social question. Goodness or Badness of a person isn’t just an internal concept for people to judge themselves by, it’s also a handle for social reward or punishment to be doled out.
I wouldn’t want to be friends with Saddam Hussein, or even a deadbeat parent who neglects the things they “should” do for their family. This also seems to be true regardless of whether my social punishment or reward has the ability to change these people’s behaviour. But what about being friends with someone who has a billion dollars but refuses to give any of that to charity? What if they only have a million dollars? What if they have a reasonably comfortable life but not much spare income?
Clearly the current levels of social reward/punishment are off (billionaire philanthropy etc.) so there seems an obvious direction to push social norms in if possible. But this leaves the question of where the norms should end up.
I think there’s a bit of a jump from ‘social norm’ to ‘how our government deals with murders’. Referring to the latter as ‘social’ doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I think I’ve explained myself poorly, I meant to use the phrase social reward/punishment to refer exclusively to things forming friendships and giving people status, which is doled out differently to “physical government punishment”. Saddam Hussein was probably a bad example as he is also someone who would clearly also receive the latter.
Getting rid of guilt and shame as motivators of people is definitely admirable, but still leaves a moral/social question. Goodness or Badness of a person isn’t just an internal concept for people to judge themselves by, it’s also a handle for social reward or punishment to be doled out.
I wouldn’t want to be friends with Saddam Hussein, or even a deadbeat parent who neglects the things they “should” do for their family. This also seems to be true regardless of whether my social punishment or reward has the ability to change these people’s behaviour. But what about being friends with someone who has a billion dollars but refuses to give any of that to charity? What if they only have a million dollars? What if they have a reasonably comfortable life but not much spare income?
Clearly the current levels of social reward/punishment are off (billionaire philanthropy etc.) so there seems an obvious direction to push social norms in if possible. But this leaves the question of where the norms should end up.
I think there’s a bit of a jump from ‘social norm’ to ‘how our government deals with murders’. Referring to the latter as ‘social’ doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I think I’ve explained myself poorly, I meant to use the phrase social reward/punishment to refer exclusively to things forming friendships and giving people status, which is doled out differently to “physical government punishment”. Saddam Hussein was probably a bad example as he is also someone who would clearly also receive the latter.