27 Comments

Sorry if you've already covered this elsewhere— it seems to me that a lot hinges on what we mean by "shaming". It has both a spectrum a severity and many different forms it can take (eg. overt vs more subtle shaming, how public can the shaming be, rules of etiquette when shaming and being shamed, what is the nature of the shame itself? etc etc). It aso isn't clear to me that all forms of shaming are the same, or are equally socially useful/harmful. Then there's the question of when whatever we mean by"disapproval" veers into whatever we mean by "shaming", which isn't always obvious. Leaving aside those who want to abandon any concept of socially sanctioned/proscribed behavior, the question for the rest of us seems like it's usually a matter of degree rather than simply yes/no to shaming.

Interesting stuff as always, thanks for writing.

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Thank you :) I have not! I'm thinking through this set of issues live and attempting to find some more precise ways of speaking about it.

Agreed, there are various degrees of shaming and the level of confidence I would need that some behavior is creating a social externality, or is harming the people who consensually engage in it would be lower to convince me that more subtle forms of shaming are ethically justified. This is the case when we use legislative tools as well though, we need less evidence that we should discourage a behavior, either for paternalistic reasons or due to externalities, to levy a 10% additional tax than we do to levy a 100% additional tax.

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Honestly I know way more people (men and women) who regret NOT taking sexual opportunities than regret sleeping with too many people. In fact I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who regretted sleeping with too many people. It may be something someone gives lip service too if they need to convince someone else who doesn't like it why they've "changed", or maybe it happens if someone becomes a born again Christian or something...but outside of that I don't believe body count regret is a real thing.

It's just something OTHER people don't like because they perceive (correctly most of the time) that a person with a high count is more likely to be involved in infidelity in the future (both their own and potentially interfering in other people's relationships). So this one IMO is 100% about wanting to control/change someone else's behavior for their one's own benefit...definitely not to paternaliatically help.

Now I know LOTS of people who regret that they ever started smoking. Or various other things we shame. Regretting taking sexual opportunities is just not something that I think it commonly regretted.

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Your tack here is pragmatist-utilitarian. You think of it as the culture having a menu of different ideas and values to choose from, so let's figure out which will produce the best results and choose those. I think of it more as which ideas and values are *true*. In principle, these two approaches should land in the same place. But if our only way of solving this is by some huge well-being calculus, it just seems too hard. Should we slut shame more or less relative to our current level? No idea. I guess it's fine to take up such questions and just do the best calculus you can. That doesn't excite me though, purely in terms of research potential--the ability to create new knowledge. I'm much more interested to figure out *why* populists/trads and wokists, respectively, have adopted false views--what *ideas* are at the root of their errors--and then trying to argue for more correct, fundamental ideas. This may seem like a very indirect way of solving the problem you're interested in, but I just don't think any other way either will work (do the calculus right) or have a realistic chance of positive societal change (causing people to adopt better, more welfare-enhancing views).

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But how do you go about determining which norms reflect true values/ideas if not with some sort of well being calculus? I agree that there’s some truth to be found, but my prior is that the “right thing to do” is normally best left to the individual to determine (given an assurance that they’ll be protected from non consensual acts against them). This is partly because I agree with you that the well being calculus is generally too difficult, and so it’s hard (but not impossible) to overcome my prior that individuals know what’s best for them. Also, there are multiple “good” values that most of us hold, but we prioritize them differently. Do you feel that there is some true/correct set of values and relative importance of those values? And again how would we objectively determine that?

Thanks for the comment :)

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When we get down to the core errors of trad-populism and wokism, so the errors that when corrected would have the biggest cultural impact, they're not these more concrete, calculus-y ones like about things like slut shaming. There are two main kinds, epistemological ones and ones more about morality on a theoretical level.

I've thought about the epistemological ones a lot, but it's complicated and requires a much meatier exposition. The moral ones are still tricky, but I think are sortable in a post-size chunk, which answers some of the questions you raise. Had this in the attic:

https://ricksint.substack.com/p/moral-values-in-living-color

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Well, guess I know why I like your writing. Major echo chamber for me although I'm somewhat more trad/ordo liberal

Missing in the framing is a discussion of institutions, major organizations and formal structures across government, for profit and non-profit space (the Fed to Google to Emory to United Way to United Methodists). 1) Institutions are consequencial beyond market forces due to market making, natural market concentrations from economies of scale and non market activity including norm setting. 2) High functioning institutions are major social value add and disfuntional institutions destroy markets. 3) Institution dynamics and incentives are weird. Incentive alignment with the social function and internal management has layered principal/agent issue.

Within institutions shaming, virtue signaling, etc are effective tools to build internal coalitions. The weaker the binding common objective, the more petty political battles over dividing the pie leading to bloat and outright corruption. As someone slightly more trad leaning, I would argue that the past was pretty rough and without institutional strength we end up back there. The enlightenment while useful in the sphere of science led to reductionist ideologies that undervalue the role of institutions and social organization.

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Thanks, Paul!

Institutions do matter, and I’m not sure how to think about how they form or how to get better institutions other than that they are in some sense the product of the people within a society. Not sure if you know Garett Jones but he focuses a lot on institutions and norms and how they reflect immigration patterns. Vaish and I interviewed him for our podcast a few weeks ago:

https://open.substack.com/pub/moralmayhem/p/interview-with-garett-jones-national?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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I think the shame/praise issues are magnified in institutions and institutional cultures. Norm setting in institutions can be very proscriptive and there can be good organizational justification. My sense is that many institutional norms and the means to enforce them are arbitrary or reactionary.

I think it is defensable to claim that institutional norms and culture are upstream of broader culture. If a monopolist retailer is is producing clothing worn by working class teenagers, this is norm setting. There is a market factor but also an institutional norms factor on the sizes, cuts and colors. Another example, HR sets dumb norms like making talking about salary taboo mostly for their own interest. This is incredibly damaging as a broader cultural taboo, because price transparency leads to better career decisions.

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Intriguing to have "central planning" include social pressure on behavior, since it's usually only used for economic pressure. This made me consider the similarities and differences in ways I normally don't. What do you think of situations when the free market and social shaming overlap? "Shaming products" can can find many eager buyers and sellers in the form of movies, podcasts, books, television, etc.

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Interesting, I suppose you could say those products, while enjoyable for the consumer, also have an externality in that they add to the overall level of shaming which is a cost for whoever is being shamed? Of course, I don’t think anyone shouldn’t be allowed to shame or call for others to shame a given behavior or even to profit off of their shaming. I just personally think it’s unethical unless a sufficiently high bar is met when making the case that some behavior is harmful to those engaging in it or others.

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Your analysis is different from any other related opinions I've come across, and somewhat thought provoking at that. But, as usual, a major factor is missed. It has to do with trust(worthiness). Which has become almost nonexistent nowadays and IMO this ruins relationships more than anything else.

There's a difference between a libertine and an adulterer, even if sometimes they do overlap. Adultery has been on the rise for decades now. At least around me, but I get the impression it's a rather general thing. From my experience, it has long become taboo to openly criticize it in most social circles. Many people feel more comfortable to discuss cheating as normal (or at least socially accept the participants like nothing happened) than to call them out. This creates victims that almost no WOKE warrior or status seeker cares about, and encourages further cheating. It creates a culture of distrust in human relationships, and not just among couples, though it's certainly not the only factor for that.

Perhaps shaming should be directed at cheaters (and aware accomplices) instead of trying to find the ideal rate of acceptable libertinism. I find this more ethical, and maybe more practical as well.

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In my observation of, for the lack of better term, wokeish/identarian spheres which are VERY negative about any form of slut-shaming, they're also EXTREMELY condemning of "adultery"/cheating and any interpersonal sex related deception, much more than the mainstream people, largely based on consent framework (cheating means the cheated partner has sex with the cheater or stays in the relationship on false assumptions, and might have not consented had they known). Common acceptance of ETHICAL non-monogamy makes the woke anti-cheating stance more persuasive.

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I really only see the word "shaming" in response to comments that aren't shaming someone at all. It feels like the only ones bringing the concept of shame into this are the ones who want to deny ideas like "losing weight can improve someone's health and attractiveness if they're overweight" or "sleeping around can make it harder for men to see you as a good long-term prospect". Neither of those phrases particularly imply shaming someone in the first place.

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I think the best point on this issue was made by Scott Alexander in his piece arguing that you shouldn't cancel/ostrasize until you believe you can sufficently coordinate enough people to actually effect your desired change.

As long as only a small percentage of people slut shame in a community it does very little to change behavior because most people are getting the message from the community: it's fine to be a slut. So all you really do is make people feel bad and create negative feelings.

If people would just follow this advice and merely try and convince people they should slut shame or whatever once they reached critical mass things would be sooo much better and it's basically a pure pareto win.

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Interesting - will look for that post!

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The implication here seems to be that any promiscuity-shaming can only be of women exclusively. But it is of course possible to shame both genders, or only men.

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In theory yes. In practice not really. Men are naturally disposed to feel much less reluctance to have low quality sexual relations so there is less of a natural anxiety to grab ahold of. This tendency also just makes it really hard to ever generate sufficient social coordination to on net make men feel bad about it in our culture.

Hell, it didn't even seem to work back in fire and brimstone days when people often literally believed being unchaste meant eternity in hell so it's pretty unpractical now outside of some unusual situations.

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I'd add that I think we focus most of our male-shaming on infidelity rather than number of partners

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Focus is a question of where you aim the lens.

Even in the army, which is historically a very macho place, I saw that very promiscuous guys were thought of as unreliable and untrustworthy. If you didn't have a girlfriend or at least the occasional one-night stand that was considered weird and sad, but the guy who had a different woman every weekend wasn't admired, he was mistrusted.

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I don't think shame is the right word for how we try to punish male cheaters.

One of the limitations of shame is it's tough to shame upwards in status hierarchies; it's much easier to shame downwards. Incels can't really bully chads the way wives can bully homewreckers.

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In some respects shaming upwards is easier - the guy higher up is more well-known, so when he is shamed, there are more people holding him in contempt. Thus people having to resign from CEO jobs etc.

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The history of tobacco and alcohol in the West suggests that with sufficient effort, a society can cause behavioural changes. These won't be universal, but will be significant.

In Australia, for example, from 1970 to 2020 we saw the fraction of the adult population smoking going from 45 to 12.5%. The fraction of people who do not drink alcohol at all went from 15 to 35%.

Similarly, domestic violence has become less severe and more often reported, industrial accidents less frequent and severe, and so on.

Obviously all these required a package of measures. But, "If you do X you are a bad person," which is to say shaming, was part of it.

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Yes, I agree shaming can be effective. And there are times when we have good reasons to be confident that too much of some consensual interaction is happening and it’s bad for society - and in those cases shaming is the right thing to do. The point of this post was to think through when the right thing to do is shame people and to understand why I often disagree with social conservatives. It mostly comes down to different priors regarding how likely someone is to be wrong about what they want/should do, how much I value freedom vs safety and how convinced I am that the causal links between a behavior and other outcomes are.

Domestic violence doesn’t need to be considered in this framework to know that it’s ethical to shame it since it is not a consensual interaction. People who victimize others in that way are subject not only to shame but to criminal punishment

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Unfortunately, consent isn't always perfectly clear.

With regards to domestic violence, it's well-known that police officers called by a domestic violence victim will sometimes, on removing the offender from the premises, find themselves attacked by the victim. Is she not then consenting to the violence she's suffered?

Once a person is addicted to drugs are they truly consenting when they purchase more drugs?

If someone is a sex worker, is that consent for sex the same as the consent between a loving couple? When there is a couple who are not yet loving, but who are establishing a relationship, can it be that one pressures the other for sex, and that the other consents not because they want the sex itself, but because they hope the sex will help establish the relationship?

If someone is pressured about their appearance, and as a result takes on liposuction, chemical peeling, rhinpoplasty or the like, how much have they really consented, and how much were they under social pressure?

If a well-educated woman is hired for a job demanding all their intellectual powers, but on occasion finds herself being sent to get coffee while the men have the important discussions which she could contribute more intelligently to than they could, and in her jurisdiction she can be fired without notice or cause, has she really consented to her work conditions?

While consent is and should be part of the decision on how to proceed with criminal charges and the like, I'm not sure how much it can be relied on to decide whether a behaviour should be shamed or not.

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The fact that there are cases where consent is unclear doesn’t invalidate the concept or its usefulness. Is it unclear whether the victim of a home robbery consented? No. It isn’t. And in the DV case a woman can want to protect her partner from legal consequences while also not consenting to his acts of violence against her - if she’s saying “please stop” and defending herself while he attacks her she is not consenting. She may however consent to remain in the relationship knowing that he will likely victimize her again against her wishes.

I think some of the cases you’ve given are good examples of where shaming or general social pressure to not engage in some behavior is ethically justified for paternalistic reasons (such as the drug addiction case) or because it creates an externality (anti meritocratic pressure on women in the work case).

I’m not arguing that shaming is always wrong but explaining that my *prior* is that it’s wrong and I have to see good reasons why one should use social pressure to modify behavior in each case.

Also in this example: When there is a couple who are not yet loving, but who are establishing a relationship, can it be that one pressures the other for sex, and that the other consents not because they want the sex itself, but because they hope the sex will help establish the relationship?

I don’t see any real problem here, yes someone can consent to have sex for reasons other than their personal sexual pleasure. But I also don’t think it happens that often.

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Yes, obviously we could shame men enough that they feel bad about sleeping around but it's not really within the realm of practical concern.

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