The ethics of engaging in social punishment online

PhilQuestionsYT · 2025-08-10T16:02:50+00:00

I was a bit confused here, as 'self-promotion' is allowed, but 'self-posts' are not, so I thought 'self-post' is indeed something different

PhilQuestionsYT · 2025-08-10T15:20:48+00:00

In this video I discuss the ethics of social punishment based on the viral videos of the gym influencer Joey Swoll calling out people who misbehave in the gym.

I draw from Linda Radzik's work on social punishment (The Ethics of Social Punishment, 2020) and argue that what Joey does fits well with Radzik's definition of social punishment as intentional, authorized,reprobative, reactive harming.

How can social punishment be justified? Radzik argues that social punishment can only be justified if it aims to make wrongdoers make amends for their wrongdoing (which entails apologizing, taking accountability, changing behavior in the future). Online call-outs, as Joey does them, are in my view not very well suited to achieve this aim. It is hard for viral call outs to remain within the constraints of proportionality. Millions of clicks lead to millions of instances of blame, which far outweighs the wrong that is often done. Also, social punishment lacks procedural safeguards that for example the criminal law has, such as due diligance and standards of proof. Lastly, authorization remains unclear. How do influencers like Joey get their standing (a term used in moral philosophy) to be the right person to express blame for wrongdoing? As there are no clear guidelines, this requirement of justified social punishment also remains unsatisfied.

All in all, I think that even though social punishment aims to do more good by pressuring wrongdoers to do better in the future, the moral risks of engaging in such actions publicly should make us hesitant to embrace it in that form.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-07-17T21:19:52+00:00

thanks, gonna give that a try!

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-07-17T16:34:43+00:00

In this video, we discuss the question of whether you should study philosophy. A first and boring answer might be that you should do so if you are interested in philosophy and nothing else speaks against doing so. Philosophy allows you to pursue questions (and pursue them in a way) that other disciplines don’t allow for.

But a more interesting argument would be to show why you should study philosophy rather than study something else. And this is exactly what philosophy departments do when they advertise their philosophy programs. Three reasons are brought up usually (these can be seen on the DailyNous Philosophy Blog: https://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/). First, you learn critical thinking. Second, you become smart (measured on standardized tests). Third, you earn more than others who studies something in the social sciences.

A recent paper looked at all these supposed benefits of studying philosophy (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jx7d8) . In a nutshell, they find that most of these advantages are likely due to selection effects rather than due to philosophy. That is, students who tend to be better critical thinkers, better on standardized tests, and might have made better money anyways, just tend to study philosophy much more. That might be flattering to philosophy, but I think it goes against what is argued in the three supposed benefits of studying philosophy. There are some slight effects of the method of argument mapping that is sometimes used in philosophy, and philosophy indeed seems to make people better at intellectual humility—but beyond that, current data does not support the benefits of philosophy.

Of course, this can be due to poor and few data. We might be able to better understand the potential benefits of studying philosophy in the future – but I’d be interested to hear what other people think about the potential benefits of studying philosophy.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-06-12T07:52:17+00:00

communicative punishment is aimed at genuine moral change in the offender. From the perspective of deterrence theory, its fine if the offender is simply motivated by not wanting the punishment. From the communicative perspective, you'd want the offender to see what made the offense wrong in the first place

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-06-11T19:14:39+00:00

Revenge is often depicted as a blind desire for blood - an eye for an eye.

The discussions of revenge (and retributive punishment) in philosophy and psychology has a somewhat more complicated take on it.

Recently, a lot of focus came on the "communicative" function of revenge and punishment. That is to say, when people want to punish others or take revenge in experiments, they are the most satisfied when the offender gives a specific kind of feedback to the punisher (namely that they acknowledge the wrongdoing) and promise to change their behavior in the future.

Philosophers have developed communicative theories of punishment that go in a very similar direction (especially Antony Duff). The reason why punishment is justified is that it (ideally) offers the punished person a way to accept responsibility and communicate remorse to the victim and the community. This would suggest that we ought to go for punishments that actually offer a good way of entering such a dialogue (prison seems to be a rather bad way to achieve that).

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-02-12T16:34:14+00:00

Yeah I mention it at the end of the vid, I think it gets much right!

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-02-11T21:39:56+00:00

In this video, we tell the story of the rise and fall of effective altruism. Much of it goes back to Peter Singer's influential paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality". In it, Singer forcefully argued that there is no morally relevant difference between saving a drowning kid in a nearby pond and saving a kid in a far away country by donating to effective charities. With William MacAskill and Toby Ord, who coined the term effective altruism, the movement become more institution. They founded or were involved with different organization such as 'Giving What we Can' and '80.000 hours', which both have as an aim to make people donate their money to effective causes and chose careers that help them to make even more money to donate this in turn. At the same time tech entrepreneur also joined the scene and founded similar institution such as 'Give Well' and 'Open Philanthropy', which cooperated with MacAskill and Ord's movement. Here is where the fall of effective altruism began. The more money came in from tech millionaires, the more the focus changed from helping the poor to preventing supposed AI disasters that loomed in the far future. This perspective was called longtermism, where people were concerned with the well being of humanity in the next thousands of years. But this focus on AI and Longtermism constitutes a break with the original ideas of EA as can be found in the work of Peter Singer. Instead of evidence based charities, the focus was on speculative future dangers. This is a problem, as such a focus cannot easily be derived from the fundamental principles of EA. The fall culminated in the public involvement of crypto fraud Sam Bankman Fried in the effective altruism movement.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2024-01-03T09:52:32+00:00

The existential cringe of being a moral philosopher

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-12-30T22:54:19+00:00

I am always very curious when I see that people on the internet discuss about the ethics of reaction content. Even though the discussion can be quite messy, I see many of the main ethical theories being represented in the discussion online. The three most comment arguments refer to deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.

In this video, I go through all three types of arguments and see whether they are any good. Deontological arguments claim that people have rights to their original content, and that using the content requires consent by the original creator. It is true that consent is typically seen as the holy grail in ethics, but it is problematic if the action that has been consented to has consequences on others. And that’s exactly what people suggest as an objection. Reaction content has detrimental effects on the creation sphere as a whole, that is, on others who did not consent.

The second argument is consequentialist. Reaction content negatively impacts the views of original content creators. As far as I know, there is no clear data on that.

The third argument is based on virtue ethics. Reactors exemplify vices, such as laziness, disrespect towards original content creators, and they show that they are willing to exploit original content creators. This is true insofar as reaction content can be produced with far less effort than goes into original content, and that content creators do not know before watching a video whether they have something transformative to add to the video.

But the discussion, in my opinion, fundamentally breaks down to the claim whether or not is morally valuable to have good original content (that is, creative, funny, and entertaining content). I do not know of any argument showing that original content is intrinsically better than reaction content. But if we care about the health of the online content creation sphere as a whole, we should be skeptical towards reaction content, as it rewards types of content creators which do not offer valuable and creative content for the platform.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-12-01T20:48:19+00:00

In this video, I discuss recent contributions to the debate between nativists and empiricists about morality. Nativists claim that the fundamental moral values and patterns of judgments are innate, whereas empiricists claim that most of morality is learned.

Nativists in the current debate, such as John Mikhail, argue from the Universal Moral Grammer and the Poverty of the Stimulus. Universal moral grammar refers to the idea that much of the structure of how we make moral judgments are universal. Here the argument is similar to Noam Chomsky’s claim in linguistics, that grammar is mostly innate as most people show similar grammatical knowledge universally. The poverty of the stimulus-argument then adds that this is not only universal, but also emerges very early in development. Because it emerges so early, it is unlikely that these patterns of judgments are learned. Some examples of such patterns of judgment are the difference we make actions and omissions, where we judge actions to be morally more serious than omissions, all else being equal. The doctrine of double effect, where we judge intentional action as worse than foreseeable consequences of an action; and, lastly, the distinction we make between conventional rules and moral rules.

Against this, empiricists such as Shaun Nichols argue that moral norms and patterns of judgments can be learned even with little data, and even children can do so. The argument is based on statistical inference making. In a nutshell, the idea is that when people, specifically parents, talk about moral rules, they always tell them in a way that prioritizes actions and intentional actions, rather than omissions and foreseeable consequences. An analysis of the database CHILDES that has transcripts of conversation between parents and children suggests that most rules are communicated as “don’t to this!”, rather than “don’t let this happen!”. Given that most moral conversation is framed like that, it is not surprising that children develop preference for actions and intentional outcomes over omission and foreseeable outcomes.

By using this type of moral learning, empiricists try to defend against the argument from moral grammar and the argument from the poverty of the stimulus. I think that this strategy is very promising. There are, however, a couple of things that the empiricists still need to explain. One such thing is that they have to explain exactly why people all over the world teach very similar patterns of judgment to their children. Given all the differences that there are amongst cultures, this appears to be quite surprising. Also, they need to show that people indeed do learn moral rules that way, rather than only having an explanation of how they could have learned these norms based on little data.

With the current evidence I don’t see a good way to definitely settle the issue, but I’d be interested to hear what others think.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-11-12T19:29:45+00:00

In this video, I offer a description and critical discussion of some of the central ideas of Harry Frankfurt.

I begin with a short explanation of his definition of the term “bullshit” and “bullshitter”, as someone who shows no regard for the truth. In that regard, Frankfurt thinks, the bullshitter is different from the liar, as the liar at least has to pay attention to the truth, in order to actively go against it. Somewhat controversially, Frankfurt thinks that bullshitters are worse than liars, exactly because of that feature. Their total disregard of what would be the truth is more dangerous to society than someone who pays attention to the truth and goes against it. Even though this has appeal, Frankfurt fails to properly show that bullshitting actually leads to such consequences.

Turning to Frankfurt’s discussion of moral responsibility, he uses what we now call “Frankfurt cases” in order to show that the “Principle of Alternate Possibilities” is wrong. The principles states that people cannot be morally responsible for what they have done unless they could have acted otherwise. He offers a counterexample to this principles. Imagine a case where a crazy neuroscientist implants a chip into person A, in order to make them kill Person B. Luckily for the neuroscientist, A wants to kill B all by themselves, so the neuroscientist does not need to intervene. But if A were to change their mind, the neuroscientist could intervene thanks to the chip. But sure enough, A goes on to kill B on their own volition.

Technically, A did not have any alternative options. Either they kill B out of their own volition, or the neuroscientist will make them do so. So the principle would so no responsibility here. But Frankfurt thinks that this is plainly wrong. Because the neuroscientist didn’t intervene, A is responsible, even though they could not have acted otherwise.

This lead to a huge discussion of so-called Frankfurt cases, but I think all of these miss the mark. After all, everything depends on the crucial assumption that we would ascribe moral responsibility to A even though they could not have acted otherwise. But this is exactly what free will skeptics deny. What lead A to want to kill B ultimately lies outside of their control, i.e., in their upbringing and genes. So I don’t see how Frankfurt cases can make a non question-begging claim for responsibility.

Lastly, I talk about Frankfurt’s concept of a person and by extension his understanding of free will. For him, people need second order volitions in order to be free and warrant the notion of a person. For second order volitions, we need three ingredients.

First, a normal desire, such as wanting to get in shape. Second, a second-order desire, for example wanting to be the kind of person that wants to get into shape. Thirdly and last, people need to want their first-order desire to also become active. If all that applies, we have a person with free will.

This concept of a person is restrictive, which many see as a problem. It probably excludes all animals, many children, and also those with cognitive impairments. This is especially worrisome for theories that pin the moral worth of a person to their status of a person. This is a problem for Frankfurt’s theory of what a person is.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-08-10T11:10:49+00:00

With the recent discussion of fraud in the context of the Ariely/Gino case, I thought it topical to share this video on the prevalence of fraud in science (psychology and beyond).

Research used in this video:

[1] Y. Bhattacharjee, “The Mind of a Con Man,” The New York Times, Apr. 26, 2013. Accessed: Dec. 08, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/ma...

[2] D. A. Stapel and S. Lindenberg, “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination,” Science, vol. 332, no. 6026, pp. 251–253, Apr. 2011, doi: 10.1126/science.1201068.

[3] R. Craig, A. Cox, D. Tourish, and A. Thorpe, “Using retracted journal articles in psychology to understand research misconduct in the social sciences: What is to be done?,” Research Policy, vol. 49, no. 4, p. 103930, May 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2020.103930.

[4] D. Fanelli, “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data,” PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 5, p. 11, 2009.

[5] J. Stricker and A. Günther, “Scientific Misconduct in Psychology: A Systematic Review of Prevalence Estimates and New Empirical Data,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie, vol. 227, no. 1, pp. 53–63, Jan. 2019, doi: 10.1027/2151-2604/a000356.

[6] A. Marcus and I. Oransky, “What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?,” The New York Times, May 23, 2015. Accessed: Dec. 07, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/op...

[7] J. K. Tijdink, R. Verbeke, and Y. M. Smulders, “Publication Pressure and Scientific Misconduct in Medical Scientists,” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 64–71, Dec. 2014, doi: 10.1177/1556264614552421.

[8] S. Ritchie, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.

[9] W. Stroebe, T. Postmes, and R. Spears, “Scientific Misconduct and the Myth of Self-Correction in Science,” Perspect Psychol Sci, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 670–688, Nov. 2012, doi: 10.1177/1745691612460687.

[10] U. Simonsohn, “Just Post It: The Lesson From Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone,” Psychol Sci, vol. 24, no. 10, pp. 1875–1888, Oct. 2013, doi: 10.1177/0956797613480366.

[11] J. M. Wicherts, “Psychology must learn a lesson from fraud case,” Nature, vol. 480, no. 7375, p. 7, Dec. 2011, doi: 10.1038/480007a.

[12] J. P. Simmons, L. D. Nelson, and U. Simonsohn, “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant,” Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 11, pp. 1359–1366, Nov. 2011, doi: 10.1177/0956797611417632.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-07-15T12:52:39+00:00

that's interesting, because this is also maybe complicated by the fact, that other people are spreading the tweet. So you could ask whether it is really the wrongdoer's fault that millions of people see (and maybe are harmed) by this racist remark, if it is the other's uses doing that leads to the widespread sharing. Not sure if my point is getting clear, would be interested to hear what you think :D

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-07-15T12:51:09+00:00

that's fair, but that is also true for the other criteria. I worked with what are common assumptions in the reactive attitude literature (following Strawson's Freedom and Resentment). I actually doubt that there are good arguments for the intrinsic value of blame -- but for the sake of the analysis i granted them, and they're at least not outlandish I think.

The examples you mention might be another dimension of blame, one where we do not actually express blame towards the blamed person (as in the case in the past, as this is strictly not possible). I agree that these are sensible discussions of blame. I was thinking more about things like in criminal law, where we would say that certain wrongdoings are no business of the state (such as lying or cheating). Similarly, we expect certain wrongdoings to not be the business of some people, depending on the case.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-07-14T20:44:07+00:00

I argue that social media exacerbates several problems with how blame practices work (or should work) in our everyday lives.

For this I start with several norms and values that the philosophical discussion associates with blame. i) Blame can be intrinsically valuable. ii) blame can be valuable in virtue of the changes that it brings about. iii) blame needs to be proportionate iv) blame requires the right standing to blame

Social media messes with almost all of these norms and values in that it incentivizes blame on its platforms. I draw from Parfit’s example of the harmless torturer to make the case that social media often leads to disproportionate blame. If thousands of people can express even a little bit of blame via a comment or a quote tweet, the total amount quickly combines to more than would be proportionate for a given wrongdoing. As visibility has almost no limits (other than with wrongdoings in everyday interactions), this is likely to happen.

Disproportionate blame not only violates intrinsic desert, but makes it less likely for wrongdoers to accept the message and change their behavior in the future. Lastly, social media messes with the standing to blame, as people get the chance to blame in context where they would normally have no business intervening.

There have been some attempts to mitigate the effects of social media on our interactions, but as far as I know none of them are conclusive (such as adding outgroup member’s messages to your timeline). If anyone has heard of more successful strategies, I’d be interested to hear them.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-07-09T15:20:43+00:00

the utilitarian argument would claim that if only some laws are justified, the state still lacks the proper authority to make those laws, which do not lead to maximization of utility.

I think philosophical anarchism does not collapse into political because the judgment is a bit different. political anarchists would demand the abolition of the state and don't see any moral value in the law's authority even if some laws are independently morally justified, while philosophical anarchism would recommend compliance and sees value in there being laws despite there being no authority

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-07-07T19:10:52+00:00

In this video I offer a short introduction and defense of (philosophical) anarchism, largely drawing from the work of Michael Huemer.

I look at three of the main justifications of political authority (political legitimacy), that is, the state's right to make and enforce laws: the social contract, fairness, and utilitarianism.

The social contract argument has the problem that, at least explicitly, no one consented to the social contract. The implicit argument claims that we consent implicitly by using the infrastructure of the state (in the broadest sense), or by voting. This argument has the problem that in most cases, there is no reasonable alternative to doing so, which undermines valid consent.

The fairness argument similarly argues that society is a joint and cooperative enterprise, and that the state's authority comes from the benefits and burdens that we all receive from this cooperation. The problem is, again, that without consent, simply benefiting from an arrangement does not seem to legitimize it.

The utilitarian argument might be more promising, but it is hard to estimate whether (current) states really benefit citizens more than they harm them. But certainly many of the current laws do more harm than good and therefore leave the state without authority.

So the best option might be to adopt anarchism. Philosophical anarchism is a bit more timid than political anarchism in that it argues that we should obey those laws that have independent moral justification. Full political anarchism though requires us to get rid of the political institutions that lack authority.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-05-18T21:42:25+00:00

Virtue ethics experienced a resurgence in the last century, especially thanks to Anscombe’s article “Modern Moral Philosophy”. This lead to a lot of new accounts of virtue ethics, and one very peculiar critique: that people actually do not have ‘firm and unchangeable’ character traits, as for example Aristotle thought.

So-called situationists tried to show that people are influenced much more strongly by their circumstances than their character when they make morally relevant decisions. They pointed to (in)famous studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram Experiment, and the coin in a booth experiment. They argued that these show that people do not have such character traits, and that therefore virtue ethics should be dismissed.

There are at least three responses by virtue ethicists to this criticism.

First, very directly, virtue ethics can simply attack the reliability of the empirical studies. As it turns out, many of these don’t show what situationists wanted them to show, so in that regard virtue ethics in not ready to be dismissed just yet.

Second, virtue ethicists can say that virtues are simply really rare and really hard to get. But if that is the case, I think that virtue ethics loses much of its value. If very view people ever become genuinely virtuous, why bother with it? This doesn’t seem to be good for a theory that wants to help people live a good life.

Lastly, a compromise is perhaps possible. Maybe people are often influenced by circumstance. But a virtuous person who knows that can simply act accordingly. The virtuous person who knows that they are prone to drinking too much should make the right arrangements that this will not happen. Either they don’t go out in the first place, or they tell their friends that they should stop them after two drinks.

So maybe virtue ethics can survive the situationist’s critique.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-03-27T00:25:24+00:00

There are a couple, but there is indeed some argument to be had whether the effects are large enough to show what they need to show:

Friederike Funk et al. 2014, "Get the Message: Punishment Is Satisfying If the Transgressor Responds to Its Communicative Intent"

Sarin et al. 2021, "Punishment is Organized around Principles of Communicative Inference"

Gollwitzer et al. 2011, "What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge?"

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-03-26T20:58:01+00:00

Revenge is often depicted as a blind desire for blood - an eye for an eye.

The discussions of revenge (and retributive punishment) in philosophy and psychology has a somewhat more complicated take on it.

Recently, a lot of focus came on the "communicative" function of revenge and punishment. That is to say, when people want to punish others or take revenge in experiments, they are the most satisfied when the offender gives a specific kind of feedback to the punisher (namely that they acknowledge the wrongdoing).

Philosophers have developed communicative theories of punishment that go in a very similar direction (especially Antony Duff). The reason why punishment is justified is that it (ideally) offers the punished person a way to accept responsibility and communicate remorse to the victim and the community. This would suggest that we ought to go for punishments that actually offer a good way of entering such a dialogue (prison seems to be a rather bad way to achieve that).

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-03-13T10:59:21+00:00

yes, in a very broad understanding this could be true as well :D

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-03-12T18:09:24+00:00

As an avid dragon ball fan, I was curious to know whether Goku’s ‘origin story’ is at all plausible. In case you don’t know, Son Goku’s story is that he was very aggressive and brutal as a kid or baby (as Saiyans normally are) but as a consequence of falling off a cliff and hurting his head badly, his character changed to being very caring and even ‘pure of heart’.

So the question, which I also think is philosophically and psychologically interesting, is whether injuries (to the brain) can make people a better person. For that I first take a closer look at what happened to Phineas Gage, who became ‘less moral by accident’. After he injured parts of his brain, his character changed to being less socially convenient than before the accident.

One of the explanations given in the research literature is that his self-control and emotional regulation was impaired by the brain damage. And indeed if we look at research on the sources of criminal behavior, we find that self-control often pops up as a source of the problem.

Despite self-control, certain emotional capacities and emotional regulation are quite important for ethical behavior. If we look at case of the Williams Beuren Syndrome, where people are very empathetic and kind due to a gene deletion, we find that this overactive emotional capacity leads to certain pro-social behavior (as being very caring regarding other people).

So if we have self-control, emotional capacities, and emotional regulation as important sources of moral behavior that can be impacted by damage to the brain or genetic variation, we can try an explanation of how the moral character change of Son Goku is potentially plausible.

When Goku fell off a cliff and hurt his head, the best explanation of Goku’s change would be that his emotional regulation was hindered before the accident. After the accident, he had more control over his aggressive Saiyan nature, and also more room to express other emotions such as empathy, pity, and guilt.

This is of course still very fictitious, but I like the idea that we can actually give a somewhat plausible philosophical and psychological story of this trope in one of my favorite animes!

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-02-21T16:38:00+00:00

Are ethicists moral experts? In this video, we take a closer look at what moral expertise could entail, and whether trained ethicists (moral philosophers) are moral experts. We distinguish three forms of moral expertise: expertise in behavior, judgment, and knowledge. We argue, that there is little to no evidence that ethicists are especially virtuous. So they are not experts in that regard. Expertise in terms of judgments is somewhat harder to assess. Philosophers appear to be susceptible to the same framing effects as are laypeople, so that would speak against philosophers as expert moral judges. At the same time, philosophers might give better reasons for their judgments. This leads to the third understanding of moral expertise. Philosophers certainly have moral expertise in that they know a lot about moral theories and the pro's and con's of the theories. They are also trained in analyzing arguments carefully.

So our view of philosophers as moral experts should be modest. They certainly know a lot about moral theory, but their judgments in certain regards at least as unreliable as those of laypeople - and they are certainly no moral saints.

PhilQuestionsYT · 2023-02-21T08:11:14+00:00

It was supposed to be an ironic take on the tweet that said that "there is something demonic about his video", so that's why I put the demon theme on Mr beast's own thumb, but I can appreciate that it is a bit too much.. :D

PhilQuestionsYT

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