The Importance of Honesty and Kindness

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"I can't think of another way to ask and answer the question, do people think the world is getting worse?" "The amount of effort that they clearly put into like analyses and collecting these data seems so disproportionate to the amount of conceptual analysis," he says. "It would be more convincing if they were just looking at a specific thing like that." 'If you had just made this a paper about honesty and kindness, and then asked people how honest and kind do you think is the world getting worse?'"

David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers’ bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What’s the underlying philosophy that animates Anton Chigurh? Does he have a code of any kind, or is he just a ghostly symbol of human brutality and a pitiless indifferent universe? Does he represent a new kind of evil or is Sheriff Bell just getting old? What elements, if any, in the film are more dream than reality?

And speaking of moral decline, a new Nature study claims that we have the illusory belief that people are getting worse - but can they really establish that it’s an illusion?

Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 1-8.

Mastroianni blog post about the illusion of moral decline

No Country for Old Men (movie) [wikipedia.org]