The Importance of Morality

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The idea that you're going to in a small section of a paper established that morality is still just plugging along roughly the same is an illusion. People are no more or less more than they were 50 years ago, not that they measure 50 years ago as the Scott Alexander guy points out in his critique of this. A lot of their stuff is focused on like, you know, from the early 2000s to now. But they're probably not thinking since like, I remember how moral everybody was in the early2000s.

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]