The Effect of Morality on Violent Crime

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There is a very interesting finding. If you ask people, has violent crime gone up or down? Like every year people say it's gone up. And for at least a good chunk of that time, it's actually going down. So people are miscalibrated in at least some specific ways. But yeah, if you do it like that, like with something that actually can be objectively measured. Now that doesn't mean you don't know what the causes of violent crime increasing or decreasing is. It's not necessarily that people have gotten more or less moral. That isn't something that's objective. You can measure it. Then you can fight about the causes of it and how to

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]