The Paradox of Kindness and Cruelty on Social Media

Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other authors in this series – including Bentham and Nietzsche – and asks what price we should be willing to pay for putting cruelty first among the vices.

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Going Deeper:

• David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy (2008)
• Katrina Forrester, ‘Hope and Memory in the thought of Judith Shklar’, Modern Intellectual History (2011)
• Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, 'The Theorist of Belonging', Aeon (2020)
• [Audio]: 'The Moral Philosophy of the Good Place,' Vox

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