The Importance of Being Kind to Your Neighbor

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"It just immediately raises some flags to me that they gloss over any kind of definition of morality," says David Frum. "A reasonable person has a complete disagreement, as Scott Alexander points out, about whether or not objectively things have gone worse." He adds: "You can't just pick the things everybody agrees on and make a claim that this is enough evidence to show that the world isn't actually declining"

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]