14. Is there ever anything wrong with praising people? With Jules Holroyd

Jules Holroyd is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her teaching and research focuses on understanding the nature of, and addressing, injustices. In this conversation, she turns her attention to praise.

Philosophers have given a lot of attention to blame in the past, but not so much to praise. This might be because praise looks fairly unproblematic on the whole. Praising people is nice! It boosts people's self-confidence, strengthens social bonds, and if we occasionally praise people who don't deserve our praise, who cares? According to Jules Holroyd, a philosopher working at the University of Sheffield, while this attitude is probably right overall, there can be instances in which we praise people in ways that are morally problematic, harmful even, and we should be on the lookout for these cases. In this conversation, we talked about some of the moral norms that govern praise - when it is and isn't appropriate to praise someone - and in particular we looked at the ways in which our acts of praising can signal a commitment to wider social norms, some of which we might not want to endorse.

Jules's paper which forms the basis of this conversation is here:

Holroyd, J. (2021) Oppressive Praise. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/13967

She also has this more recent paper on praise:
Holroyd, J. (2023) Proleptic praise: a social function analysis. Noûs. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12482

Here are some of the papers Jules refers to in the episode:

Coates, Justin. (2019). Gratitude and Resentment: Some Asymmetries. In R. Roberts & D. Telech (Eds.) The Moral Psychology of Gratitude(pp. 160–175). London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jeppsson, S., & Brandenburg, D. (2022). Patronizing Praise. The Journal of Ethics, 26, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09409-2
Khader, S., & Lindauer, M. (2020). The “Daddy Dividend”: The Gender Division of Labour and Regression Towards Patriarchy.APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy,19(2), 6–8. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/ resource/collection/D03EBDAB-82D7-4B28-B897-C050FDC1ACB4/FeminismV19n2.pdf
Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2022). Praising without standing. The Journal of Ethics, 26,229–246. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-021-09374-2
Shoemaker, D., & Vargas, M. (2019). Moral torch fishing: A signaling theory of blame. Noûs, 55, 581–602. https:// doi.org/10.1111/nous.12316 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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