Inequality and Indignation

Inequalities often persist because both the advantaged and the disadvantaged stand to lose from change. Despite the probability of loss, moral indignation can lead the disadvantaged to seek to alter the status quo, by encouraging them to sacrifice their material self-interest for the sake of equality. Experimental research shows that moral indignation, understood as a willingness to suffer in order to punish unfair treatment by others, is widespread. It also indicates that a propensity to apparently self-defeating moral indignation can turn out to promote people’s material self-interest, if and because others will anticipate their actions. But potential rebels face collective action problems. Some of these can be reduced through the acts of “indignation entrepreneurs,” giving appropriate signals, organizing discussions by like-minded people, and engaging in acts of self-sacrifice. Law is relevant as well. By legitimating moral indignation and dissipating pluralistic ignorance, law can intensify and spread that indignation, thus increasing its expression. Alternatively, law can delegitimate moral indignation, or at least raise the cost of its expression, thus stabilizing a status quo of inequality. But the effects of law are unpredictable, in part because it will have moral authority for some but not for others; here too heterogeneity is an issue both for indignation entrepreneurs and their opponents. Examples are given from a range of areas, including labor-management relations, sexual harassment, civil rights, and domestic violence

Solidarity in Consumption

Contrary to a common picture of relationships in a market economy, people often express communal and membership-seeking impulses via consumption choices, purchasing goods and services because other people are doing so as well. Shared identities are maintained and created in this way. Solidarity goods are goods whose value increases as the number of people enjoying them increases. Exclusivity goods are goods whose value decreases as the number of people enjoying them increases. Distinctions can be drawn among diverse value functions, capturing diverse relationships between the value of goods and the value of shared or unshared consumption. Though markets spontaneously produce solidarity goods, individuals sometimes have difficulty in producing such goods on their own, or in coordinating on choosing them. Here law has a potential role. There are implications for trend setting, clubs, partnerships, national events, social cascades, and compliance without enforcement

The Intersectionality of Disasters’ Effects on Trust in Public Officials

Objective Groups defined by race and ideology are well‐known predictors of interpersonal and political trust, but gender‐based effects are undecided. I investigate whether disaster experience conditions a difference in political trust between women and men. Methods Examining the hurricane data set of U.S. public opinion, I analyze intersectionality's influence on disaster‐based political trust with a three‐way interaction between race, class, and gender. Results Among disaster survivors, black women trust less than all other race–gender groups, and white men trust the most. The difference between black and white women survivors’ political trust is attenuated by education. Education exacerbates race‐based political trust among observers. Among observers, there is not a gender‐based distinction. Conclusion Disasters create new identities based on shared experience, and offer a moment in time that illustrates how trust varies along gender–race–class–disaster dimensions. Knowing how trust differs according to intersectionality allows managers to manage critical events better

Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree