The Vice of Social Comparison in Kierkegaard: Nature, Religious Moral Psychology, and Normativity

This paper argues for the thesis that social comparison is, for Kierkegaard, a vice. The first part of this article reconstructs Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of social comparison. Here, I bring attention to his anthropological but also political and sociological observations that pertai...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Kaftanski, Wojciech (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: MDPI 2023
Dans: Religions
Année: 2023, Volume: 14, Numéro: 11
Sujets non-standardisés:B Social comparison
B Ethics
B Kierkegaard
B Virtue
B Virtue Ethics
B Vice
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Résumé:This paper argues for the thesis that social comparison is, for Kierkegaard, a vice. The first part of this article reconstructs Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of social comparison. Here, I bring attention to his anthropological but also political and sociological observations that pertain to social comparison and its links to modernity. The second part reconstructs the moral psychological account of social comparison in Kierkegaard, drawing on some of the available secondary literature. I complement Kierkegaard’s consideration of social comparison in relation to worry and humility with his account of the non-cognitive aspects of its operationality. The third part demonstrates that social comparison is a vice. Therein, drawing on the previous sections of this article, I identify Kierkegaard’s naturalistic argument engaged to present social comparison as a non-moral and non-religious vice (functionalism), pointing toward its intermeshing with the moral religious.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contient:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel14111394