ZOE JOHNSON KING: Hi, everyone.
As mentioned, I am Zoe Johnson King and I work on praise.
By praise, I mean two things.
First, there's the speech and behavior in which
we engage to express our positive attitudes toward other people's
behavior.
So that's things like applause, high fives, finger snapping, compliments,
smiles and nods, and the giving of awards and prizes.
Second, there are those underlying positive attitudes themselves.
So things like admiration, approval, esteem, gratitude and pride.
These positive attitudes are ways of commending somebody or giving them
credit, or as I would say, praising them, for something that they've done.
Now there is an enormous literature on motivation, agency, and responsibility,
not just in philosophy, which is my field, but also in related fields
like psychology and law.
However, most of that literature focuses on blame and blameworthiness rather
than praise and praiseworthiness.
So one might ask, why?
Why is that?
And that question isn't asked very often, but those who do discuss it
usually give something like the following argument.
They say, look, being blamed and punished is an unpleasant experience.
No one likes to be blamed.
So we should worry about whether people are being blamed unfairly
because that would be them being subjected to an unpleasant experience
that they don't really deserve.
By contrast, being praised and rewarded are different.
Everyone likes to be praised and rewarded.
And so we shouldn't worry about people being praised unfairly.
Even if some people are being praised unfairly,
that's no big deal because it's nice to be praised.
I disagree.
For illustration, consider the backlash against praise of essential workers
during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the early months of the pandemic, lots of parts of the world
introduced rituals of clapping, or cheering,
or even singing for essential workers at regular intervals.
And it became trendy to issue public pronouncements of praise
for essential workers, with celebrities, influencers, politicians,
public figures, corporations and news agencies
all clamoring to express gratitude to essential workers
and to call them heroes.
But those expressions of praise met with a mixed reception.
Some essential workers said that they appreciated the praise
and it helped them to stay motivated.
While others created satirical means.
Like this one on the left, showing a boy holding a piece of paper that
says, "You are a hero" and exclaiming, whoa, this is worthless.
Or that one on the right showing the media cheering on the essential,
while they really mean "sacrificial", as the caption says.
We also saw some more poignant remarks and some expressions of genuine anger.
For example, one Reddit user wrote, "I'm sick to death of the hero narrative.
Almost like they're trying to use it.
So they don't feel like they have to pay people
what they're owed for working such dangerous conditions. haha, jk,
unless."
Upon which another Reddit user commented,
"It's like what they do to soldiers, call them heroes and send them
to the slaughterhouse."
OK, so why was there all this backlash?
What exactly was the problem?
Well, I think that praise of essential workers
in those early months of the COVID pandemic
was problematic in at least three ways.
First, a lot of it was insincere.
Cursory acknowledgment of their toil and our indebtedness became a trend
and then a ritual performed largely for the sake of keeping up appearances.
But insincerely expressing attitudes that one doesn't really hold
is problematic in general.
That's what's wrong with lying.
And hollow expressions of attitudes that one doesn't really
hold that are motivated by an interest in keeping up appearances
so as to retain one's loyal fan base or one's customers
are no more than a calculated charade.
In addition, some praise for essential workers, whether sincere or insincere,
functioned as a distraction.
There are lots of challenging, ethical and political questions
that those of us who are sheltering safely at home
could have asked about what we could have done to support essential workers
and what we might owe them in light of their work's clear, social value
and its worsening conditions.
And how it came to be that this particular subsection of the population
were the ones taking on significant personal risk for the sake
of significant public benefit and whether it was just or unjust that,
that was so.
Praise can function as a distraction because when you focus on how great
it is, the essential workers have what it takes to keep going,
you focus on the aspect of the situation that
are comforting and pleasant to think about
and turn away from these aspects of the situation that
are challenging and uncomfortable to think about.
It's like what happens when somebody compliments you
on how well you deal with adversity rather than asking you
about how the adversity arose or how they might alleviate it.
Lastly, some praise for essential workers was manipulative.
In the literature on manipulation in philosophy,
we say that manipulation is what occurs when someone
convinces someone else to do something using
a method that's sneakier than rational persuasion,
but subtler than blunt coercion.
So methods like selectively presenting information or deliberately
arousing strong emotions in ones manipulatee, especially
emotions to which manipulator knows manipulatee to be especially
susceptible in light of her character, or history, or values.
One paradigmatic example of manipulation is what's
colloquially known as the "guilt trip".
Wherein acute guilt is the emotion that manipulators
incite and manipulatees in order to get them to do what they want.
And some praise of essential workers functioned as a guilt trip.
For example, Dr. Laura Kolbe wrote an opinion piece
in The Journal of General Internal Medicine
in which she said the following.
"Ongoing extreme risk without appropriate compensation or risk
reduction shouldn't be expected of health care workers
under the label of gifts or heroism.
It's flattering, but as the months go on,
it's also harder to call attention to the need for workplace improvements
if one's internalized this view of one's higher risk or unprecedented work
as a gift to society."
In other words, some praise of essential workers
were strategically deployed in order to get
them to feel as though it would be selfish or disloyal to complain
about the ever increasing risks involved in their work
or to call attention to those challenging, ethical,
and political questions about why they should have to bear those risks
and what the rest of us can do about it.
As well as distracting us from those challenging questions,
then praise can discourage us from even asking the questions.
Since it can create the impression that the people being praised
are doing what they're doing out of the goodness of their hearts,
and therefore, that the rest of us don't need to do anything besides thank them.
OK, so what's the upshot?
What lessons can we draw from all this?
Well, we can start by noticing that the 1-2 punch of praise that simultaneously
distracts and manipulates is by no means confined
to the case of essential workers during pandemic.
On the contrary, as that Reddit commenter shrewdly observed,
a similar rhetoric has long surrounded members of the armed forces
and especially low-level infantry.
It's also quite common for people whose work serves an obvious public benefit,
like state school teachers, public defenders, social workers and so forth,
to be paid relatively poorly in comparison
with comparable work in the private sector, apparently with the expectation
that their work social value will motivate them regardless of salary.
And similarly, feminist scholars have for a long time
criticized the ways in which housework and child
care can be expected of women without any kind of compensation
in the context of a rhetoric that paints them as driven to perform that work out
of love, and so, needing no further support, no further benefit.
And that's all I have time for today.
Thanks for listening.
[APPLAUSE]