The wisdom_of_crowds: An Efficient, Philosophically-Validated, Social Epistemological Network Profiling Toolkit

Klein, Colin; Cheong, Marc; Ferreira, Marinus; Sullivan, Emily; Alfano, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-21127-0_6

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…From the mandevillian point of view, this is not only acceptable but desirable, on the assumption that people’s social networks are structured in such a way that enables them to exploit the wisdom of crowds. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that only a small minority of them was so-positioned, at least when it came to discourse about vaccines (Klein et al, 2022 ; Sullivan et al, 2020 ). This returns us to the point, made above, that whether a disposition counts as a mandevillian virtue or vice depends on the structure and organization of the group in which its bearer operates.…”

Section: Social Learning and Apt Deferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Mandevillian vices

Astola,

Bland,

Alfano

2024

Synthese

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Bernard Mandeville argued that traits that have traditionally been seen as detrimental or reprehensible, such as greed, ambition, vanity, and the willingness to deceive, can produce significant social goods. He went so far as to suggest that a society composed of individuals who embody these vices would, under certain constraints, be better off than one composed only of those who embody the virtues of self-restraint. In the twentieth century, Mandeville’s insights were taken up in economics by John Maynard Keynes, among others. More recently, philosophers have drawn analogies to Mandeville’s ideas in the domains of epistemology and morality, arguing that traits that are typically understood as epistemic or moral vices (e.g. closed-mindedness, vindictiveness) can lead to beneficial outcomes for the groups in which individuals cooperate, deliberate, and decide, for instance by propitiously dividing the cognitive labor involved in critical inquiry and introducing transient diversity. We argue that mandevillian virtues have a negative counterpart, mandevillian vices, which are traits that are beneficial to or admirable in their individual possessor, but are or can be systematically detrimental to the group to which that individual belongs. Whilst virtue ethics and epistemology prescribe character traits that are good for every moral and epistemic agent, and ideally across all situations, mandevillian virtues show that group dynamics can complicate this picture. In this paper, we provide a unifying explanation of the main mechanism responsible for mandevillian traits in general and motivate the case for the opposite of mandevillian virtues, namely mandevillian vices.

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Section: Social Learning and Apt Deferencementioning

confidence: 99%