This week we’re looking at praise. When is it a good thing? And when, crucially, is it not?
At first blush, it might seem obvious that praise is a good thing. It involves complimenting others on what they have done; it tends to make them feel good; and it’s a way for us to communicate insights about virtuous behaviour.
But dig a little deeper and things are not always as they seem. Take an example from almost three years ago. A bright moment for many people in the first Covid lockdown was the weekly ‘clap for carers’, instigated to praise and give thanks to NHS workers and others who were on the frontline of the battle against the disease. But the weekly claps went sour. Many of the intended recipients of the praise came to resent them.
So what was going on here? What makes praise sometimes inappropriate or wrong?
These are some of the questions at the heart of the research of Hannah McHugh, a political philosopher currently completing her PhD in the UCL Department of Political Science. Long-time podcast listeners may remember that Hannah joined us last year to explore another aspect of her work: the role of blame in politics. We are delighted that Hannah joins us again, this time to discuss the role of praise.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
praise, norms, clapping, oppressive, standard, case, moral standards, blame, moral, people, behaviour, signalling, practices, praiseworthy, hannah, duty, instance, vegan, recognition, role
SPEAKERS
Emily McTernan, Hannah McHugh
Emily McTernan 00:05
Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics. This week we're looking at praise. When is it a good thing? And when, crucially, is it not?
Hello. My name is Emily McTernan. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast at the School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science at University College London.
At first blush, it might seem obvious that praise is an uncomplicatedly good thing. It involves complimenting others on what they have done; it tends to make them feel good; and it's a way for us to communicate our approval of virtuous or moral behaviour.
But dig a little deeper and things are not always so simple. Take an example from almost three years ago. A bright moment for many people in the first COVID lockdown was the weekly 'clap for carers' instigated to praise and give thanks to NHS workers and others who were on the frontline of the battle against the disease. But the weekly claps went sour. Many of the intended recipients of the praise came to resent them. And after a few months they were stopped.
So what was going on here? What makes praise sometimes inappropriate or wrong?
Well, these are some of the questions at the heart of the research of Hannah McHugh, who is a political philosopher currently completing her PhD in the UCL Department of Political Science. Long-time podcast listeners may remember that Hannah joined us last year to explore another aspect of her work: the role of blame in politics – particularly in tackling injustices. I'm delighted that Hannah joins me again now.
Welcome back, Hannah to UCL Uncovering Politics.
Hannah McHugh 01:46
Thank you, Emily, it's fantastic to be back again. And thank you very much as well for starting off by referencing what I think is a really useful case to start thinking about these issues – the 'clap for our carers' case. So I'll just spend a moment reflecting on that case as I think it's going to bring out a bit of what we'll talk about today.
Emily McTernan 02:03
Great.
Hannah McHugh 02:03
So in March 2020, as you said, in the early days of the COVID pandemic here in the UK, we had this government-endorsed ritual, 'clap for our carers'. And it gave a good feeling to the people clapping, to the government who had asked for the clapping to be done and, indeed, I think for the NHS workers who were receiving that praise as it [inaudible] that it was.
But actually after just 10 weeks, the woman who'd advocated for the clapping to start was quoted in The Guardian saying, 'without getting too political, I think the narrative is starting to change, and I don't want the clap to be negative'. Fast forward since then, working conditions in the NHS have deteriorated. And this ritual of clapping has come back into the political fore: [at] picket lines in January 2023, I've been reading signs saying, 'claps don't pay the bills' and 'you clapped us and then you slapped us'. So there's a huge sense that actually what was intended to be praise has become disrespectful. I will talk more about what that means to be disrespectful.
But I think what's really interesting in this case is that we saw two difficult things happening.
So the first thing we saw happening was that the praise was suggesting that nurses and other social and health care workers were heroic, but without actually acknowledging the role of underfunding in creating the need for those heroic efforts. So politicians praising nurses for being heroic were failing to address the causal factors that meant they had to act in that way. That made the praise disrespectful.
And a second issue is that the praise was being used, for instance by politicians, to signal some kind of unjustified merit in the people who are doing the praising. So when we praise, we send some quite important signals. For instance, if I tell you, Emily, that I admire you for your research and your teaching – which I do, by the way – I'm saying that I really value those things. I really think that being a good researcher and teacher is a desirable standard. And I subscribed to that. When politicians were praising these health care workers, they were saying publicly that they value healthcare provision, but then they were undermining that by failing to fund that or give the resources to those workers. And it became disrespectful. So my research is looking at this question: why could praise become so disrespectful, and what conditions are necessary to reform those practices?
Emily McTernan 04:22
A fascinating question. Perhaps I could just ask a follow-up on that. So your discussion of what goes wrong here, that it is disrespectful because, really, they need these resources and it's kind of trying to look as if they're appropriating these moral goods, of being, you know, the NHS, what a wonderful thing, look at me, I'm supporting the NHS. I was wondering if that really meant that the praise was disrespectful from all of the people standing on their doorsteps clapping or only when the politicians joined in. So you know, was the member of the general public failing in their expression of praise in the same way as a politician? Or do you think it really matters who we are when we're doing these praising practices?
Hannah McHugh 04:58
So a member of the general public was not in the same position as a politician to make that kind of change. I think there's an argument to say that during the pandemic, for instance, when healthcare workers were battling the implications of COVID, of the pandemic, if you as a member of the general public are clapping for healthcare workers, but say breaking lockdown rules or refusing to take reasonable steps to contain the pandemic, which they are then fighting, you could argue that that praise is in some sense problematic. And that's problematic because you're attaching yourself to a standard or to a behaviour of someone else that you yourself are undermining and you yourself are not adopting. So in that sense, the praise is misfiring its target, and it's unduly appropriative.
But of course, you're right. There are plenty of members of the general public who absolutely wanted to praise healthcare workers and did so in a very socially just way. Not everyone is caught in that net. You're quite right.
Emily McTernan 05:52
I mean, I wonder if the nurses and the other healthcare workers and workers in other sectors that were being praised by this clapping practice, I wonder if they might say that really the problem wasn't only perhaps...? I think you certainly identified that one of the problems was that some people are kind of appropriating this praise, or they're not really living up to those standards and they're trying to claim them. But isn't another problem just that the praise wasn't what they wanted? So the praise was kind of meaningless, right? What they really wanted was better pay.
How does that fit into our account? Because that would apply even to the well-acting member of the general public whose praise was otherwise unproblematic. It seems like even their praise, these carers might say, 'well, no, even that's not what we're actually looking for'.
Hannah McHugh 06:13
Great. So I think what's really, really important and interesting about practices of praise, and just to say a little bit. Practices of praise, like practices of blame, are part of how we hold other agents responsible. And in holding other agents responsible, we do more than just appraise their behaviour: we actually signal what we think normative and moral standards in our society should be. So when we do things like praise for healthcare provision in the way that we have, what we're trying to do, implicitly, I believe, is signal that there is a desirable standard, and we're trying to entrench that standard – or perhaps we would like to entrench that standard – such that a society takes that up, and that becomes normatively what you would expect for that society.
Now, praise at the outset, when we say, 'oh, okay, I've identified that our NHS was in some kind of crisis, and what these NHS workers and social care workers and everyone to whom that praise was directed are doing is really normatively desirable in this moment of crisis' – we're praising them as heroes in that context. Over time, that praise starts to become disrespectful and undermining because it's not followed with social change. In that initial moment, there's nothing socially unjust about identifying that there's something desirable here, and we're praising it. But praise which isn't followed up by some kind of meaningful action becomes, in some sense, hollow, undermining, and disrespectful.
Emily McTernan 08:07
Thank you for that wonderful articulation of what's gone wrong with 'claps to carers'.
I wonder if we could step back from that case now and to continue to think about praise but in more general terms. Perhaps we can think a little bit about what praise is, what makes praise interesting, and perhaps particularly, how is it different from blame.
So perhaps you could tell us a little bit more as you told us a bit about what could be good about praise, that it's forming this signalling role. Could you tell us a bit about how that is different from blame? Because I take it that blame also plays that signalling role, doesn't it – saying what our moral standards are, what we approve around here, don't approve of around here? So what's praise doing that's different?
Hannah McHugh 08:42
So philosophers have spent a lot of time focusing on what the role of blame is in our responsibility practices. And one big reason why that's true is that it's a natural assumption that to blame someone in a way that's unjustified would be really harmful and really unfairly punitive. We have pretty strong intuitions that there's something wrong with unjustifiably blaming someone.
That same intuition perhaps doesn't arise as quickly when we're thinking about praising. So a bit of unwarranted praise here and there perhaps doesn't seem too troubling to us. But as we've started to bring out in the case of what we've just discussed, I can see that praise can actually be harmful. So, this lack of attention is a gap in the literature, which has started to be filled by some recent theorists – Jules Holroyd and [inaudible] are worth mentioning for that.
But to your point on what actually are praise and blame, and just to reflect on that to preface some of this discussion. As I say, they have a role in something very key, which is signalling normative standards and moral standards in a context where our norms do evolve over time. And we use these practices of blame and praise to show where those standards are, and where we see someone either falling short of a standard or perhaps exceeding a standard. Generally, we praise people for exceeding a standard. And we'll discuss this more later, but I actually think where we have new norms, we praise not just for exceeding standards, but actually to indicate new standards which we hope will become duties. So, at the outset, we're praising for something that you think somebody ought to do, but generally, it's not done. And over time you praise someone for something that goes beyond what they genuinely ought to do.
Emily McTernan 10:30
That's a very helpful thought there. So the idea is we blame people when they fall short of a moral standard that we've adopted. But you're saying that we praise people – mostly accepting these developing cases that we're going to come back to where there are these brand-new norms that are not generally followed, perhaps – but in praising in general, you're saying, okay, well, it's only when we go beyond our moral standards. Is that right? Because I wonder whether that raises a question for the signalling function. So we can see how blame forms the signalling function for moral norms, right, because it says, 'that's a moral norm, you violated it, I blame you'. Praise, though – we don't praise people for following the right moral standards. And you might think for a signalling function, you'd want people to be praised for doing the moral standard. I wonder how you think that praising people for exceeding a moral standard helps signal the moral standards that we have around here. Perhaps you could give us a case to suggest why praising those who go beyond our moral standards is a good way of securing our moral standard.
Hannah McHugh 11:28
So praise is really key in signalling what kinds of standards we could possibly take up, right? So where we have interesting cases that new norms are emerging. Let's say a new norm of paying attention to the environment. And a friend comes to me, and they say, 'I've become vegan', and I say, 'wow, that's really amazing, that's great. You're doing something so good for the environment, I'm so impressed'. Fully aware that I myself am not a vegan. But perhaps I am praising that and saying, 'well, in spite of my bad behaviour...'.
By doing that, I'm not just signalling to the friend, who of course already is vegan, that there's something really praiseworthy in considering your daily practices like diet and reorienting them in favour of some normative goal, like fixing the environment. I'm signalling to any other friends who are at that dinner, and interestingly to myself, that that is a feasible standard that I myself could achieve.
We always have a capacity, in a sense, to do anything that is in the physical realm of possibility. But we might not have a capacity in the sense that we're willing to accept those reasons, apply to us, and are feasible for us. So praise can be really key in these moments of transition when new norms are coming out, where we have new sets of knowledge about how we might achieve moral or normative goals, to give those signals to ourselves and to others, and to make that a really genuine and feasible framework for action.
Emily McTernan 12:56
Great, thank you for that. That's a really helpful description. I think there's something coming in here, isn't there, about how people can be kind of moral exemplars or moral heroes, and we praise those people partly as one of the ways we're trying to say these are really good things, and then we sometimes try and model ourselves more on those heroes or exemplars. That's a helpful way of thinking about it. Thank you, Hannah.
So we've talked a bit about how praise can be good. I wonder if we can turn now to help praise is problematic.
I know a lot of your research is focused on the ways in which praise can become oppressive or contribute to oppression. So in your work, you discuss three possible problems: that praise can be under attributed to members of a group, such that people are under-recognised; or that it can be over-attributed, that people can be praised too much; and finally, one that we've discussed a bit already and talking about 'clapping for carers', that there's something appropriative sometimes in our praising practices.
Should we start with examples of the under-recognition in praise? What did you have in mind?
Hannah McHugh 13:57
Absolutely. So what I think – and just to rephrase a bit of what you said there, which is well describing my work – I think that where we have an oppressive background structure of norms, and very often unfortunately we do – perhaps in society which is somewhat ableist, somewhat sexist – then the practices we have of blaming and praising (and of course, I'm particularly focused on praising today), unsurprisingly, may reflect those background structures. So we will wrongly hold somebody to be praiseworthy, in accordance with a norm that we've taken from an oppressive structure rather than from one of say, equality, or one in line with the emancipatory goals that we might have for ourselves.
So when you point to these cases of under-recognition, what I mean by that label is to say that these are cases in which we have praised someone in a way that misrecognises them as less deserving of praise than would be consistent with non-oppressive norms. That sounds very chauvinistic, so let's have some cases to make that a bit clearer.
So a first case, for instance, would be ableist praise. So there is an excellent TED Talk, which I would encourage anyone to watch, called 'I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much'. And this is by a speaker, Stella Young, who is a disability activist. And Stella Young describes how one day somebody came and approached her parents to say that she was an inspiration and propose that she be nominated for a Community Achievement Award. So Young and her parents were quite confused because they couldn't actually attach this praise to any particular achievement. Young has a physical disability, but that fact bears very little on her ability to do ordinary things like go to school or participate in social life. And so Young deduced from this praise that the person who had given it had this expectation that, owing to Young's disability, she was actually less educationally or socially capable than her able-bodied peers. So this praise is misrecognising her as less able than we would see her if we had adopted non-oppressive norms.
A second example, which unfortunately occurs too often, I would term these cases of 'missing praise'. So this is also an under-recognition. This would occur where we see, for instance, double standards occurring in hiring because of oppressive expectations, for instance, based on gender or based on race. So for example, in a recent study, participants ranked men and women as well as black and white candidates on the basis of their competence and suitability for a made-up professional role. And unfortunately, in the study, they found good evidence for activation of a double standards process and choices, competence and suitability rating. So in this case, there's an under-recognition of the competence and suitability of women and black candidates. The same qualifications and experience are seen as less praiseworthy by comparison to similar attributes of socially privileged agents. So that missing praise for those agents is an under-recognition. Equally, the recognition for the socially privileged agents, you might argue, is an over-recognition if they're given any extra esteem just based on the idea that they are white or male candidates.
Emily McTernan 17:17
That moves us nicely to talking a bit more about over-recognition, so giving people from privileged groups more recognition for being good candidates for a case. Did you have any other instances of over-recognition to call on here to think through the way that it contributes or participates in a system of oppression?
Hannah McHugh 17:37
I'd like to refer back to a case that keen listeners will have heard me speak about on the previous podcast. And I think this case is interesting because it brings out this transition of how praise can become problematic over time. So we can imagine that we have a non-binary identifying person who asks us as their colleagues to adopt they/them pronouns when referring to them. Some colleagues probably struggle with this task: maybe they've never encountered a non-binary person and they have a habit of using binary pronouns, she/he, his/her. However, the colleagues who do adopt the pronouns of ‘they and them’ are initially praised quite highly for having adopted they/them pronouns. Over time, if those colleagues continue to be praised every time they adopt them, this looks like it becomes problematic as an over-recognition: it starts to make it look like there's really no obligation to say 'they or them' because each time the colleague is praised and says, 'oh, how extraordinary, how wonderful, thank you so much', it feels like it's some kind of gift, not some kind of duty. And so that that praise becomes oppressive as an over-recognition.
Emily McTernan 18:24
Great, that's helpful for us to see what's going on here.
So is it fair to say that the driver of your analysis of praise here is the idea that praise is good if it manifests or promotes progressive or good norms, and bad if it manifests or promotes oppressive norms? Is that the right way to think about what's going on here?
Hannah McHugh 19:07
That's certainly an important feature of my work. I would argue further that praise is actually apt in the way that I describe it. So I'm not describing praise as this pure kind of tool or instrument that you can pick up and bend the practice to try and make it suit what you want to achieve. I actually think that praise at the outset of a new norm is really respectful of agency.
So first of all, we can consider that pioneers of new norms are acting against their social context. So the act that they perform might align what we wish were duties, but they are acting in a time where they're traversing social norms. And that is what we would philosophically call 'supererogatory', but by that I just mean going beyond the duty that you have. So we could think of, for instance – and this case I think brings out really nicely where I think we do think we owe praise to people for adopting norms and conditions where it seems unlikely that where we would wish that there was a duty to do what that person had done – if we think about when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front of the bus in the time of racial segregation when black people were not invited to do so or allowed to do so. Famously, Rosa Parks said, 'I was just tired'. If we took what she meant to mean that she was just physically tired and felt like she should sit down at the front of the bus where there was a seat, then perhaps we wouldn't praise her at all because we would think, well, we should be praising in line with what we want the duty to be. Of course not. Of course, Rosa Parks did something amazing traversing the social context. And as a pioneer in that movement of liberation and emancipation, she becomes a very praiseworthy agent.
Emily McTernan 20:49
Thank you for that description.
What about disagreement? So it looks like there might be disagreement over which norms are progressive and which norms are oppressive. How does your account deal with that? Because you've talked very much in terms of what's socially accepted, what we've adopted as a moral standard. So what do you think about disagreement – cases where we don't really have a clear sense what the right norms are? Or what do we do about the fact that we might be wrong in what we think the right?
Hannah McHugh 21:16
This is a very difficult challenge and you're right to identify it.
I assume, in my work, the premise that we actually could come to some sort of socially acceptable, socially desirable framework for how we would like to live in a non-oppressive way. I don't think that that is such a radical assumption. I think we may disagree on how we get there, but I don't think that it is too radical to say that we will coalesce around thinking we all want to reach some version of equality. Now, what's really interesting, for instance, on transitioning to equality – or as you know, Emily, I'm a Republican theorist, I would say transitioning to a state of non-domination where we don't have some groups with too much power over others in an arbitrary way – is that there will be reasonable disagreement in how we do that.
Now, our praising and blaming practices are at the centre of how we have those disagreements. If we were to withhold praise or blame – which by the way, I think are exactly the moments in which we have moral deliberations – then I don't think we will be respecting the person that we're withholding it from as a moral agent capable of having that deliberation. Now, an upshot of this is that I think we should be well prepared to see ourselves as sometimes getting things wrong, and as existing in moments of change, and being responsible to make some change – that we have grown up in a world that has led us to have implicit biases does not necessarily lead to the idea that we are not responsible to make change when somebody points that out to us.
So I think praise and blame are really, really interesting points in our practices in our social life where we see ourselves deliberating, and we should be investigating how to make those sites of change. And we should be using them to have important moral conversations to try to reach these heavier or higher goals of things like equality or non-domination.
Emily McTernan 23:04
Great, thank you for that description.
I wonder we could turn to the missing piece so far of your work on praise and the ways in which praise can be problematic. We've talked about it a bit in the case of 'clapping for carers', but not yet in this part of the discussion. And that's appropriative praise. So your thought in the 'clap for carers' is that by praising someone, we sort of lay claim to the standards they're living by. We sort of suggests we're aligning ourselves somehow with those standards, that we'll have some kind of reflective glory on us, that we're the kind of people who praise the right kinds of things.
And so a question I had was: isn't all praise appropriative? Because we've said – we've already discussed, haven't we – how praise isn't something you get for just doing your moral duty, usually, except in cases where the moral duty is not widely accepted, and so doing one's duty is exceptionally burdensome. But ordinarily, it's for going beyond. And that might suggest that nearly all of our praise looks appropriative because we may well not be acting so well ourselves when we praise others. Or is it that only other moral heroes can praise moral heroes because only they live up to those standards, and anyone else is merely appropriating for themselves that reflected glory? What do you think?
Hannah McHugh 24:19
Very interesting.
So absolutely, we can praise things that we think are good. It would be unusual to praise something that you don't believe is good. So the first premise is to say that you can signal that there is a standard, but the more that you yourself believe is a desirable standard.
But the more interesting question which you raise there is to say, well, are you allowed to levy that praise if you yourself are not adopting it? Can I tell my vegan friend ‘Wow, that's amazing' knowing full well that I'm eating a pepperoni pizza across the table, right?
So this is an issue of standing. And standing has come up as a huge feature of the literature when we speak of blame. It's quite a common intuition that you cannot blame someone in a hypocritical way. I can't blame you for not eating vegan while I eat my pepperoni pizza. That seems like an issue of standing, right?
And some have argued in relation to praise that issues to standing never apply. Some think that you can just praise for anything you want, regardless of your own behaviour.
On the other hand, other philosophers think the opposite. So, one recent philosopher, Nathan Stout, made an interesting argument that if Donald Trump were to tweet out in favour of his work, he would find this really problematic. He obviously has views that Donald Trump is not an upstanding member of the moral community. He believes that that kind of praise would actually undermine his work. And I think there is something there. I don't necessarily take the bite that it would be undermining to his self-perception in the way that that Stout believes it would. But I think what goes awry – and as you mentioned, it's something we saw in the 'clap for our carers’ case – is the praise would be undeservedly appropriative. So it may be that in some sense, praise is always appropriative i.e., we attach ourselves to those standards, we say 'I think those standards are good'. But we may have some cases in which it's unjust to say those standards are good if you yourself are part of degrading those standards, or if it's in such stark conflict with your own behaviour.
Now, you could steal praise by detaching yourself from the standard. If Donald Trump were to tweet in spite of my worldview and commitments, 'I think the work of this philosopher is very commendable', that issue of standing could fall away. So when we're praising and when we're signalling our commitment to a standard, that could be disrespect if we've transgressed those standards or if we're trying to unjustifiably derive some kind of merit for ourselves from the perception of the person that we're praising. And that would likely only be unjustifiable if we've really done something in direct contravention. I don't think there's a problem with, for instance, hypothetical praise. If I found myself in South Africa in the time of apartheid, I would have behaved in this way or these kinds of hypothetical 'what is a good action'? There's no problem with that. That would be problematic, if, of course, you yourself were living in something similar to an apartheid state and undermining those norms.
Emily McTernan 27:14
One of the most interesting insights from your analysis is the idea that the same praise, that praising the same act, can shift over time from being progressive to being oppressive. We've touched on this already, but perhaps you could explain that idea. Some people might find that quite counterintuitive: they might think you're either praiseworthy for the act or you're not. So what's going on in those cases exactly?
Hannah McHugh 27:35
So far, we've talked quite a lot about the pitfalls of praise. But as you say, actually the main thrust of my contribution to this debate, I hope, is to try and rescue praise as a really important and valuable way of combating depression. I've argued already to you that it's not just a tool, that it's also apt. But it does imply, what I say, that the same praise can go from oppressive to progressive.
So some theorists that I mentioned have taken on oppressive praise. Interestingly, Jules Holroyd has a very admirable approach, which I have taken a lot of my thinking from. And she would argue that we should stop praising, for instance, in cases like the 'daddy dividend', right? So the 'daddy dividend' is where fathers get praised for being on the tube holding a toddler, looking like a really great dad, but actually, a mother wouldn't receive that praise, and they're really just fulfilling a duty.
Now, I think it'd be too hasty to say that there was never a moment in which those dads should have received some praise, right? Maybe the 'daddy dividend' was actually justifiable at some point, even if that time has changed.
So if we take the view that where we're acting against a background structure of oppression, we're acting against the background structure where, say, the norms are that women perform all the childcare. But there is a group which has the idea that actually we want to transition to a moment in which it's absolutely imperative that men take part in this, that is going to begin with praising of men who do that.
And actually I want to talk to you a little bit more about specifically what I think is happening when these norms are emerging. So, if we are interested in moving from a society in which we, unfortunately, have a background of oppressive norms into one where we have norms of liberation or emancipatory norms, whatever you want to call that, we need to consider very much what goes into instantiating those new norms.
So I think this falls into two phases, broadly conceived.
The first one is this point in which there is one subgroup which knows of the norms and knowledge that needs to be spread to other subgroups. So Cheshire Calhoun describes this – she calls this an 'abnormal moral context'. An example of this would be the early days of feminism. So where there is a group of, well, not necessarily women, but there is a group who understand the oppression that women are facing, they have a sense of what those new norms need to be. There is a much larger group than that subgroup who just are unaware of the bias built into that system – they're unaware of the oppressive nature of those norms.
In that moment – and I call this time when norms were emerging – praise for fathers in the '60s who were taking a really active role in duties of childcare is very, very important. They're transgressing the social context, the norm is emerging, many are unaware of it, and it's really conducive to suppressive norms.
The second stage, which is an interesting time, where actually the norm is no longer emerging, but it is now developing. So this is the stage in which knowledge is generally held, but agents haven't yet taken up that norm.
I think we could argue, in some sense, we're in this stage with climate change norms. Everyone knows there's something morally bad happening around climate change. But perhaps we aren't all doing everything we could to give up the pepperoni pizza and become vegan, right? We're still developing our ability to do that.
Now, in this stage, I don't think that praise continues to be appropriate. In this case, I mean... And it's not an on and off. Over time, these landscapes are changing and shifting. But blame starts to become much more appropriate. We know the standard; we fail to uphold it; we've already given praise to those who've helped the norm emerge. But actually, it's becoming less and less appropriate, and we become blameworthy for failing to live up to the standard. Perhaps, really, we're not there in terms of becoming vegan, but we could say we are there in terms of unnecessary flights, or driving a diesel car when we have options to move to electric, or are not walking to work. So as the norms become more developed, blame becomes more appropriate. And praise becomes much less appropriate.
Emily McTernan 31:44
Right, because we don't praise people for merely meeting a moral standard that we've all agreed is the moral standard.
Hannah McHugh 31:51
Exactly.
Emily McTernan 31:52
Thank you so much, Hannah, for that positive vision of how praise might be useful in making things better, as well as that complex account of what might go wrong with praise and the many ways in which it might be part of a system of oppression.
We've been discussing the role of praise in politics with Hannah McHugh. Listeners can't read your work on this just yet, but I'm sure we'll see excellent publications on this topic from you in due course.
We're taking a little break next week for UCL reading week. But we'll be back in two weeks’ time when we'll be looking at the role of the European Court of Justice in protecting the independence of judges in the EU member states.
Remember to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of your time to rate or review us.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Conor Kelly and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.