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Articolo contenuto in Vol. 99 Anno 2022 --> Fasc. 4

On the Measurement of Capital Vices

Abstract

References to the tradition of the capital vices have been widespread over the past decades. Nevertheless, no consensus exists about their relevance and diffusion in modern societies. In this paper, we shall discuss main measurement issues and suggest a bundle of indicators for assessing capital vices diffusion.


References to the tradition of the capital vices have been widespread over the past decades, from Hollywood's movies, like Seven or The First Deadly Sin, to thriller novels, books or other writings coming from academic or religious perspectives. Nevertheless, no consensus exists about their relevance in modern societies. For instance, Maguire (2004) has suggested that the knowledge of sin, and the individual and collective constituents of sin, are non-existent, or believed to have no substance, in today's society. Differently, Williams (2007) defends capital vices relevance and centrality in contemporary moral discourses.

Largely less debated is the issue of how to measure capital vices. If these deadly sins have to be attributed to society's lack of remorse or guilt in the face of evil, they should be measurable entities.[1] The reason of this lack is manifold. First, according to the medieval Catholic tradition, deadly vices can be both carnal and spiritual. Maybe the former can be measured, but to quantify the latter surely is a hard task. Second, capital vices are usually located at the individual level, but often reliable indicators for measuring them can be found only at the social level. Third, the issue of which kind of measure to adopt for any vice: indicators of what sort should be used, and whether they should be similar in mathematical terms are unsolved problems. Finally, what we shall call the causality dilemma, i.e., is it better to measure the diffusion of pathologies which explain vicious behavior or is it preferable to move the opposite way around?

In this paper, we shall discuss above measurement issues and suggest a bundle of indicators for assessing capital vices diffusion. Our reasoning will follow two basic methodological steps: (i) the identification issue, i.e., which dimensions of the deadly sins to look for, (ii) the aggregation issue, i.e., how to move from indicators bundles to composite measures of capital vices diffusion.

The rest of the article is organized as follows. In the next Section, we briefly summarize the medieval debate on the seven deadly sins. Section 3 will be devoted to the measurement issue, while Section 4 provides some examples. The last Section concludes.

[1] A remarkable exception is M. STIMERS – R. BERGSTROM – T. VOUGHT – M. DULIN, Capital Vice in the Midwest: The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins, «Journal of Maps» 7 (2011), pp. 9-17.

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Pubblicazione Inverno 2022

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