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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