Social Comparison and the Vices of Pride: A Kierkegaardian Perspective

Abstract This article connects Kierkegaard’s warnings about social comparison to “vices of pride” such as self-righteousness, domination, presumption, vanity and hyper-autonomy. In Sect. 1, I stress the ways these vices use social comparison and show their connections with self-importance. In Sect. 2, I investigate Kierkegaard’s prima facie startling claim that “pride is cowardliness”, showing why it is more plausible than might initially appear. “Pride is cowardliness” insofar as the vices of pride involve failing to face up to, or pursue, the truth. They distort the truth, serve as obstacles to truth-seeking, and hamper our capacity for knowledge and understanding. In Sect. 3, I show that if we suppose that on some level we know this, then the failure to face up to what on some level we know is itself a form of cowardliness. The vices of pride are amongst the ways through which we self-deceptively hide from ourselves (albeit incompletely) what we are doing. But if some forms of social comparison encourage us to be cowardly and dishonest with ourselves, thus hampering our capacity for knowledge and understanding, then it becomes important to ask: which, and how? In Sect. 4, I explore the prospects for two Kierkegaard-inspired answers: when the motivation for social comparison is “shrewdness’”, and when we use “the crowd” or “the public” as problematic reference networks. In Sect. 5, I briefly explore the implications for classic and contemporary social comparison theory, demonstrating some epistemic vice-risks it commonly overlooks.