Status Games, Polyamory and the Merits of Meritocracy
About this episode
Philosopher Agnes Callard defines status as the value other people place on us and describes the conversational 'games' we play around it: finding common ground, jockeying to seem important, or bonding over shared unimportance. They debate what makes a human being valuable — inherent dignity versus earned virtue — and Callard defends a non-punitive meritocracy that rewards accomplishment without treating failure as deserved suffering. The conversation ranges widely: civil society as a regulator of our natural altruism, the 'violence' of self-creation and conflicting desires, why advice to strangers rarely works, parenting as 'childing' rather than shaping children, and the tension between goals and reality. They also discuss jealousy as a form of desire, polyamory and monogamy as facing the same erotic rivalries, divorce and deliberating together afterward, and how we set goals for ourselves.