Praise, responsibility, and the ethics of suspicion

This chapter presents a selective historical analysis of how praise has been theorised by philosophers since the advent of the ‘modern’ period. More specifically, the chapter describes and evaluates three historically salient sources of philosophical interest in praise as an object of suspicion, based on a) the nature of responsibility and the will; b) the contingent motivations behind praise and the psychosocial dynamics of its expression and uptake; and c) the relationship between praise and achievement or excellence. In the case of each of the three sources of suspicion about praise, its explicit instantiation in modern moral philosophy in the work of such authors as Francois La Rochefoucauld, Bernard Mandeville, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer is illustrated.