Self-defeating arguments

Are ethics promulgations self-defeating?

Alan Wertheimer argues that promulgating some ethical standards of international clinical research may be self-defeating: the intended purpose of these standards is to promote the interests of subjects and communities in LMICs, while the outcome of promulgation could be to undermine these very same interests. If enforced, such standards would increase the costs of performing beneficial research...

Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior

One of the most persistent legacies of Karl Marx and the Young Hegelians has been the centrality of the concept of “ideology” in contemporary social criticism. The concept was introduced in order to account for a very specific phenomenon, viz. the fact that individuals often participate in maintaining and reproducing institutions under which they are oppressed or exploited. In the extreme, thes...

The Self-Defeating Rationale for Torture∗

We study torture as a mechanism for extracting information from a suspect who may or may not be informed. We show that a standard rationale for torture generates two commitment problems. First, the principal would benefit from a commitment to torture a victim he knows to be innocent. Second, the principal would benefit from a commitment to limit the amount of torture faced by the guilty. We ana...

Impulsivity and the self-defeating behavior of narcissists.

Currently prominent models of narcissism (e.g., Morf and Rhodewalt, 2001) primarily explain narcissists' self-defeating behaviors in terms of conscious cognitive and affective processes. We propose that the disposition of impulsivity may also play an important role. We offer 2 forms of evidence. First, we present a meta-analysis demonstrating a strong positive relationship between narcissism an...

The pursuit and assessment of happiness may be self - defeating