The Fancy New Golf Game

In two weeks, the world's most accessible and artistic source of intelligent social commentary will release on their website an episode that my brother said represents exactly everything he thought about the issue. In short, the episode's message is that we need to start blaming the person more and the conditions less.

My friend Andy had a somewhat different opinion of things. He didn't know why private indiscretion should become such a public matter that an adulterer would have to publicly apologize for it. Woods' sponsors supposedly pay him to play golf, not to be a saint. That some of his sponsors withdrew their support because of his marital infidelity reveals what Andy takes to be another dangerous conflation between the public and private spheres.

I actually find the public reaction to this affair both disappointing and encouraging. Disappointing, in that I agree with Andy. But encouraging, in that this shows how social norms can be strictly enforced through mere noncompliance. This was an instance where people "punished" a guy, and impelled him to make it right, simply by not doing things for him anymore.

We already have the basic infrastructure for it, so I'm quite confident that - if it were allowed to - some good old fashioned shunning can work to incentivize other duties besides the duty to not cheat on your wife.