Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Articles

What’s So Bad About Smugness?

Emrys Westacott asks whether it really is a terrible moral failing.

Elaine: “I hate smugness. Don’t you hate smugness?”

Cabdriver: “Smugness is not a good quality.”

So goes a popular snippet from Seinfeld. In a 2014 article in The Guardian titled ‘Smug: The most toxic insult of them all?’ Mark Hooper opined that “there can be few more damning labels in modern Britain than ‘smug’.

…