https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/openfordebate/2017/08/28/the-vices-of-truthlessness/
created by ADefiniteDescription on 21/01/2020 at 17:48 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 top-level comments (showing 1)
Comment by Shield_Lyger at 21/01/2020 at 20:51 UTC
2 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I'm not sure that "truthlessness" should necessarily be considered a vice. Once upon a time, my father than I were talking and he'd contended that the threat of AIDS to heterosexual couples was deliberately overblown. And he was in favor of this, as he felt that AIDS was too serious a problem to be ignored simply because it only impacted a relatively small part of the overall population. And so spreading a deliberate untruth was acceptable, even an imperative in this case.
While I suspect that Mr. Crerar would list this as a form of indifference to the truth, that idea is born of the simple concept that truth-telling is a *means,* rather than a necessary *end.* The end of driving support for AIDS research wasn't supported, in my father's mind, by telling people the truth about their individual risks, so that wasn't a useful means. Does that come across as vicious?
The assumption that the truth is always an affirmative good, in and of itself, strikes me as overly simplistic, given the world that we live in. Basing a philosophical point on that, therefore, begs the question, and it's a question worth answering.