2 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: The Vices of Truthlessness
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.
Comment by [deleted] at 22/01/2020 at 17:50 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Your father adopted the position that it's good to lie to people in order to advance policy positions that if they knew the facts they wouldn't support.
Morally, it's obvious that lying to manipulate people into doing what you want politically is wrong, regardless of the moral framework you start from. It shows a lack of virtue, fails the categorical imperative, and will have a hard time in most utilitarian perspectives.
It's an amusing inversion of the normal form of intellectual hubris, "If people knew what I knew they'd agree with me." For him, if people knew what he knew there's no way they'd agree. I sure hope he wasn't a doctor with those ethics.
Whether or not truth has intrinsic value, it's wrong to manipulate people with lies.
Edit: To add, it also undermines your own argument if you believe lies are justified to steer others. Do you really believe what you're saying, or, like your father, are you just speaking without regard to the truth to manipulate people to some personal goal?
Comment by RunnyDischarge at 22/01/2020 at 17:59 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
That’s just straight up lying, and it makes people distrust governments and international agencies. It's exactly the kind of things climate change skeptics will bring up, "Remember when they lied to us about AIDS"?