[Sherri asked me to blog on my real opinions on the topic of lies, etc, etc]
So lets say some politician lied. What are we going to do? Well it depends on what the lie was, and what the intent was, and what the effect was, and what the intended effect was, and did he think he was just, and do we think he was just, and how do the courts feel, and how does the constitution address this, and the mood of the public, and.... Well, you get the picture. There is nothing concrete about a lie. There is no place to feasibly set a standard where all lies that fall into such and such a category are ok, and all other lies are bad or vice versa. So I'm bored. This does not speak to me as something that I can practically apply well.
I've outlined when you can lie and still have your hands remain clean:
(1) Don't lie unless I tell you it's ok to lie.
(2) Secrets are ok sometimes (when? when necessary. For what? For
important stuff. What is important? Whatever I think is important.)
(3) Manipulation and Deception can easily lead to lies, so be careful with that.
(I'll let you know when that is ok too.)
This Dirty Hands business is all relative anyway, right?
I guess I see your point, but doesn't most of the same criteria also apply to torture? or war? I mean, I want to argue on the same lines as you, that lying is not concrete, but all of the evidence points to yes. Take a similar example in torture: say a soldier tortures an innocent. There are witnesses to this torture, as well as autopsy reports, possibly video tapes; all of which are concrete evidence that torture was happening. However, we have no way of proving intent or knowledge of a human being without using polygraph machines which are not 100% accurate anyways. This is the same with lying, but I think moreso.
ReplyDeleteWith lying you might have on record the lie itself, but you cannot prove that it "was a lie" from the liar's perspective. That is, you cannot prove that the liar knew what was going on, even hard evidence such as in the Iran-Contra cases, where North was leading, you cannot "prove" what his intent was. For all that we know, it might have been some underground foreign policy attempt that we cannot know about even to this day in fear of reprocussions.
Sure, it may seem pointless to debate about, but it seems that you get nowhere unless you do debate. Going back to Sheri's words on the first day of class, something along the lines of "This class would be very boring if we all agreed on everything".
So, I guess what I am getting at is whether this is what you meant by concrete, and if so, what level of concreteness is needed in order to have an effective debate?
Well I will reply with a relevant/tangent response because I am struggling to figure out the point of having ethics? When we started this class we already had the assumption that there was some form of morality that people follow...if not how can you have dirty hands? I think this expands on the idea of "concreteness" not just of lying but everything. How can we have moral shades of gray, shouldn't ethics and morality strive to uphold something? Unless there actually is some universal truths that humanity hasn't figured out whats the point of trying to claim one set of morals are any better than another? Are ethics essentially morals and laws that are artificial guidelines that were created by mankind to decide what humans should and should not do? If it is just something made up who is to say what standards are better than the others? Since ethical standards are always changing will our moral limits just waiting to be proven wrong? For example what if people can't believe that we have a government that had to use deception/violence at all or what if people can't believe how we use nation-states, some of which are considered "Super Powers." I guess I am still wrestling with whether ethics mean anything and if so how do we avoid just coming to the "shades of gray" argument on every issue. Well I'll stop my philosophical musing and try to relate more to the topic next time I write on this blog.
ReplyDeleteNow I am going to amend what I said a little. I wasn't not trying to say that ethics and morality are not needed, basically I'll I really wanted to address was how to avoid coming to shades of gray argument by try to see if maybe Kant was right. I just feel as if society as a whole should try to put definite moral rules that can't be ignored. If this were to happen perhaps we would be able to remove dirty hands and other problems from government.
ReplyDelete