Lies and Social Class Revisited...Again

At the risk of sounding like a Marxist broken record, I'm going to try to tackle the relationship of lies in government and social class once again, from a third angle, this time by discussing the problems with acoustic separation.

Acoustic separation is a concept that I have never heard of before, but it makes perfect sense. Of course the criminal justice system itself would benefit from being more lenient in its penalizations than it would like the masses to believe. By making people believe that punishments are harsher than they really are, the goal of creating a deterrent against crime is fulfilled without having to pay to keep more people in prison for longer amounts of time. Also, acoustic separation can be important for other reasons, such as in the case of the 'ignorance of the law as an excuse' example. Thompson explained very convincingly the reason that this 'decision rule' should not be transparent to the public for the following reason: "It if were generally known that one could avoid punishment by claiming ignorance of the law, not only would some people try to feign ignorance of the law, but also there would be an incentive to cultivate legal ignorance" (135). I think it is a fair claim to make that legal ignorance is intrinsically detrimental to democratic society, so, it can be argued that, in this case, secrecy is not only acceptable on the part of the government, but perhaps morally obligatory in the interest of protecting democracy.

However, because there are no easy answers in political ethics, acoustic separation within our criminal justice system can lead to decidedly negative consequences as well. This is a result of the 'holes' in this particular veil of government secrecy. While this seems really weird to say, and contrary to my general beliefs about lying and politics, it almost seems to me that it is the fact that some people will always have the ability to find out the truth that makes this form of acoustic separation immoral, rather than the problem of secrecy itself. This is where the problem of social class comes in. In the instance of as a regulatory body like the Environmental Protection Agency demonstrating leniency in its enforcement of its policies, it is the smaller, poorer businesses that suffer. Large companies that can afford to hire lobbiests and lawyers to thoroughly research precedent will push the limits of their carbon output and other environmental regulations in order to save money for their company, without having to worry about being fined. Smaller companies without these resources, however, follow the codes because they have no reason to believe that the EPA won't behave as they claim. Ironically, the policies of large companies that make products on more mass scales have the potential to create much more environmental harm than these smaller companies even if both followed the regulation set forth by the EPA. So, creating a system that causes the smaller companies to follow the regulations while the larger corporations circumvent the rules is counter-productive on a practical level as well as a moral one. This system, though intended to protect democratic principles, actually has the potential to increase the economic and social disparity within our society.