One quick announcement - If you live near Hilton Head, SC - I will be speaking at 3:30 today (Friday, September 20th) at 3:30pm in the OLLI building at USC Bluffton campus. Come join me and hear about “Existentialism in the Mountains.”!!!
Ok, let’s dive in.
I noticed today that apparently my posts are fairly significantly longer than most of the fare here on Substack. Hmmmm. Well, I am sure that will likely continue for most of the stuff I write here - let’s be honest, nuance is hard to do quickly. However, today I want to offer a quick little thought for your Friday morning (or whenever else you happen to read this).
Since I missed this week’s Music Mondays (for irrelevant but legitimate reasons), today’s post is motivated by the song “Liar” by the Rollins Band.
I admit that I am not a huge fan of Henry Rollins’s music, but this song has always been philosophically interesting to me.
Many of you will know of the liar’s paradox, which addresses the complicated situation when a liar tells you that they are lying. In that situation, if they are actually lying then they just told the truth, but if they are telling the truth then they are not lying when they said that they are lying to you!
This track by the Rollins Band is an instance of this paradox. When the liar claims that he is indeed a liar, then what are we to make of that claim?
The paradox notwithstanding, the problem with liars is that they are intentionally attempting to deceive. And yet, in order to be effective at such deception, a liar must be committed to knowing the truth. Think about it, if the goal is to deceive someone about what is true, then that requires that the person know (or at least do their best to know) what is true in order not accidentally to lead people to truth instead of deceiving them from it.
In this way, the liar is ironically epistemically virtuous in the sense that they are interested in pursuing truth (at least initially). However, they are deeply morally vicious because the reasons they care about truth are flawed. Accordingly, they end up epistemically vicious because they fail to display the responsibility to their interlocutor to tell the truth, so far as they understand it, and give the actual reasons that support their views.
As dangerous as liars are for social cohesion, I agree with Harry Frankfurt that bullshitters are much much worse.
In contrast to the liar, the bullshitter doesn’t even care about truth at all. They are not intending to deceive their audience, but rather the bullshitter attempts to motivate behavior in their audience that supports their own self-interest.
Importantly, that the liar and the bullshitter speak falsely is not actually the where the failure in their behavior resides. Lots of us inadvertently speak falsely. The problem is that the liar intends to speak falsely and the bullshitter doesn’t care at all about even trying to speak truly.
According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter is much more socially dangerous than the liar because whereas the liar does have some degree of epistemic virtue in play (again, at least initially), the bullshitter knows no such constraint. They are unencumbered by actual states of affairs. The truth plays no role in the bullshitter’s calculation. All that matters is bringing about their own selfish ends.
One of the main contributing factors to bullshit is a cultural framework where folks are expected to hold opinions about things they don’t really understand. In the attempt to “sound smart,” or to be “perceived as knowledgable,” etc., bullshit is deployed as a means of distraction (in contrast to the liar’s deceptive intentions).
Well, I have been teaching this distinction between the liar and the bullshitter in my philosophy classes this week and was struck by the fact that far, far too often in our contemporary political discourse we accuse people of lying when I think we need, instead, to be calling them on their bullshit.
But, doing so will not make much of a difference so long as we continue to leave in place the cultural realities that occasioned the rise in popularity of prominent bullshitters. Raising our voices in critique of the epistemic and moral vice of the bullshitter is required for the sake of our social flourishing, but then working hard to foster epistemic health and deliberative virtue as a social norm must follow.
And yet, rather than building out such epistemic frameworks within our current educational systems, the very culture that facilitates so much bullshit ends up being the same one that guides the decisions of so many legislators, college administrators, and general social critics of robust, nuanced, and philosophically focused educational models.
Perhaps we can call this the bullshitter’s paradox:
The situation when the people who proclaim themselves guardians against bullshit are the most likely ones to foster it.
I want to hear from you about what you think the best way forward is in light of this situation. I tend to lean hard into the importance of argument and yet in a time when argument motivate less than memes do and when people praise the biggest bullshitters as the only hope for truth, it is hard to see how argument can do the work we so desperately need it to do.
Now, ain’t that some bullshit! Sigh.
Wow. this is a bit above my understanding yet I am trying to understand the liar and bullshiter form of communication. Reason: I am a 71 yr, old women with a M.Div. My father was a blue collar worker and know by many as a bullshtter, I say my father as a story teller and a social guy. He was an honest and truthful man and his bullshit stories were honest. Can you provide more comments of things to read about this?