When is it OK to Lie?
When you're a true believer in man-made global warming, obviously. If you lie under those circumstances (or commit identity theft or forge documents or try to sully the reputation of a think tank or its employees through smears leaked to the left-liberal press) you are not a bad person at all. You are a hero!
How do I know this? Because an expert says so in the Guardian. His name is James Garvey (author of a book called "The Ethics of Climate Change," so he must know his stuff, right?) - and he's discussing the affair known as Fakegate - or Gleickgate - in which well-known climate activist Peter Gleick used what you and I might consider underhanded, nay, downright immoral and unlawful methods to try to blacken the reputation of the Heartland Institute.
What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action. Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. It could go the other way too – maybe he's undermined confidence in climate scientists. It depends on how this plays out.
Liberals: gotta love their sense of humor!
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Comments:
Apr '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Diane Ellis, Ed.: The trend I've seen lately of so-called ethicists espousing some of the most clearly unethical ideas (e.g. the defense in the Journal of Medical Ethics of "after-birth abortion") is really alarming.
This kind of rubbish should be met with derision and mockery, of course, but too many people seem to take these ideas seriously that mockery is rendered an insufficient tool to combat them. · 39 minutes ago
Too true, too true. The field of Ethics no longer even concerns itself with discovering the boundaries that man must live in. They have already disproved those (for themselves) now they want to see just how far they can bend our inner natures and rational impulses to doing objective evil.
In response to defending the After-birth Abortion the journal editor said the aim of his journal was not to seek the "Truth" in Ethics just present arguments...If Ethics is not to be about an objective Truth why even bother?
Mar '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
James, you need to spend more time in the US - a recent poll finds that nearly 2/3 of Americans still believe in climate change. Though, to be fair, the poll was not clear about how much of that is due to our driving around with under-inflated tyres and heating our homes to 72 dg (F).
Well, it has been a relatively mild winter in AZ, which I like cause all my plants are still alive :-)
BTW, if you want to see how weak is the CO2-related greenhouse effect, compared to H2O, spend some time in the desert at night - it's why we have to heat our houses in the winter.
Jul '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Why stop at lying? Pretty soon these loonies will join ELF as domestic terrorists. The slippery slope leads you to criminal behavior and somehow it is all OK to the relativists.
Mar '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Valiuth
If it was just undercover work that would not be outrageous. He was pedaling false documents he claimed to have gotten undercover.
I had only read the links in James' post, so I had not picked up on the latest developments.
I would nonetheless make the following comparison:
Liberal activist: assumes a false identity to obtain confidential documents; forges one when genuine documents are not juicy enough.
Conservative activist: assumes a false identity to obtain confidential opinions; edits video highly to make them sound more inflammatory.
Whose transgression is more unethical? The liberal's, without a doubt. But the difference is still one of degrees, not one of fundamental philosophy.
Jan '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Wanna see weak links? Then check out the supposed link between CO2 and temperatures.
Jul '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Mendel
Valiuth
If it was just undercover work that would not be outrageous. He was pedaling false documents he claimed to have gotten undercover.
I had only read the links in James' post, so I had not picked up on the latest developments.
I would nonetheless make the following comparison:
Liberal activist: assumes a false identity to obtain confidential documents; forges one when genuine documents are not juicy enough.
Conservative activist: assumes a false identity to obtain confidential opinions; edits video highly to make them sound more inflammatory.
Whose transgression is more unethical? The liberal's, without a doubt. But the difference is still one of degrees, not one of fundamental philosophy. · 1 minute ago
Good points.
Aug '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
I think calling in and identifying yourself as a Board Member is well within the tradition of political dirty tricks in America. O'Keefe did that as well, but he didn't forge those videos. Gleiks forged his data.
The continuing damage to the credibility of science itself is frightening. If the scientist must lie by forging "data" in order to defend their science then they have betrayed the fundamental ethical principles of the scientific enterprise.
There was a great little French play called "By Any Means Necessary." No matter where you start on the right or the left you end up with the same prison camps. Anyone know where I can get the text.
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Samuel Amaral
What is even more interesting is that if Mr James Delingpole would even insinuate - I remember the post about the death threats which something similar- such kind of thing, all hell would break lose. So in a sense this ethicist is not providing an opinion, but merely stating the obvious : The cause is greater than truth and morals. · 1 hour ago
That is SO true Samuel. If someone on my side of the argument were caught faking documents to discredit the alarmists he would be totally DESTROYED - not just by the environmentalists, warmists and so on, but also by the skeptics who couldn't bear to see their integrity brought low.
May '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Grendel
There is a difference between lying to get someone to do what she is not allowed to do in order to obtain what you are not entitled to get, and misrepresenting one's self in order to incline someone to be more candid than he would be otherwise.
The difference between O'Keefe and Gleick seems to be more of method than morals. In both cases they "misrepresented one's self in order to incline someone to be more candid than he would be otherwise". In O'Keefe's case, the inclination to be candid came from the fact that the NPR execs thought they were having an unrecorded conversation with co-ideologists. In both cases, they simply acquired through deception examples of their opponents' true thoughts; for O'Keefe, footage of a conversation; for Gleick, a memo. On the other hand, simply making things up, as Gleick did, is definitely unethical.
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
@mendel
Liberal activist: assumes a false identity to obtain confidential documents; forges one when genuine documents are not juicy enough.
Conservative activist: assumes a false identity to obtain confidential opinions; edits video highly to make them sound more inflammatory.
Yeah, I take your point - up to a point. But I think there's a world of difference between misleading editing - which ALL TV does - and outright, deliberate forgery.
May '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure only one of the documents was forged, the rest were actually written by officials of the Heartland Institute.
Mar '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
O'Keefe had some people impersonate donors to gain an audience with NPR execs, so yes, deception was involved. What O'Keefe didn't do was hire actors to impersonate the NPR execs and put words in their mouths at a recreation of that meeting.
What Glieck attempted to do was pass off another memo as being a product of the Heartland Institute, backing that up by obtaining information from the Institute by deception. The damaging stuff is in the "strategy memo" with the uncertain provenance. The Institute denies authorship of that memo, and the "original source" (undoubtedly fearing retribution from Right Wing death squads, albino monks, or -- oooh -- Right Wing death squads made up of albino monks! Yeah, that's it!) is keeping mum. Etiher that or the "original source" doesn't exist.
Nov '10
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
My view is that, if you are fighting evil, then it is perfectly okay, indeed morally praiseworthy--and perhaps even morally obligatory--to lie.
Who would not have justifiably lied to oppose the evil regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao? Who would have, like a kooky Kantian, prioritized the telling the truth at all costs?
The problem arises when you misidentify the good as the evil, and the evil as the good. This is precisely as the Warmists have done. They have indulged in intellectual and moral arrogance, and they have gone astray.
But understanding that the Warmists truly believe they are on the side of the enlightened angels, and that those who disagree with them are on the side of the cretinous devils, illuminates why Warmists are ready to lie, and believe their lying is justified (despite their belated half-hearted protestations to the contrary). It is only a strategic mistake, in their view, not an ethical breach.
If Warmists' intellectual and moral premises were true, then they would be justified in lying; but their premises are false, so they are not.
Edited on February 29, 2012 at 10:34pmMar '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
James Delingpole:
Yeah, I take your point - up to a point. But I think there's a world of difference between misleading editing - which ALL TV does - and outright, deliberate forgery.
Here's the thing: the original post criticized the Garvey article, which was explicitly written (on Sunday, apparently) from the premise that the documents were genuine, and that Gleick's only transgression was identity deception. Based on the comments in this thread, both the left and the right seem to agree that this tactic is acceptible, if somewhat unseemly.
Now, if Garvey writes a follow-up column saying that the forgery was also a good idea, I'll eat my words. But I would bet money he wouldn't, because no one on the right would make that argument, and I firmly believe that the moral compass of the left is off by only about 20° or so from that of the right, not 180°.
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
@aodhan
I think your point is well made. The cause of the Warmists is provably wrong: anti-science, anti-empiricism, anti-human. There lies the problem
Sep '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
The comparison to James O'Keefe is very interesting. Obviously what O'Keefe did was not as bad as forgery (and I've greatly enjoyed all his exploits.) But it seems that as the different factions become hardened in their positions they run fairly sophisticated intelligence and disinformation operations against each other, much the way governments have in the past, and of course still do. Since the Left is fully entrenched in the media, academia and government, not to mention wholly immoral, they are extremely dangerous. As in the Rathergate forgery, they blew the HI fraud with incompetence. Imagine if the still unknown forger of the Bush National Guard documents had bothered to pick up a used typewriter to commit his forgery, rather than using Word with default font--it could have changed the election.
I wonder if in the end any written or video electronic communication will be considered no more reliable than an artist's depiction would have been before the advent of photographic, video and audio technology. Perhaps that's how it should be--trust would only be based on reputation, and any picture or recording would simply be considered an interesting, possibly synthetic, arrangement of pixels.
May '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
The comments here are fascinating. Notice that they deal almost entirely with the acts themselves. Compare to Garvey:
"If his lie has good effects overall . . . then perhaps on balance he did the right thing."
This is not to say that conservatives in general are more moral than liberals in general (much as I'd like to.) But Ricochet members in particular seem to have a higher standard than Mr. Garvey.
Sep '10
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
"gets in the way of public consensus" is a scary enough statement. Very revealing.
Mar '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
Mendel:
However, I fail to see how this is ethically any different from James O'Keefe's people using assumed Muslim identities to elicit embarassing quotes from an NPR exec. Both cases involve the same type of lying with the same end: exposing opponents' secrets. Yet I didn't hear much complaining on Ricochet about O'Keefe's tactics.
Thank you for this example of moral relativism. I was not aware that the Heartland Foundation has its fangs buried deep in the government teat and uses public, as well as private, money to disseminate falsehoods to promote policies that necessarily involve the depression of quality of life for the great majority of humanity.
Sep '11
Re: When is it OK to Lie?
James Delingpole: @aodhan
I think your point is well made. The cause of the Warmists is provably wrong: anti-science, anti-empiricism, anti-human. There lies the problem · 5 minutes ago
I believe Popper's demarcation criterion of science is that a hypothesis explain the known data, and that it provide falsifiable predictions. The Hockey Stick fraud was a lame attempt to achieve the former; and the latter, in the form of climate models of ten years ago, have now been falsified. So while there's no reason to believe the hypotheses, I'm not entirely sure that CO2 warming has been proven wrong.