From \u2018post-truth\u2019, to \u2018fake news\u2019, to \u2018alternative facts\u2019, truthlessness is everywhere at the moment. These phenomena present us with a huge array of questions. How do we separate fact from fiction? How can we tell which sources of information are credible? Is there even such a thing as objective truth?<\/p>\n
At the most basic level, however, the question might be a simple one: Why? Why did thousands of people share a lurid tale about a youthful David Cameron\u2019s encounter with a dead pig, even whilst the journalist behind the story admitted that she had no real evidence to support it and that she didn\u2019t actually claim it to be true<\/a>? Why would Boris Johnson, whilst campaigning in the run up to the country\u2019s most significant vote in decades, travel around the country in a bus emblazoned with a blatant lie<\/a>? Why does the current President of the United States seem so happy to go on the record with obvious falsehoods<\/a>? As with many simple questions, the answers to these will likely be very complex. However, philosophy can perhaps provide us with one part of the answer, by encouraging us to think about intellectual vices.<\/p>\n Vices, generally speaking, are bad character traits. Historically, philosophers have mainly been interested in moral vices, traits like cruelty, cowardice, spitefulness, and vanity that make somebody a bad person. Intellectual <\/em>vices, similarly, are the character traits that make you a bad intellectual agent, or a bad knower. Closed-mindedness, incuriosity, dogmatism, and snobbery are all intellectual vices, as are hubris<\/a> and pride<\/a>, which have been discussed elsewhere on this blog.<\/p>\n What makes a character trait an intellectual vice, or a person intellectually vicious? Again, the answer to this will likely be complex, but one feature that philosophers have focussed on is intellectual motivations. The basic idea is that there are certain intrinsically valuable intellectual goods, like truth, knowledge, and understanding, and it is these that we should be aiming for in our intellectual lives. The intellectually responsible agent, then, is someone who cares about and is motivated by these goods, and who thus conducts their life in ways that are conducive to the acquisition and spread of truth. Insofar as they do so, they are a good, or virtuous<\/em>, intellectual agent. Conversely, the intellectually irresponsible agent is someone who isn\u2019t motivated by truth in this way, who doesn\u2019t take truth to be a valuable thing worth pursuing for its own sake. Insofar as this is the case, they are a bad, or vicious<\/em>, intellectual agent.<\/p>\n To add a bit more detail to this picture, we can note that there are two ways of not caring about truth. Both of these, I suspect, underlie some of the phenomena that characterise the current age of truthlessness. First, one can simply be indifferent to truth. Truth, that is, simply doesn\u2019t feature as an important consideration in one\u2019s thinking, or else is less important than other considerations. This means the vicious person\u2019s intellectual activities will be guided not by the pursuit of truth but by other ends which lack this distinctive intellectual value. We see this in a range of vices: negligence, where people carelessly let falsehoods slip through the net; laziness, where people lack motivation to seek out the truth; a lack of integrity, where people abuse their intellectual status to further non-intellectual goals; and more. Boris Johnson, for example, plausibly just didn\u2019t care that the claims he was associated with weren\u2019t true, since all that mattered for him was the furthering of his political goals. Similarly, many people who spread the story about David Cameron seemed to not really care whether it was actually true<\/a>. What mattered was that it was the perfect stick to beat an elitist politician with.<\/p>\n Is this the same with Trump? Is he just an extreme example of a politician, like Johnson, who wouldn\u2019t let the facts get in the way of a good campaign? Perhaps, but as many have remarked, something seems different about Trump. The lies come particularly thick and fast, they are particularly obvious and easy to debunk, he is particularly prone to contradicting what he himself said only a few days previously<\/a>. Maybe there is something else going on.<\/p>\n To see what, it will be helpful to take a detour through Russia. Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist and fellow at the LSE, has recently begun to document<\/a> a notable change in the Kremlin\u2019s propaganda machine. Previously, the KGB\u2019s modus operandi<\/em> was to spend \u201cmonths, or years, carefully planting well-made forgeries through covert agents in the west\u201d. Times and technologies change, however, and now their fake stories are placed through internet trolls, who develop outlandish narratives and post deliberately provocative comments. The aim here, Pomerantsev suggests, is \u201cless to establish alternative truths than to spread confusion about the very status of truth\u201d.<\/p>\n This brings us to the second way in which someone\u2019s motivations can be intellectually vicious. Rather than simply failing to care about intellectual goods like truth, a failure that might be quite passive, some people are actively motivated against<\/em> intellectual goods. Some people, that is, actively want to believe falsehoods (perhaps because they make them feel better about themselves), or to remain ignorant (about some inconvenient truths, say). Russia\u2019s state-sponsored internet trolls, in seeking to undermine the very status of truth, are displaying a vice at the extreme end of this particular spectrum. This is a vice that Jason Baehr calls \u2018epistemic malevolence\u2019<\/a>: the vice of outright opposition to truth or knowledge. It\u2019s not difficult to see what\u2019s so troubling about it. As Pomerantsev puts it: \u201cOnce the idea of rational discourse has been undermined, spectacle is all that remains. The side that tells better stories\u2026 will edge out someone trying to methodically \u2018prove\u2019 a fact\u201d.<\/p>\n Perhaps, then, this is what marks Trump out from other mendacious politicians. Boris Johnson used a catchy statistic that he thought would resonate with people and further his political aims. His viciousness lay in his indifference to the statistic\u2019s patent falsity. Trump, however, may not even really be trying to convince people of the veracity of what he\u2019s saying. Rather, perhaps by casually throwing around such a dizzying array of blatant falsehoods he\u2019s really trying to make people think that truth, after all, is unattainable, or unimportant. Perhaps, in other words, Trump is epistemically malevolent. His viciousness lies in his actively trying to undermine the very idea of truth.<\/p>\n Image “Truth, Lies, Philosophy, Wisdom<\/a>” by G D J<\/a> on Pixabay<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From \u2018post-truth\u2019, to \u2018fake news\u2019, to \u2018alternative facts\u2019, truthlessness is everywhere at the moment. These phenomena present us with a huge array of questions. How do we separate fact from […]","protected":false},"author":1395,"featured_media":213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,19],"tags":[65,28,66,58],"custom_author":[79],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-news","category-open-for-debate","tag-fake-news","tag-trump","tag-truth","tag-vices","custom_author-crerar-charlie"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8KPlM-3l","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":357,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/can-exposure-to-fake-news-damage-our-intellectual-character\/","url_meta":{"origin":207,"position":0},"title":"Can Exposure to \u201cFake News\u201d Damage Our Intellectual Character?","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"January 15, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"There is no denying the current widespread interest in the phenomenon of \u201cfake news\u201d. Reflection on the quality of recent political debates has fuelled concerns about the use of inaccurate and misleading stories and statistics. In response, politicians have begun proposing legislation to combat the spread of misleading information, while\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/hoax-2097365_1280.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/hoax-2097365_1280.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/hoax-2097365_1280.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/hoax-2097365_1280.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2018\/01\/hoax-2097365_1280.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":338,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/how-closed-mindedness-obstructs-effective-inquiry\/","url_meta":{"origin":207,"position":1},"title":"How Closed-Mindedness Obstructs Effective Inquiry","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"December 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"In his recent book Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, John Nixon describes his encounters with the two main protagonists of the 2003 Iraq war. 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