ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Ethics

I work for a voluntary organisation with a great premise that I am wholeheartedly committed to. However, there are some senior staff who, athough they are themselves committed also, are ineffectual and have over the years damaged the organisation albeit inadvertently. In order to save the organisation from ending, these people need to be removed or brought to a realisation that would probably end in them removing themselves. To do this the board of trustees needs 'evidence' or a paper trail of the ineffectualness. Should I contribute to this evidence in order to help save the organisation or should I refuse to contribute because the people concerned are very good people and only inadvertantly damaging the organisation? To me, both courses of action are wrong in some philosophical sense. And in the end both courses of action leave me damaged in my perssonal sense of what is right or wrong. But should my own concerns be put aside for the greater good of an organisation which genuinely seeks to, and works to...

You write asking for advice about a real life moral dilemma that you face. We often ask others for moral advice, but we are rightly suspicious of those who are too quick to offer it! You need a trustworthy adviser, but to be that, for you, in this context, any advisor would have to know a lot about the details of the relationships in question, about you and about your values, so that they could advise from a perspective that your best self could come to see is warranted. Knowing only as much as can be known from this posting, I think you should distrust anyone who is willing to say to you categorically, "do this" or "do that," so I'm not going to do that. Instead, let's back up and consider whether you have got the best framing of the choice you face. Is there some way of defusing the dilemma? Is it a fully-fledged dilemma or a hard choice? An agent faces a fully-fledged moral dilemma when she is required to do A and she is required to do B and she cannot to both. Whatever she does, she will fail to do...
Ethics

If I lied and told Bob that I was very pleased to see him when I really am indifferent to his existence and couldn't care less if I never saw him for the next two thousand years. My lie made him very happy. Is that as bad a lie as if I lied in an 'ordinary' way, for example lying to my father about why I got home so late or telling my mother I didn't break her favourite vase? What if it didn't make Bob happy, but it just meant that we didn't have an awkward moment since saying that to Bob is what was socially expected of me?

You might enjoy reading Annette Baier's essay, "Why Honesty is a Hard Virtue" in Owen Flanagan and Amelie Rorty (eds) Identity, Character, and Morality which discusses just the issues you raise. There are very complex contextual rules for determining when something counts as a lie. Do adults lie in telling children about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy? Or are they merely story-telling? Social conventions, such as "pleased to meet you" and responding "I'm fine" to an acquaintance's "how are you?" even when things are going really badly and you are very far from fine, do not violate the other’s trust since they are typically not counting on you for a direct and truthful response. You and they know that you are in the realm of conventional exchange, but it is hard to codify exactly how you know this. Returning to your examples, one key to understanding them is to think about their implications for the trust relations between the parties. Are you misleading Bob because, say, he has reason to believe you...