I just watched Harry Frankfurt’s appearance on the Daily Show. I liked the interview, but I wish I could have seen the two of them have a longer conversation. Jon Stewart has drawn a lot of attention to himself by calling bullshit on various media personalities (e.g. in the Crossfire appearance); it seems to me that Harry Frankfurt and Jon Stewart each have relatively thought-out views about bullshit. It would be interesting to see the two of them discuss that topic at greater length.
By the way, I am not sure whether Frankfurt is right to say that bullshitting is worse than lying. Specifically, I don’t see why bullshitting is supposed to show less "respect for the truth" than lying. Deliberately ramming your car into pedestrians is probably worse — and probably shows less respect for human life — than driving recklessly without caring whether you hit anyone. Perhaps something similar is the case with utterances: Deliberately uttering things which are false, i.e. lying, is worse than uttering things without caring whether they are true or false, i.e. bullshitting. As Frankfurt says, the liar does care about the truth, but he cares about it in precisely the wrong way; perhaps it’s better not to care about it at all.
Another analogy: The bullshitter is to Han Solo as the liar is to Darth Vader. Han Solo doesn’t care about the Force; he just wants to fly the Millenium Falcon around and around. Darth Vader, on the other hand, does care about the Force, but he cares about it in precisely the wrong way. But when we watch Star Wars, we’re supposed to think that being like Darth Vader is worse than being like Han Solo.
Oh, and another thing: I think having the notion of "bullshit" would have been useful during the election, when everyone was arguing about the lead-up to the Iraq war. For instance, a lot of people have accused Bush of having lied about weapons of mass destruction. Bush supporters typically respond to this by saying that Bush didn’t know whether Saddam had WMD’s. Once that response is made, the conversation typically degenerates into a discussion about the circumstances under which a person can be said to have lied. Bush may or may not have lied, but he probably did bullshit about the WMD’s. That is, he probably did claim that there were WMD’s in Iraq without caring whether there were or were not. Bullshitting may be worse than lying, or it may not be as bad as lying, as I suspect; but whatever the case, bullshitting is still clearly wrong. Perhaps the election would have gone differently if we had had a polite way to talk about whether Bush bullshitted us into Iraq.
Leave a comment