I wanted to go back to a comment I made earlier concerning Kant’s world. The discussion last night got me thinking about living in a society where no one lies to each other, and I wondered what that would really be like. And just to get this out of the way – I am in no way constituting lying – I’m just theorizing.
I feel like humanity as a whole can’t handle the truth. Everyone has these egos that are continuously inflated through deception of some sort (whether intentionally or not). It is so common in society for people to need validation, and to need to be told that they are this or that. It seems to me that much of the time, this validation comes from people telling un-truths just to appease the other person, telling them what they want to hear. For example, if a girl is going out with her friends, when she finally pick out an outfit after seventeen tries and lots of frustration, she’ll ask her best friend “How does this look?” This girl is not usually asking for the truth. She doesn’t want to hear “Well actually those jeans make your legs look real short” or “That top makes you look fat.” What she wants is validation that she looks good. While friends may try to be up front and honest with each other, there is always a little of this that will be going on, as is the nature of humans.
Furthermore, if we were to live in this Kantian society where lies are not told, I feel like on a positive note we could trust everyone, sure, but it could either go one of two ways. For one, it could create the ultimate trusting society, in which we all were happily able to know anything about anyone or anything whenever we wanted.
On the other hand, I think this complete honesty would cause sort of a social rift. If people need validation through lying, then without lying, no one would ask anyone anything they didn’t want to know the truth about. This makes me think that self-consciousness and self-doubt would run rampant. People would constantly hate each other for telling them the truth.
To end, I’m again not supporting lies, I just think that a Kantian society like this would have many social problems, and would be a difficult world to live in.
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While I think your points are valid, especially for our world, in which we are accustomed to many people lying and are accustomed to not having to always hear the truth, I feel that there is a small aspect missing from your analysis.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact of the matter is that IF we lived in Kant's world, in which everyone told the truth, I do wonder if society would actually have problems. Because if we all lived in Kant's world, we would all be accustomed to the truth, unlike the world we live in now in which we are all accustomed to lies. So if in Kant's world, we were unaccustomed to hearing lies, hearing the truth would be expected and we would not be surprised by such an action - as it would be commonplace. I feel that in our world, we seem to derive the majority of problems out of the things we are unaccustomed to. Whereas in Kant's world, lying is the thing to which people are unaccustomed, and thus truth wouldn't be a shocking or offensive thing to hear.
I still stand by the thought that there would be a social rift. Even if we had always had this society, and were always used to the truth, I think communication and human connection would be greatly restricted from what we have now. The truth hurts. No one can deny that. Even using Professor Harwood as an example, people DON’T ask him if they don’t want to know the truth. If the truth were constantly being told, our feelings would constantly be getting hurt, therefore causing this social awkwardness.
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ReplyDeleteRousseau provides a different look at this social rift. He believes that it is not human's nature to want to be deceived, it is only society telling us that we want it. I agree with Rousseau that it is not our nature to want to be deceived. Society tells us that we need constant validation from others. If we followed our genius, it wouldn't matter what anyone else thought of you.
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