Insomniac
04-27-2009, 10:30 PM
Moral honesty is pretty easy, at least to know. It isn't always followed, of course, but your parents probably did a good job instilling in you an aversion to lying, cheating, stealing, etc. We fall short, but we usually recognize when we have or as we're doing it.
Intellectual honesty is different because an actual rational and even-handed approach to life would be utterly ruinous to us. We need short cuts and prejudices so that we can make decisions fast enough to be effective. When a person pulls a knife on you, you don't have time to give him the benefit of the doubt while you figure out his intentions. So I get that.
What I don't get is why it's not really considered worthwhile to attempt to be intellectually honest and why we don't call people on their intellectual dishonesty so long as they're strictly telling the truth. You misrepresent something or mislead someone, and it's OK. You leave out the weaknesses in your own arguments and hope no one catches them so you'll look right, and that's expected.
Some disagreements are always going to exist between people with different principles or viewpoints, obviously, but most of the time positions or issues or events can't be left alone to be interpreted according to a person's principles. Instead, those speaking about it and even those of us interpreting it for ourselves, have to fit in new information into pre-existing conceptions. Which as I said, is often good or at least necessary, is definitely very bad when a person has the luxury of mulling a thing and being fair about it.
How many political/religious/artistic disagreements on GMF are actually genuine and how many are just people operating on automatic? Any issue or news item is going to descend into the same handful of circular arguments involving the same people, and how could this be so if people were actually looking at particular facts and weighing them on their own merits?
What's so hard being intellectually honest? Why can't we do it?
Intellectual honesty is different because an actual rational and even-handed approach to life would be utterly ruinous to us. We need short cuts and prejudices so that we can make decisions fast enough to be effective. When a person pulls a knife on you, you don't have time to give him the benefit of the doubt while you figure out his intentions. So I get that.
What I don't get is why it's not really considered worthwhile to attempt to be intellectually honest and why we don't call people on their intellectual dishonesty so long as they're strictly telling the truth. You misrepresent something or mislead someone, and it's OK. You leave out the weaknesses in your own arguments and hope no one catches them so you'll look right, and that's expected.
Some disagreements are always going to exist between people with different principles or viewpoints, obviously, but most of the time positions or issues or events can't be left alone to be interpreted according to a person's principles. Instead, those speaking about it and even those of us interpreting it for ourselves, have to fit in new information into pre-existing conceptions. Which as I said, is often good or at least necessary, is definitely very bad when a person has the luxury of mulling a thing and being fair about it.
How many political/religious/artistic disagreements on GMF are actually genuine and how many are just people operating on automatic? Any issue or news item is going to descend into the same handful of circular arguments involving the same people, and how could this be so if people were actually looking at particular facts and weighing them on their own merits?
What's so hard being intellectually honest? Why can't we do it?