Liars
& Truth tellers
I
often think academics in many fields, but especially academic
philosophers should get a life. More to the point they should live
for a while in the real world in enterprises where reality bites!
Among
our distant ancestors, people who thought odd things such as that
sabre-toothed tigers were really gentle, cuddly misunderstood animals
generally got themselves swiftly removed from both the human
intellectual and gene pools! Today however, especially in subjects
like moral philosophy they get tenure, write the syllabus and
influence a whole generation of students!
Let
me explain further. I am not being anti-intellectual. I'm not
anti-academic. I'm just against folly. Particularly the sort of folly
that flourishes where ideas are divorced from their real-world
consequences.
In
1990 I took a year off from being a parish priest and studied
philosophy full time at the (then) prestigious University of
Melbourne. Before training for the priesthood I that been a design
engineer with a masters degree in mechanical engineering. One time
this lecturer was belabouring the philosophic problems of “tests”,
particularly the more problematic cases where a false positive (say)
gave a worse outcome than a false negative. Judge Blackwood's dictum
“I would rather release ten guilty murderers than hang one innocent
man” is a good example. I remember thinking as I listened to this
philosopher explain how philosophy had yet to solve this conundrum
that all he needed to do was ask his colleagues in the engineering
department. Engineers had solved it decades ago.
Engineers
had faced the problem in many guises that had very strong reality
feedback mechanisms.
If
you are producing machines where a 50 cent component that fails costs
your $5,000 to repair the damage under warranty you very quickly
learn the maths of how many “good” components you are willing to
reject in the process of eliminating any “bad” components.
Engineers
learned to get their “theory” right because they operated in a
real world where those who got it wrong went out of business!
So
I am going to take a “real world” approach to this problem of
truth telling and lying. If you want to see the academic
philosophers' work Wikipedia has a good outline article. If you are
confused by moralists who seem to delight in thinking up scenarios
that seem to tip common morality on its head, stay with me I will
deal with them eventually – not immediately because they simply
don't warrant it. However I will quickly explain why they should be
treated as charlatans.
Most
of us are socialised into a functional understanding of morality.
In
truth versa falsehood we have been in situations where the response
“Liar!” has leapt unbidden to our minds even if not to our lips.
So we in fact have a functional notion of truth and falsehood. For
most of us this notion works pretty well within the range of
situations we commonly face. Then along comes some teacher of moral
philosophy who dazzles us with hypothetical situations in which our
notions of right and wrong seem at odds with the rules of conduct we
commonly employ.
Their
hidden agenda is possibly only to make themselves look clever, but in
the process they are prepared to make us doubt or even reject the
rules we have used. Sometimes we are stupid or gullible enough to
believe them.
I
am calling them out as charlatans! I am saying that your common rules
work in common situations. It is the common situations we need to
understand and explore.
As
I said earlier, we are socialised into moral understanding just as we
are socialised into the complexities of social conventions. Our human
brain is very good at analysing amazingly complex social situations
and telling us the correct response. So if you are ever in one of
these fantastical situations the well formed moral character will
almost certainly choose the correct action. We need to find first
the general rules for general situations, and NOT be fooled into
abandoning these rules by tricksters who produce out of a hat a
fantastical situation where the general rule does not apply, and who
then turn our innate knowledge that in this situation the general
rule does not work to make us doubt or throw out the general rule!
Let
me give you an engineering example. In my first job out of university
the design office I joined had just been saved from ignominy by a
professor of engineering who correctly picked a situation where the
general rule did not apply. This is the story:
Our
office had been instructed to design a compressed air tank for
starting engines on jet airliners at an airport. This seemed simple.
Draughtsmen had tables of how big at tank was needed to act as a
reservoir for a given delivery rate of compressed air. So they
designed the tank by their normal rules. The tank was built. Then
came the test. Failure! There was not enough compressed air to start
even one engine on the airliner!
The
draughtsmen re- checked their figures, but all seemed in order. The
engineers checked the figures – and came to the same conclusion.
The tank should have been big enough. In desperation a university
professor was called in.
The
professor solved the problem simply: “This was a special case where
you could not ignore the cooling effect of adiabatic expansion”.
The tables worked perfectly for “normal” compressed air systems
where there was only a small amount of expansion.. The aircraft
system used extremely high initial pressure with the tank run down to
a comparatively low pressure. In this instance expansion was huge.
The gas laws meant that the air temperature in the tank dropped
hugely so the air contracted hugely, and then there was not enough
volume to start the engine. He did the maths, told them how much
bigger the tank had to be, it was built and it worked.
However
next time they were designing a compressed air system they went back
to their old tables. Why? Because at ordinary pressures adiabatic
expansion was small and the tables gave the right answer. For
ordinary situations the ordinary rules worked fine.
So
next post let us start thinking through the ordinary ideas of truth
and lies.
