No Country for Honest Men: Political Philosophers and Real Politics
| Author | Robert Jubb,A. Faik Kurtulmus |
| Published date | 01 October 2012 |
| Date | 01 October 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00934.x |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
No Country for Honest Men: Political
Philosophers and Real Politicspost_934539..556
Robert Jubb A. Faik Kurtulmus
University College London Sabanci University,Turkey
There are limits on the duty to tell the truth. Sometimes,because of the undesirable consequences of honesty,we are
morally required not to revealcer tain truths and can evenbe required to lie. In this article,we explore the implications
of this uncontroversial claim for the practice of political philosophers.We argue that, given the consequences of
misunderstandings and misrepresentations that might occur, political philosophers will sometimes be under a moral
duty not to disseminate their research and, in highly exceptional cases,have a moral duty to lie outright.
Keywords: lying; non-ideal theory; political realism
It is perhaps one of the least controversial conclusions available in moral or political
philosophy that sometimes one ought not to tell the truth or at least not the whole truth.
Indeed, sometimes we may be morally required to lie. Kant, for example, has long been
pilloried for thinking that it cannot be permissible to lie to someone who you know intends
to commit murder about the location of their potential victim. That we are sometimes
required not to tell the truth, and even lie, is a conviction that all moral theories have to
account for. Moral and political philosophers, though, do not seem to have thought very
much about the implications of that claim for their own practice.If the honest provision of
information and the discovery of significant truths is not always a duty, and may sometimes
be overridden by other duties, then just as we should not automatically give sincere and
thorough answers to every question we are asked, moral and political philosophers should
bear in mind the consequences of bringing certain conclusions to light when deciding what
to work on and where to publicise their work.
For example, we find many discussions of the permissibility of torture in contemporary
political philosophy quite disturbing. In so far as these focus around discussions of the
infamous ticking-bomb case, they seem to us very dangerous. No government that has
tortured has ever remained within the wholly artificial limits which the ticking-bomb case,
supposedly developed to help us think about how the messy realities of politics might
require us to dirty our hands,1imposes on itself. Nor have many states been reluctant to
torture if they think they can get away with it. The lack of acknowledgement of the risks
that discussions of the permissibility of torture in terms of the ticking-bomb case pose in
light of these two facts would be worrying enough by itself without those discussions being
conducted in the febrile political atmosphere around issues of security over the past decade.
By providing rhetorical resources to those who would, for example, create a network of
secret prisons beyond the rule of law in which to torture anyone unfortunate enough to
have crossed one of their informants,political philosophers – who, however innocently, have
recently advocated thinking about the permissibility of torture through the lens of the
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00934.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012 VOL 60, 539–556
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
ticking-bomb case – have foreseeably made not only each of the violations committed in
those facilities easier but also facilitated the corruption of the var ious political institutions
implicated in those practices.2
Bearing in mind these concerns, in this article we attempt to lay out some conditions
under which political philosophers in particular should exercise restraint about the truths
they set out to discover and expose. We do not attempt to offer a full theory of when
political philosophers should avoid presenting particular truths.Rather, given what seems to
us a general indifference in the discipline to these sorts of concerns, we merely aim to show
that more care than is typical should be taken about what we say and to whom we say it.3
Given the effects that the utterances of political philosophers can have, there will be cases
where political philosophers, despite the fact that what they are saying is true or likely to
be true, should not say it.We do not develop a full account of the precise boundary between
those cases and others where other factors intervene and so the bad effects of some act of
honesty are not enough to make it wrong. Questions, for example, of the responsibility of
others are beyond the scope of this article, as are those of the value of truth and truthful
utterances. Merely bring ing attention to the problem, at least here, will satisfy us.
Our basic point applies not only to political philosophers, but also to other researchers
in the social and natural sciences and humanities. We focus on political philosophers,
because that is the discipline we are most familiar with and therefore the discipline we feel
most competent to address. Other disciplines will interact with public political discussions
and culture more broadly and in ways we do not feel competent to comment on. Applying
our argument to these other disciplines would have to take into account this broader range
of effects, introducing a complexity we are not properly equipped to deal with. The natural
sciences, for example, generate public benefits much more directly than political philosophy
does, which we would have to take into account. Further, because of their subject matter,
applying our argument to other disciplines would also raise different objections.Secrecy in
biology is much less likely to violate requirements of public reason, for example. Although
our basic point is general, the details of our argument are not.
Our argument also has implications beyond the question of which topics political
philosophers should work on and whether they should publicise all of their ideas.4For
instance, political philosophers in their role as journal editors or as members of grant
committees might have duties to make sure that research that will be harmful does not get
done or publicised. Determining whether they do have such duties and what their content
is would require bringing in a different set of considerations.We shall not attempt to address
them.We do not pretend to say everything that might be said. Raising the issue is enough.
It is probably worth saying at this point that we are not making the sort of claims about
the soundness of normative political statements for which Amartya Sen and Colin Farrelly
have recently argued. Their claim is that the abstraction of much contemporary political
philosophy means that it cannot guide action here and now, and because of that, its claims
are false (see Sen, 2006; Farrelly, 2007). We are sceptical of that claim, but that is not our
topic here. The question we discuss here is whether making statements likely to bring about
serious political harms is appropriate, not whether that affects the truth value of those
statements.We are therefore not participating in the debate over the role of abstraction in
contemporary political philosophy that followed Sen’s and Farrelly’s pieces.
540 ROBERT JUBB AND A. FAIK KURTULMUS
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012, 60(3)
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