Why is bullshit objectionable

Now available! Available here. The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release.

Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:. In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods are everywhere.

The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not cut corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to features of their work which would ordinarily not be visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences.

So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps also say, there was no bullshit. It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods as in some way analogues of bullshit. But in what way? Is the resemblance that bullshit itself is invariably produced in a careless or self-indulgent manner, that it is never finely crafted, that in the making of it there is never the meticulously attentive concern with detail to which Longfellow alludes?

Is the bullshitter by his very nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined? The word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped.

It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought. The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite.

But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.

And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who — with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth — dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right. Yet there is something more to be said about this. However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something.

There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated, evidently, with simple carelessness or inattention to detail. I shall attempt in due course to locate it more correctly.

This comes out in an anecdote related by Fania Pascal, who knew him in Cambridge in the s:. I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. Now who knows what really happened? It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says.

Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to make a small joke, and it misfired. He was only pretending to bawl Pascal out, just for the fun of a little hyperbole; and she got the tone and the intention wrong. She thought he was disgusted by her remark, when in fact he was only trying to cheer her up with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing.

In that case the incident is not incredible or bizarre after all. But if Pascal failed to recognize that Wittgenstein was only teasing, then perhaps the possibility that he was serious was at least not so far out of the question.

She knew him, and she knew what to expect from him; she knew how he made her feel. Her way of understanding or of misunderstanding his remark was very likely not altogether discordant, then, with her sense of what he was like. Then just what is it that the Wittgenstein in her report considers to be objectionable? Let us assume that he is correct about the facts: that is, Pascal really does not know how run-over dogs feel. Even so, when she says what she does, she is plainly not lying.

She would have been lying if, when she made her statement, she was aware that she actually felt quite good. For however little she knows about the lives of dogs, it must certainly be clear to Pascal that when dogs are run over they do not feel good.

So if she herself had in fact been feeling good, it would have been a lie to assert that she felt like a run-over dog. Of course, the phrase is far from being complete nonsense to her; she is hardly speaking gibberish. What she says has an intelligible connotation, which she certainly understands. Moreover, she does know something about the quality of the feeling to which the phrase refers: she knows at least that it is an undesirable and unenjoyable feeling, a bad feeling.

The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad. Her characterization of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively particular.

Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her account, the distinctive kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is run over. It does so, I believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as being — roughly speaking, for now — unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels.

Her description of her own feeling is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up. She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are. What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct.

Be this as it may, it seems clear what that reaction is. He reacts as though he perceives her to be speaking about her feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the relevant facts. The point that troubles Wittgenstein is manifestly not that Pascal has made a mistake in her description of how she feels.

Nor is it even that she has made a careless mistake. Her laxity, or her lack of care, is not a matter of having permitted an error to slip into her speech on account of some inadvertent or momentarily negligent lapse in the attention she was devoting to getting things right.

The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying. This is important to Wittgenstein because, whether justifiably or not, he takes what she says seriously, as a statement purporting to give an informative description of the way she feels.

He construes her as engaged in an activity to which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet as taking no interest in whether what she says is true or false.

That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

Now I shall consider quite selectively certain items in the Oxford English Dictionary that are pertinent to clarifying the nature of bullshit. For one thing, the dictionary evidently supposes that the use of the term bull in bull session serves primarily just to indicate gender. But even if it were true that the participants in bull sessions are generally or typically males, the assertion that a bull session is essentially nothing more particular than an informal discussion among males would be as far off the mark as the parallel assertion that a hen session is simply an informal conversation among females.

It is probably true that the participants in hen sessions must be females. Nonetheless the term hen session conveys something more specific than this concerning the particular kind of informal conversation among females to which hen sessions are characteristically devoted. The characteristic topics of a bull session have to do with very personal and emotion-laden aspects of life — for instance, religion, politics, or sex.

People are generally reluctant to speak altogether openly about these topics if they expect that they might be taken too seriously. What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say: It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel.

The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it. Each of the contributors to a bull session relies, in other words, upon a general recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be understood as being what he means wholeheartedly or believes unequivocally to be true.

The purpose of the conversation is not to communicate beliefs. Accordingly, the usual assumptions about the connection between what people say and what they believe are suspended.

The statements made in a bull session differ from bullshit in that there is no pretense that this connection is being sustained. They are like bullshit by virtue of the fact that they are in some degree unconstrained by a concern with truth. This resemblance between bull sessions and bullshit is suggested also by the term shooting the bull, which refers to the sort of conversation that characterizes bull sessions and in which the term shooting is very likely a cleaned-up rendition of shitting.

The very term bull session is, indeed, quite probably a sanitized version of bullshit session. Gleed, Arise to Conquer vi. Baron, Human Kind xxiv. Here the term bull evidently pertains to tasks that are pointless in that they have nothing much to do with the primary intent or justifying purpose of the enterprise which requires them. The term bull is also employed, in a rather more widespread and familiar usage, as a somewhat less coarse equivalent of bullshit.

The entry at hand also provides the following two definitions:. I Times Lit. It covers digressions and innocent irrelevancies, which are not invariably instances of bull; furthermore, saying that bull is not to the purpose leaves it uncertain what purpose is meant.

It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled.

In the first version of the case, the ship sinks and hundreds of people drown. An alternative scenario has the vessel arriving safely. In believing beyond the evidence, the shipowner becomes culpably responsible for the deaths of the passengers and crew first version or for putting their lives at risk the alternative. Clifford generalizes from cases like these, concluding that every leap beyond the evidence is a moral error. His readers have often seen him as overgeneralizing. A mountain climber may be guilty of wishful thinking in believing that she can leap a crevasse — but her confidence could be instrumental in bringing her safely across.

Each member of a group of scientists, working on a difficult problem, may believe that his or her approach offers the best way to tackle it — and that valuable diversity of belief, not all of it evidentially warranted, can be crucial to finding the solution. Where the costs of being wrong are severe, beliefs must be held to a higher standard. The potential deaths of the seafarers impose a moral demand on the shipowner. He should have checked. Bullshitters care nothing for truth or falsehood, and hence are not scrupulous about assembling evidence.

Sometimes recognition of bullshit can come with a lighthearted laugh who cares — or who ought to care — how many people attended the last presidential inauguration?

On the other hand, bullshit about large policy issues ought to be the target of moral outrage. When millions of people might lose their health care coverage, when tax reform might impose new burdens on those who are already struggling, when withdrawing from an agreement might encourage nuclear proliferation or might threaten the human future on our planet, it is profoundly wrong not to investigate.

Even if the actual consequences, if probed, would not turn out to be so dire, thinking the issue through is morally required. In a transient moment of Republican responsibility, John McCain recognized the point. Rushing blindly to judgment when mistakes might well produce enormous suffering is a grave moral error. Why are we so blind to this moral corruption?

Even Senator McCain stopped short of castigating his colleagues with the vehemence their actions deserved. Perhaps in part because, in a culture of bullshit, we have become inured to the daily dumpings. Perhaps because, as Frankfurt originally suggested, each individual instance of bullshit seems not quite as bad as an outright lie.

That may well be correct. Deliberately deceiving someone about a topic seems even worse than uttering the same words as bullshit. Yet bullshit may have more tendency to spread than lying does.

Have we become cynical about our new technologies, seeing the internet as a vast arena in which the masters of bullshit can compete with one another? So far, this essay has only looked at basic bullshit, performances about factual matters some of them, like climate change and nuclear proliferation, admittedly very large.

Bullshit thrives, however, because of bullshit about bullshit. The credo of the higher bullshit consists of two doctrines: everyone does it; and politics rightly cuts ethical corners. Both need to be exposed for the bullshit they are. Nor do mainstream media differ from Fox News and Breitbart through their inviolate purity.

Where it falls short is in its silence about the relative rates of bullshit. Republican discourse today exudes bullshit in great clumps and clods and streams. The peccadilloes of the political opposition, by contrast, are more modest, more chaste, less brazen. Bullshit only arrives in small pellets. The discussions of health care, those that preceded the passage of the Affordable Care Act and those that gushed from the failed attempts to undo Obamacare underscore the difference in bullshit density.

Perhaps they recall scriptural passages about motes and beams, injunctions not to chastise offenders for their relatively minor failings until they have come to amend their own more flagrant derelictions.

Those with such tender consciences will require something more than the first article of the higher bullshit if they are to exonerate themselves. The idea of politics as overriding moral niceties seems well suited to their needs. Self-styled political realists think of themselves as having learned that moral scruples can sometimes interfere with attaining important social goals. Legislative achievements often involve compromise, horse-trading, and dealing, producing a morally imperfect but overall valuable bill witness the Affordable Care Act.