Against Purity

• In Event: Philosophy and Current Public Issues

Abstract

A core worry in the age of misinformation and disinformation is that these two forms of distorted facts and beliefs “skew the political landscape, and impact the attitudes and actions of political actors.” In this paper, instead, I discuss a different but related perversion of our modern age of fast-moving information: the desire to unearth the “truth” about politically meaningful actors. While driven by the demand for greater transparency and accountability, I argue that the desire to know the minute secrets of political leaders' past and private deeds comports with a conservative inkling to police moral purity. The view that humans have a true inherent moral character is, I suggest, a conservative belief echoing Augustinian discussions of predestination. Instead, I propose to recover a more Aristotelian view according to which virtue and a moral character is something to be learned, honed, and improved. Private and, in particular, past misdeeds have thus limited informative value, for they speak about how someone used to be. Only compared with someone’s later behavior do they become informative by allowing an assessment of how much (or how little) someone changed.
Therefore, except for some limited cases, it might be ethically and politically advisable to judge the private misdeeds of political leaders with a grain of salt—not because political leaders are exempt from the judgment we would bear on others, but because there is no reason to think that they are less fallible than others.

Therefore, except for some limited cases, it might be ethically and politically advisable to judge the private misdeeds of political leaders with a grain of salt—not because political leaders are exempt from the judgment we would bear on others, but because there is no reason to think that they are less fallible than others.

Author

• Yuna Blajer de la Garza, Loyola University, Chicago