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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Telling a knowable lie when you have a professional responsibility to speak truthfully is evil.

The problem with the way you've phrased it is, well, who defines responsibilities? Police states always say everyone has a responsibility to report dissent; is lying to cover dissidents or the persecuted evil? But if the responsibilities set in law and by dominant organisations can be void, then who decides? You? But then your statement reduces to "[I think] telling a knowable lie when I think you were morally obliged to tell the truth is evil". Well, no shit doing the opposite of what's morally obligatory is evil. That's practically vacuous.

In this particular case there are enough hypocrisies and contradictions that the issues with the full version of this statement don't really engage, but come on, man, that was a soundbite extraordinaire.

In this particular case there are enough hypocrisies and contradictions that the issues with the full version of this statement don't really engage

That sounds like a more convoluted way of saying "have a professional responsibility to speak truthfully", otherwise where are you getting the idea anyone should avoid being hypocritical and contradictory?

My point here is that these are basically the same people promulgating and violating the responsibility, so they're in a sense estopped from raising the defence of "that responsibility is fake and void"; they could have chosen not to define that responsibility in that way.

To more directly answer your question, though, I think there's at least an imperfect Kantian duty to do so and plausibly a perfect one (if everyone's a hypocrite about the same thing, the denunciations can be said to cease to have meaning).