Comments on: Snitch!

By: Another Duncan

Another Duncan — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 06:17:22 +0000

Some comments (Zizka and Tom Runnacles) have come close to my own thoughts on this. I think that at some level many people feel that anyone who has unaccountable power over us is a potential threat. I also observe that people generally band together in the face of a common enemy. Hence the snitch A is reviled by all the B’s because he has joined the enemy C. He is now perceived as one of Them, not one of Us. This explains why corporate and government whistle-blowers are appreciated by the general public, they’re aiding the B’s against the C’s and why there are many examples of B’s who strongly dislike each other refusing to snitch on each other.

By: DM Sherwood

DM Sherwood — Wed, 23 Jul 2003 12:42:05 +0000

Admiral Canaris, from 1935 through 1943, was head of the Abwehr (military intelligence) in Nazi Germany. In that capacity, he was almost certainly providing information and help to the Allies and resistance movements – for one account: http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Canaris.htm I would need a lot of convincing to believe he should be reviled. Posted by Bob ******************** Well yeah so would most of us. Generally in ethics bringing the Nazi’s in is a bad move. The real issue is something like someone is doing real harm but welshing on him will cause inapropriate excesive punishnment and/or total annilation of one’s realtionship with them

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:22:40 +0000

It seems obvious to me that “snitching” is generally condemned because, in practice, the moral problem involved in the “snitching” is more complex and difficult than the moral problem involved in maintaining trust. Put another way, betrayal of trust is easily recognizable (and overwhelmingly a bad thing) while appropriate betrayal that serves a higher moral purpose is far more difficult to identify and is generally controversial.

By: W. Kiernan

W. Kiernan — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 03:49:50 +0000

I have a notion which I think relates to this topic; uynfortunately my head is full of concrete just now so I doubt I can explicate it in detail, so I’ll just toss it out there. It has to do with people’s innate sense of proportion in punishment. Consider a lesser law, the one against exceeding the speed limit in your car. Almost everybody speeds now and again; at the same time almost everybody feels that doing away with speed limits altogether would probably be a bad idea. Let’s say a fair penalty for one instance of 60 MPH in a 45 MPH zone is $0.13, and a fair penalty for 90 in a 45 zone is $6.00; but of course on the average for every thousand times you speed you only get ticketed once – the law is cool with that – so the fines are $135 for the first offense and loss-of-license for the second. It all averages out. Along comes Mr. Snitch, screwing up the odds, smacking his target (probably not out of public-spiritedness but instead for spite’s sake) with a very disproportionately high fine for that single offense. Everyone frowns at the snitch, poem-loving types quote Pope at him (“who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”) Now compare that with an abominable crime like assault with a deadly weapon. Citizens and law enforcement agents alike are hardly satisfied to catch one in a thousand gun-wielders; they’ll nab every last one they possibly can to the applause of pretty much everybody. Thus most people find informing on so violent a criminal to be not so disreputable an act. (However that doesn’t fit my own sensibility about Theodore Kaczynski’s brother, who narked Ted out. I know Kaczynski was a murderer, but it still creeps me out about his own brother dropping the dime. If my sister were the Unabomber, murderer or no, I’m sure I’d never have narked her out.)

By: clew

clew — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:09:17 +0000

Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival (1992) digs into this in the third paragraph of the preface:

As individuals trying to be good, we aim at being both loyal and honest, for example. But in working life, these two virtues are often in conflict; that is, we must be loyal at the expense of honesty or, conversely, honest at the expense of loyalty to our organization or fellow workers.

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:42:29 +0000

I’m reminded, again, of Thomas Macaulay: “Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.” – from: http://www.bartleby.com/100/405.html

By: Realish

Realish — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 08:47:47 +0000

Seems pretty simple to me: most moral theories (particularly utilitarian and deontological) are universalist. The disapprobation for snitching is based, directly or indirectly, on tribal ties, so a universalist morality will have nothing to say about it. Which is one of many reasons I’m not fond of either of those moral theories. A value theorist (nod to Brian W. above) would say of snitching the following: a virtuous person snitches in appropriate situations, the appropriate amount. While that doesn’t have the virtue of crisp clarity or prescriptiveness, it does have the virtue of matching pretty well with our intuitions and practices.

By: Bob

Bob — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 19:47:09 +0000

Fine. Here is a real example of estimable snitching by the standards of most people. Admiral Canaris, from 1935 through 1943, was head of the Abwehr (military intelligence) in Nazi Germany. In that capacity, he was almost certainly providing information and help to the Allies and resistance movements – for one account: http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Canaris.htm I would need a lot of convincing to believe he should be reviled.

By: Shai

Shai — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 18:19:53 +0000

Here’s a quote from Dewey via Hilary Putnam: “As Philosophy has no private store of knowledge of, or methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good … as it accepts knowledge and principles from those competent in science and inquiry. It accepts the goods that are diffused in human experience. It has no mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.”

By: Shai

Shai — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 18:15:07 +0000

I have a few comments: (1) If I'm not misinterpreting Brian's comment, he uses autonomy as a kind of principle of non interference (well maybe I am misinterpreting him, but it will help make a point). Anyway, in the case of the adulterer and the snitch, witholding information from the wronged partner is also a lack of respect for autonomy (especially if you're friends with both), so it's not an easy way out of the problem. (2) there's a disconnect between evaluation and action; the best action isn't necessarily a reversal of the wrong (3) anyone who has had several simultaneous relationships will know that gossip will tend to do you in sooner rather than later (4) the dissonance or tension between friendship and autonomy doesn't necessarily mean jumping ship one way or the other, and neither does it require crude moderation of virtues a la Aristotle (5) the snitch problem runs together more than one criticism of moral philosophy (a) impartiality requirements i.e. to what degree do you internalize the values and goals of others (b) absolutism inherent in deontological theories (c) methodologically queer i.e. like economics embraces some oversimplifications; this is good or bad depending on whether it's done out of laziness and ignorance, or to make a problem tractable with current knowledge and methods (d) sometimes unhealthy focus on maximizing the good, or specific goods to the detriment of others (i) the first, (a) will be partly because of either reason in (c), but the disconnect between reasons and motives is often discussed; for example, see Michael Stocker, The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories (ii) the criticism in (b) is, I think, a bit of a straw man. it sounds a bit like criticisms of Kant that claim that he would be unmoved on lying, so would make the wrong decision, for example, if you were a boat captain with hiding jews during world war II and was asked whether there were any onboard. first, it's useful to understand the context; some absolutist or deontological theories are more concerned with taking thick concepts seriously -- that doesn't mean there won't be any ordering or precedence a la choice theory in economics, etc. (iii) taking thick ethical concepts seriously may require refiguring the concepts or the consequences; the trick is not to lean too hard on intuitions that don't have reasons

By: Shai

Shai — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 17:59:20 +0000

dm sherwood, re Bernard Williams, you can try his book "Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy" and "JW Mason"'s reference was to an article on Peter Singer archived here

By: jw mason

jw mason — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 17:00:50 +0000

dm- Check out “Other Peoples’ Mothers” in the Jan. 10, 2000 New Republic. I’m having trouble finding a working link but you may do better.

By: DM SHERWOOD

DM SHERWOOD — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:50:18 +0000

My comment got out of hand, so I posted it here instead. Posted by Aaron Haspel · July 19, 2003 03:01 PM and your piece in Godisamachine Granted IBSEN’s Hero is a Prig but is that always a bad thing? Your beggin the question between tick and clear values. Read HARLAN ELLISON’S ESSAYS (Sleepless Nights in a Procrustian Bed is a good place to start) for a defence of the Priggish position. dmsherwood53@hotmail.com

By: DM SHERWOOD

DM SHERWOOD — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:33:37 +0000

“someone breaks with their “thick” relationships of friends, clan or family,” This seems to me to be the fudermental point When can we rise above the merely personal and when is this a betrayal. Plato Kant and Christianity seem to be on the side of Higher Justice a lot of modern Humanitarian Thought implicitly is on the side of the more merely ‘Human’. Its a real issue it even turns uo in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

By: DM SHERWOOD

DM SHERWOOD — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:27:52 +0000

This is really vague in my memory, but I think Gandhi said something about how it was permissible to lie if a refugee was in your home and he would be killed by the imperialist colonizers without just cause. CS Lewis (the Xtian apologist) an Autoritarian by the way , said that the Lie was the Final and often the Only weapon of the Inferior in a Power realionship