Difficulty: What the fuck
Burger King bullshit
So I was at Burger King today, and after waiting forever for my food, I couldn’t help but mutter, “This is bullshit.” Then I recalled how I had been defining “bullshit” in the last few days:
Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness.
And then I thought: how does this apply to “Burger King bullshit”? I pondered this question for hours and finally had what seemed like a eureka moment:
Burger King bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of Burger King without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of Burger King correctness.
Obviously, this is not bullshit in quite the same sense as propaganda, bad-faith punditry, or empty philosophical posturing. And if it turns out that we could use my definition of bullshit as a template for calling anything that annoys or frustrates us “bullshit,” then the definition would be too ad hoc. As Karl Popper put it, “A theory that explains everything explains nothing.”
But, you might ask: so what if we could easily plug in whatever we want to explain Burger King bullshit?
Well, then dentist-office bullshit, airport-security bullshit, thermodynamics bullshit, etc., become mere rhetorical punching bags. We would find it difficult to explain what differentiates bullshit from incompetence, dysfunction, insincerity, institutional hollowness, hypocrisy, bad service, fraud, laziness, ordinary failure, and a whole lot of shit that annoys or frustrates us—and risk contributing to philosophical discourse a definition that is, well, bullshit.
The ethics of bullshit
That said, Burger King bullshit and representational, or “classic,” bullshit do have something in common. That is, both suggest that the bullshitter simulates adherence to some standard while not actually trying to get things right in accordance with that standard, or that the bullshitter is indifferent to some standard of correctness.
This might explain why we get upset when we are on the receiving end of bullshit: not only has the bullshitter failed to uphold some standard, but she either (a) pretends to uphold it or (b) doesn’t even try to pretend. And that, I will argue, is a moral failure.
First, recall this passage from On Bullshit, where Harry Frankfurt discusses a verse from Longfellow:
“In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.”
This means to say that people in the old days didn’t cut corners. They paid attention to details in their craftsmanship even if such details would normally be invisible, or else it would bother their conscience. “[O]ne might perhaps also say,” Frankfurt states, “there was no bullshit.”
The trouble is that not every failure of craftsmanship is a moral failure. A bad carpenter may simply be incompetent. A lazy Burger King employee may be rude, apathetic, or badly trained. So if bullshit were nothing more than failure to meet a standard, that would not yet explain why classic bullshit is morally distinctive.
The moral issue appears when we move into representational practices—assertion, inquiry, reporting, argument, testimony, and the like. In these practices, one does not merely produce an object or perform a service. One presents oneself as answerable to norms of truth, evidence, and getting things right. And that changes the moral landscape.
When a bullshitter merely simulates adherence to those norms, she does more than perform badly. She exploits a shared practice while refusing to be governed by the standards that make the practice possible. She takes the benefits of looking serious, informed, careful, or rational without submitting to the discipline that those appearances are supposed to signal.
That is morally objectionable for at least three reasons.
First, it is a kind of disrespect. The bullshitter treats her audience not as fellow participants in a truth-directed practice, but as people to be managed, impressed, manipulated, or pacified.
Second, it is unfair. The bullshitter wants the social authority that comes with sounding as if one is trying to get things right, without taking on the burden of actually doing so.
Third, it is corrosive. Bullshit makes it harder for all of us to distinguish genuine inquiry from empty performance, and so it degrades the very practices on which intellectual and civic life depend.
Note that within our framework, all three reasons for why bullshit is morally objectionable can also be used to explain what is wrong with lying. Lying is also disrespectful and manipulative. Lying also gives the liar an unfair epistemic advantage. Lying is also corrosive to any dialogue in which we might partake.
So why the difference in moral judgment?
Why do we treat bullshitters more leniently than we treat liars?
This points to a distinction between Frankfurt’s moral argument against bullshit and mine. Rather than attributing the bullshitter’s moral failure to disrespect, unfairness, and corrosion, Frankfurt argues that bullshitting is a greater enemy to truth, and that it is thus more reprehensible than lying, which requires the liar to at least respect truth.
Truth, admittedly, seems like a loftier ideal for philosophers. But Frankfurt also says:
“The problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.”
We can now try to answer that question.
In response to Frankfurt, I will argue that the reason our attitude toward bullshit tends to be more benign than our attitude toward lying is not that bullshit is harmless, but that lying typically involves a more direct epistemic and interpersonal wrong. A lie aims to replace the truth with what the liar takes to be false. Bullshit, by contrast, often works less by directly overturning the truth than by cheapening, bypassing, or exploiting the norms that are supposed to guide truth-directed practice.
Recall that during his grand jury testimony in 1998, Bill Clinton parsed his earlier statement that “there is no improper relationship” with Monica Lewinsky by saying, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” By quibbling over the word “is,” Clinton was not seriously trying to get things right. He was performing fidelity to standards of reasoning and truth while using those standards as a shield. That is a plausible case of insincere bullshit.
But suppose Clinton had said, instead, “There is and never was an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky.” This would be an instance of lying.
Now further assume that Clinton had achieved his goal of getting away with deception in both cases—bullshitting and lying—and that in both cases there was not enough evidence to hold him legally accountable.
The Clinton example gives us a useful way into the broader question of why lying is often judged more harshly than bullshitting.
Epistemic harm
First, bullshit is often easier to see through than a successful lie. In Clinton’s case, his evasiveness may frustrate us, but it need not destroy our grasp of the underlying truth. A successful lie, by contrast, more straightforwardly aims to replace the truth in the audience’s mind with what the speaker takes to be false. If Clinton had instead lied and succeeded in fooling us, we would have been even more furious at him for distorting our very perception of reality—namely, that he did have an affair with Lewinsky.
Disrespect and unfairness
Second, lying is usually more sharply interpersonal. The liar intentionally tries to get you to believe what she thinks is false. She directly recruits your trust against you. This is much more manipulative and disrespectful than bullshitting, which tends to involve merely putting on a show, as Clinton did. Lying is also more sharply unfair. The liar aims to replace the truth, in the hearer’s mind, with what the liar takes to be false. Bullshitting is often more like reckless disregard: it may not aim to destroy the truth outright, but it is willing to endanger the norms and practices by which truth is ordinarily tracked.
Clinton’s bullshit manipulates by performance and evasion; a lie would have manipulated more directly, by asking the public to accept as true what he himself took to be false.
Bullshit can be sincere; lying can’t
Third, a liar must, on some level, know that she is trying to get another person to accept what she herself takes to be false. That structure makes the wrong especially legible: the liar is betraying the audience’s trust on purpose. Bullshit can have that structure too, but it need not. A bullshitter may be vain, careless, tribal, self-deceived, or carried away by appearances. She may honestly believe that she is being serious and responsible. That does not excuse the bullshit. But it can make it seem less vicious, because the wrong is not always one of straightforward intentional betrayal.
I do not mean to suggest that Clinton’s own bullshit was sincere. The point is rather that bullshit as a category leaves room for sincerity in a way that lying does not. That helps explain why the moral profile of bullshit is often less stark than that of lying.
So this, I think, is part of why we often judge liars more harshly than bullshitters. Lying is necessarily insincere. Bullshit need not be. Still, bullshit remains morally objectionable because even when it is sincere, it exploits, cheapens, or corrodes the norms that make truth-directed practices possible.
A brief note on corrosiveness
Sharp readers may have noticed that I mostly set aside the corrosiveness point in the previous arguments. I did so because it is unclear whether bullshitting is more or less corrosive to civic discourse than lying. That said, I’ll take a stab at it.
When Frankfurt condemned bullshitting as more morally reprehensible than lying, his argument was that bullshitting, in virtue of the bullshitter’s indifference to truth, is a greater enemy to truth. That’s a nice idea, but how does that fit within my framework?
My take is that, while bullshitting is a less direct epistemic threat than lying, it may be the more insidious one. The bullshitter is like a reckless driver: she does not have to aim at truth in order to endanger it. The liar is more like a driver who deliberately targets a pedestrian: the threat is more direct, more intentional, and therefore more immediately legible as a wrong. Our outrage at premeditated murder tends to be stronger than our outrage at reckless endangerment or negligent killing. We are therefore often quicker to condemn the liar than we are to condemn the bullshitter. But that does not settle the deeper question of long-run social danger.
A liar, like a killer driver, is more likely to be punished severely. A bullshitter, like a careless driver, more easily gets dismissed as merely sloppy, frustrating, or irresponsible. But that does not mean bullshit is any less dangerous for society. Once we cultivate a culture of bullshit, the carelessness proliferates. We do not want to live in a society where certain pedestrians are deliberately targeted, but neither do we want to live in one where any pedestrian may become the hapless victim of recklessness. By the same token, we do not want liars killing the truth. But neither do we want truth to be unintentionally run over by bullshitters.
None of this shows that bullshit is less dangerous overall than lying. My point so far has only been that lying is usually judged more harshly because its wrong is more direct and more legible. The long-run corrosive effects of bullshit may, in some contexts, be just as serious—or worse.
So there may be no easy ranking here. Lying is often the more direct wrong; bullshit may be the more culturally pervasive one. Either way, a society that tolerates either too easily is in serious trouble.
Philosophy without Bullshit 