Sometimes we're told things in confidence, and unless we decide that it's more importantto protect other interests, we can't talk about them outside that context, or at least must censor ourselves. It might be nice if we could avoid those situations, but part of interpersonal ties, and getting close to people, is sharing these private bits of information. Ironically, we love truth, but can't share it freely with society - we love it so much we don't use it except with those we trust. This is deep, but for purposes here, let's just note that one can't avoid being told secrets, and avoiding them keeps us distant from a lot of people. In fact, investing one's secrets with someone one trusts feels good. I probably have fewer secrets than most -- I'm willing to post quite a lot of things on my BLOG here that I wouldn't talk about in public, although it's a bit strange sometimes when some people read them and want to talk to me about them (which is why, to members of my family, if you're going to read my BLOG, I'd prefer you not comment to me about things you see - I'm more ok with friends commenting than family, oddly). If anyone were to dig through my entire blog, they'd find out a lot of things about me that they probably wouldn't learn from just knowing me (although they'd probably eventually learn close to all of it plus just about everything else by dating me). Bottom line is, while secrets are a sign of safeness and comfort between people, that's a side of human nature I don't particularly like. I further think it's part of my philosophical ideal to live life more openly than others.
Meandering slowly back to one of the points I'm making, I have a pretty active role for my conception of justice in my life, and ended up giving the name of a person who did a wrong said person has a propensity to do frequently. I did it for the good of the wronged, but the source of my information was actually private. I'm not sure if I knew so when I made available the information or not, and it has been pointed out to me, so I removed said information. It bothers me that said person is free to continue unimpeded along the path they are, but so it goes. In many ways, they're the antithesis of me. It would take considerably more to cause me to breach confidentiality, so I guess they get the green light. I think this illustrates in some ways what exactly I got from Stanley Fish's book, The Trouble with Principle -- I've come to accept his notion that nonliberal means must occasionally be used to protect a liberal society, because it's the society that's important, not as much the means (I want to read some of Pim Fortuyn's books on the topic, but unfortunately, they don't appear to have been translated from Dutch). I disagree with him though that we should feel free to avoid an attempt to have virtuous relations with the nonvirtuous. To me, virtue is something we strive for both for its affect on society and on us. Far from the trivial examples in his book, I think something must at least, by my value system, be an ethical value, if not a moral value, for us to weigh it against many of the particulars of my ideas of virtuous interaction.
And, of course, to the pleagiver, it doesn't matter to me if you really hate me or not, given what you did. Until/unless you were to take steps to fix yourself and what you did, it's uninteresting to me.
A question for my readers -- what kind of secrets do you have about yourself that would be the most damaging to you if revealed? Do you think that BLOGs are causing society to open up more? Do you ever feel bound by privileged information? When would you breach a confidence? If you had one friend tell you that they were betraying another friend of yours, in confidence, what would you do? What if the betrayed were a stranger? What's the difference?
In other words...
- I'm going to open my BLOG back up again for comments soon
- Saudi Arabia bans forced marrage
- Whatever his government is doing, it's nice to know that BushJr is on top of it. Haha
- The phone company is your friend
- Bring out your dead!
