On ‘On Bullshit’ and the removal of nutrition from words

[摘要] Readers of the BJGP will be familiar with the idea of bullshit, in its tangible or rhetorical form, perhaps depending on their practice location. However, my aim here is to recommend a source of commentary on the phenomenon: ‘On Bullshit’ originally published as an essay (https://tinyurl.com/mr2add9v) in 1986, and again in 2005 as a book,1 by the eminent US philosopher, Harry G Frankfurt, now aged 93. He is most famous for his analysis of freedom of will, a subject that any GP has to know something about in daily work, but here I am concerned only with his thoughts on bullshit.I daresay GPs often think ‘… what bullshit … ’ or perhaps more polite equivalents, when confronted with NHS management-speak or the new guidance on pretty much anything that crosses our busy desks; though Frankfurt aims to be rather more analytical. At one point he opines: ‘Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, excrement is matter from which anything nutritive has been removed.’Of which it can be truthfully said much NHS paperwork is characteristic. Truth in itself is a key theme within On Bullshit, and consideration of the nature of lying, deceit, falsehoods and the like is important to healthcare practitioners as it is assumed that we are all bound to an ethical duty never to lie to our patients. Such a virtue is almost a sine qua non of clinical practice. Frankfurt helps us to realise that there are many states of utterance that are not quite a lie, but could be characterised not very far from it. Even Saint Augustine, we are reminded, described eight kinds of lie, only some of which were grievous enough to be sinful (https://web.mit.edu/aorlando/www/HT610Augustine/On%20Lying.pdf). Frankfurt declares:‘It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.’IS BULLSHIT A NECESSARY PART OF HUMAN INTERACTION? Imagine, if you will, a senior politician or officer of the state who feels able to break the law repeatedly. Clearly this could never happen in a modern democratic country, but it is useful as a thought experiment. Such a person may not know or care whether he has broken the law, and could claim innocence without similarly caring as to the disposal of the charges or indeed any secondary effect they might have. Such protestations would fulfil Frankfurt’s criteria for bullshit, and could allow the politician to remain in office with impunity if so.

[学科分类] 卫生学