The Wrong of Bullshit

ABSTRACT

It may be hard to imagine how bullshit, or being strategically indifferent to the veracity of one’s assertions, might ever be morally permissible. Yet to categorically denounce it is to find oneself burdened with defending the impossibility of justifiable bullshit, the indefeasibility of truthfulness and the inculpability of inveterate bullshitters. A much more tenable position is to expand one’s notion of bullshit to include unintentional indifference to veracity while also characterizing bullshit (whether strategic or unintentional) as wrong only when it constitutes negligence. Once bullshit is redefined in this fashion it becomes apparent that its preponderance in contemporary society is the work not of those who bullshit intentionally, but of those who uncritically consume and transmit the bullshit of others. Any attempt to disrupt the spread of negligent bullshit thus does well to consider our epistemic obligations not only as perceived experts, but as listeners. It is in this respect that the early Indian Buddhist critique of testimony proves quite helpful in reducing gullibility and, thereby, the likelihood of unintentional, yet negligent, bullshit.

KEYWORDS:

• Buddhist epistemology
• negligence
• testimony
• truthfulness

1. Introduction

To call bullshit, or to refer to something spoken, written or performed as bullshit, is to ordinarily draw attention to a defect. Unless disarmed, bullshit is a word with pejorative force. Working through the relevant entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, one finds that the term can refer to at least three types of defects. The American English sense of the term originally referred to two defects connected to the act of asserting.¹ The first defect is to assert nonsense or rubbish.² This sort of bullshit is primarily a defect of language, not language users. The second type of defect is to assert insincerely or untruthfully. Since insincerity and untruthfulness are traits of agents rather than simply what is asserted, they are associated with a defect of asserters rather than assertions.³ In addition to these two types of defect, bullshit’s lexical range includes a third. This last defect is captured by what was originally the British sense of the term; developed by British Service members around the Second World War, it referred to unproductive or counterproductive routine tasks or ceremonial – to certain defects of ritual, in other words.⁴

In his seminal essay on the topic, Harry Frankfurt (1988) argued that asserter bullshit involves more than just insincerity or untruthfulness. It is insincerity or untruthfulness born of a strategic indifference to veracity. Frankfurt (2006, 5) has since claimed that such indifference is an undesirable and reprehensible characteristic, and that asserting while strategically indifferent to veracity is categorically wrong. Yet there are situations in which asserter bullshit can not only be excused but justified; concern for veracity does not always properly override competing values. Furthermore, as the case of the habitual bullshitter demonstrates, one can be faulted for bullshitting others even when one’s indifference to veracity is not intentional, let alone strategic. An alternative account that can address these challenges is to understand the bullshitter’s indifference to veracity, when wrong, as a species of negligence.⁵ Such an account deviates from Frankfurt’s by shifting the ethical focus away from the bullshitter’s state of mind and to a person’s epistemic obligations. An important practical implication of this alternative account is that once bullshit is understood as a species of negligence, a person can be complicit in its production and spread – its resale, one might say – without having any intention of bullshitting others. The possibility of unintentional yet negligent bullshit highlights its ubiquity, and saddles many of us with perhaps unexpected culpability. In the attempt to disrupt everyday bullshit, one might naturally prioritize sanctioning willful wholesalers of bullshit or those who are in social positions that enable their bullshit to be widely distributed and uniquely harmful: politicians, celebrities, scholars, scientists, journalists, pundits, religious authorities and so on. But any attempt to curtail negligent bullshit, when such bullshit is often unintentional, ought to take a wider view of the phenomenon. In addition to the obligations of epistemic authority, one does well to also consider the obligations we have to avoid errantly trusting others when they are bullshitting us.

2. Frankfurt on the Wrong of Bullshit

Before discussing the limitations of Frankfurt’s ethical conclusions regarding bullshit it is worth recalling his definition of the term, if only because the scholarship is not infrequently mistaken on this point.⁶ In his most recent discussion of the topic, Frankfurt (2006, 3–7) presents us with what is arguably his most developed account of bullshit. It is certainly his most nuanced. Here, he defines bullshit as (1) being indifferent to the truth-value of one’s assertions, (2) hiding that indifference from others and (3) doing so in order to manipulate them. Bullshit, on his account, is strategic indifference to veracity. Frankfurt conceptualizes this indifference to veracity as a state of mind.⁷ Since bullshitting always involves an attempt to hide one’s indifference to veracity with the intention of manipulating others, this state of mind cannot be merely inadvertent or unintentional indifference. Since it necessarily involves a specific intention on the part of the bullshitter, bullshit cannot occur by accident or without the awareness of the one bullshitting. The attempt to hide one’s indifference is also what makes bullshit, according to Frankfurt, a species of deception.⁸ While this means bullshit has some overlap with the concept of lying, he argues that lying and bullshitting have distinct targets of deception and stem from radically different attitudes toward the demands of truth. Frankfurt (1988, 130) takes liars to be intent on deceiving others ‘about the facts or about what he [the liar] takes the facts to be’. Bullshitters, on the other hand, misrepresent an aspect of themselves: they present themselves as concerned with the truth and committed to communicating the truth to another, while their real project is to take advantage of an undetected indifference to the truth-value of their claims. Bullshitters hide their indifference to veracity in an attempt to manipulate others.⁹ And it is this aim to manipulate others that explains the bullshitter’s indifference to veracity. Bullshitters are more interested in results than the truth – so interested in the results, in fact, that that interest overwhelms any interest in the truth, and they find that indifference to veracity affords them even greater latitude in their assertions, availing them of unscrupulous, yet effective, means of persuasion.¹⁰ In addition to these three necessary conditions, there is – if not a necessary condition – a necessary precondition to bullshit on Frankfurt’s account. Bullshit, he says, is limited to language games in which the truth of a speaker’s assertion is deemed crucial. Bullshit can only occur when another reasonably understands the speaker to be involved in the illocution of asserting the truth. This is why we can say, for example, that anyone who accuses Stephen King of bullshitting has simply missed the nature of the man’s enterprise.¹¹

Bullshit, so defined, is categorically wrong according to Frankfurt, and he provides three reasons to share his ethical conclusion. Having distinguished between the states of mind of liars and bullshitters, Frankfurt (1988) argues that bullshitting is worse than lying. Liars, he says, remain aware of the difference between what is true and what is false in the matter at hand, and thus pay attention to reality and the truth-values of their assertions, but bullshitters are indifferent to veracity and thus have no reason to track reality or consider the truth-values of their assertions. The one lying may defy the authority of the truth and refuse to meet its demands, but the bullshitter ignores those demands altogether. This makes bullshit ‘a greater enemy of the truth’ than lies (132). The second reason to morally denounce bullshit stems from the fact that bullshitting engenders a basic epistemic vice that lying does not. The liar must keep track of the truth, and so their habit of reality-tracking is not necessarily atrophied by the activity. An indulgence in bullshit, on the other hand, involves repeated disregard for any question of truth and is thus likely to lead to the attenuation of one’s ability to attend to the way things are (Frankfurt 1988). Bullshitters, unlike liars, become lost in an epistemic fog that renders them unfit both to tell what is true and tell the truth. The third reason to denounce bullshit is independent of any normative contrast with lying. Frankfurt (2002, 343) argues that a bullshitter’s indifference to truth needlessly squanders an ‘indispensable human treasure’ in a way that is extremely dangerous. As he explains: ‘the conduct of civilized life and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensible to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false’ (Frankfurt 2002). Recent trends in the United States – from the January Insurrection to vaccine hesitancy during the height of the pandemic – aptly illustrate his point.

While these personal and social costs of bullshit may incline one toward agreeing with Frankfurt’s categorical rejection, there are two reasons to hesitate. To begin with, there are times when bullshitting others is justifiable. Take, for example, a committed empiricist who thus lacks any knowledge of whether there is or is not an afterlife, or of how such an afterlife might be described were it to exist. When this empiricist encounters the grief of his daughter over the death of her dog, he might willfully disregard the limits of his knowledge and try to comfort his child with assertions about an afterlife. In this situation, his desire to comfort his child renders him, at least momentarily, indifferent to veracity. He is also likely to hide his indifference from his daughter to ensure his assertions are capable of comforting (or benevolently manipulating) his child. By Frankfurt’s account, the empiricist would be bullshitting and thus in the wrong, yet the compassion of this particular instance of bullshit, as well as its potential to bring about desirable results, seem to render the bullshit not only permissible but perhaps even praiseworthy. The same might be said of an intelligence agent who, in order to infiltrate an enemy of the state, is forced to extemporaneously pass herself off as an expert in a field with which she has no familiarity. She may speak without regard for veracity, but does so for the sake of national security. To accept Frankfurt’s account of bullshit is to deny the moral merit of bullshitting in these types of situations. It is also to agree that no other value, not even compassion, can require that we displace – if only temporarily – our fidelity to the truth. Assuredly, a hidden indifference to veracity can be dangerous. But the same can be said, in certain situations, of an overriding concern with veracity. Truth can be told maliciously, it can betray another or violate their privacy, and demanding veracity can sometimes constitute unfair legal jeopardy. A hidden indifference to veracity may be worse than lying, but lying may very well admit of morally permissible instances, as when it is motivated by informed compassion, or when lying is offered in self-defense or to prevent physical harm to another. If lying can occasionally be justified, bullshit need not always be wrong even if it is worse than lying. Being worse than what is justified, after all, is not the same as being unjustified.

Frankfurt’s account of the wrong of bullshit also produces the puzzling outcome that while he claims that it is always wrong to bullshit he is incapable of faulting those with a long career of bullshitting others. Anyone who regularly engages in bullshit becomes, he says, unfit to track reality. Yet anyone who cannot track reality will have no way of knowing their current relation to veracity – whether it is caring or unconcerned. As such, habitual bullshitters become unable to be willfully indifferent to veracity and – as one cannot seek to hide that of which one is unaware – unable to hide any such indifference.¹² They are, in short, incapable of meeting the requirements of bullshit articulated by Frankfurt. Since Frankfurt subscribes to the alignment of the definition of bullshit and the ethics of bullshit, the conclusion that inveterate bullshitters cannot bullshit is not merely a descriptive claim (about the absence of, or inability to have, a particular state of mind), but a normative one. We are prevented from attributing the relevant asserter defect to such persons. To think that a zealous commitment to bullshit, if sustained long enough, absolves one of the moral fault of bullshitting others is a bit like thinking we ought to absolve drunk drivers if they have been heavy drinkers for several years. Not only is this to fail to stigmatize some of the worst offenders, it may even motivate some people to engage in a general program of bullshit as a way to eventually be able to bullshit without being faulted.

3. The Possibility of Unintentional Bullshit

The first step toward solving these two problems is to permit unintentional indifference to veracity to count as asserter bullshit. To be clear, Frankfurt’s account precludes the possibility. He defines bullshit as involving the deceptive act of hiding one’s indifference to veracity. As one cannot seek to hide that of which one is unaware, it is impossible that bullshit could occur unintentionally and without the awareness of the agent. There is, to be fair, lexical support for the exclusion of unintentional bullshit. Some forms of asserter defects commonly described as bullshit – bluffing others by talking nonsense, or exaggerating or speaking nonsense in order to bluff or impress others – require a specific state of mind and intention, and no doubt such bullshit may at times involve the strategic indifference to veracity of which Frankfurt speaks.¹³

Yet some forms of asserter bullshit – asserting insincerely or untruthfully (both of which presuppose certain facts about the asserter) – can occur without any particular state of mind, let alone the specific intention of gaining an advantage from an indifference to veracity. One might, for example, be insincere and thus untruthful out of habitual politeness. A person might attend the funeral of an uncle she secretly despised and still spontaneously offer his immediate family her condolences without any thought to whether she is in fact sorry that he is dead. Or one might be careless of the accuracy of one’s assertions during a job interview simply out of mental exhaustion or frayed nerves. There simply is no common state of mind involved in these examples of bullshit. Furthermore, the indifference to veracity entailed in these instances is not willful or deliberate, but simply an absence of concern that can be described as unintentional. Lexically speaking, bullshit can refer to a strategic indifference to veracity, yet it can also name an indifference to veracity that is not strategic, does not involve an awareness of that indifference and is not linked to any particular intention or state of mind.

Surprisingly, two of Frankfurt’s paradigmatic examples of bullshit also help to substantiate the possibility of unintentional bullshit. The first example is provided at the conclusion of his first essay on the topic. There he claims that the contemporary proliferation of bullshit is rooted in various forms of skepticism or anti-realism that ‘undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry’ (Frankfurt 1988, 133). Rather than subscribe to the possibility of objective truth, Frankfurt says that those under the influence of such epistemic doctrines pursue a different ideal – one of sincerity. Yet, Frankfurt suggests, knowing ourselves is quite difficult. ‘As a conscious being, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them’ (Frankfurt 1988). Thus, any claim to being sincere on the basis of private introspection alone must surely be bullshit, as one cannot help but make it up and yet pretend one is telling it like it is.

The second relevant example is the anecdote of Wittgenstein visiting his Russian language tutor, Fania Pascal, in the hospital after she had her tonsils removed (Frankfurt 1988, 122–125). When asked how she was doing she claimed, most likely in a fit of hyperbole meant to impart levity to her situation, that she felt like a dog that had been run over. Wittgenstein, however, was apparently such a humorless individual that he was disgusted by her remark. The problem, Frankfurt comments, is that Wittgenstein regarded Pascal as either inventing her assertion without any reference to experience or simply repeating, quite mindlessly, an assertion she had picked up from someone else – and ‘it is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides her’ (124). She was, in short, asserting without due care for the veracity of her assertion. Surely, anyone who would mindlessly repeat nonsense (at least when justifiably called upon to be truthful) seems worthy of reproach. The same can be said of anyone who would disregard objective truth. As William James (2000, 202) exclaims:

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!

The disregard for veracity depicted in these two examples appears both contemptible and blameworthy. The usual pejorative force of ‘bullshit’ is thus fitting. What is surprising, however, is that Frankfurt seems to agree that this is true even though neither example involves strategic or intentional indifference to veracity.

When speaking of the combination of anti-realism and sincerity, Frankfurt seems to have the epistemic subjectivist in mind; at the very least, subjectivists satisfy both of his points as they are critical of objective truth and presuppose the possibility of meaningful self-reflection. It is uncharitable, however, to say that epistemic subjectivists deny truth altogether; they merely restrict the scope of truth to solitary individuals. And while it may be, as he suggests, that subjectivists are unlikely to get themselves right, that concerns the question of whether what they say is either true or false, which is not definitive of whether one is bullshitting. It is quite possible that a subjectivist might be under the impression – even if it is mistaken – that she is truthfully presenting herself, or is at least making a good faith effort at being sincere. If the subjectivist is guilty of bullshit, as Frankfurt claims, it cannot be because she is intentionally indifferent to veracity. There is, likewise, no strategic element to Pascal’s apparent indifference to veracity. In his retelling, Frankfurt imagines Pascal would be guilty of bullshitting even if she is asserting mindlessly; it is quite hard to fathom how she could then also be aware of her apparent indifference to veracity, let alone strategic in her use of such indifference. If these two examples involve bullshit, it is unintentional.

4. The Wrong of Bullshit as Negligence

Since indifference to veracity is not always wrong; bullshit cannot be wrong simply because it involves such indifference. Nor can bullshit be wrong because it involves a particular state of mind, since one can bullshit others without having any intention of doing so. That is not to say that people cannot be faulted for being nefariously strategic in their indifference to veracity, only that in such cases they are being faulted for the indefensibility of their project, not for bullshitting per se. One way to account for the wrong of bullshit – and one that does not require all bullshit to be wrong or strategic in nature – is to say that bullshit is wrong qua bullshit when it involves negligent indifference to veracity.

Negligence is a concept richly developed within jurisprudence. A standard legal definition (Black’s Law Dictionary 2021a) has it that negligence is ‘the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided by those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do; or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do’. To take a stock example, a contractor repairing the roof of a house on a busy street who throws building material into the street below, without first checking for pedestrians, can be described as negligent. It is true that such negligence – or failure to comply with the standard of what a reasonable person would do in the circumstances – might come about due to a range of different psychological causes. Perhaps the contractor is new to this line of work and profoundly ignorant. She might be lazy. She might be unimaginative. She might even be driven by a psychopathic desire to harm someone. Yet it is her failure to look below before casting off the material, not her specific state of mind, which renders the contractor negligent and blameworthy. This is because negligence is not determined by an agent’s state of mind, but simply by a failure to act in a reasonable fashion so as to prevent injury to others (Fletcher 1971). ¹⁴

If the wrong of bullshit is understood in terms of negligence, not every instance of bullshit is necessarily indefensible. As the examples of the empiricist parent and the undercover agent illustrate, it is quite possible to be indifferent to veracity without being negligent. Additionally, this way of accounting for the wrong of bullshit allows us to fault inveterate bullshitters even if they are incapable of strategic indifference to veracity. Since negligence does not require any specific state of mind, one might be faulted for negligent indifference to veracity without even being aware of that indifference.¹⁵ Simply being gullible, subject to a psychological bias or dwelling within the epistemic fog created by a career in bullshit could be enough.

To think of the wrong of bullshit in terms of negligence implies that it may not always be possible to say when bullshit will be wrong without first accounting for what a reasonable person would do, if she were in our situation, to ensure that any indifference she might have to veracity did not harm others. At the very least, because such situations invariably involve others, our moral reasoning about the ethics of bullshit will often prove defective if it is limited to personal preferences when balancing out likely advantages and disadvantages to oneself. When a teacher is asked a question that is germane to the subject of the course but also one she does not currently know how to answer, there is an understandable tension of values – especially if she is put on the spot like this early on in the term. She may feel compelled to provide some answer to the question in order to preserve her authority, but she may simultaneously be mindful of the harm entailed by bullshitting an answer – even if she might want to rationalize the bullshit as an ‘educated guess’. Should her bullshit remain undetected and her students not grow mistrustful of her, she would still risk weakening her own epistemic habits of inquiry, and would assuredly have betrayed her professional obligations. Fortunately, the tension between maintaining authority and maintaining one’s epistemic and professional integrity might itself be relaxed by considering a third option: to acknowledge one’s ignorance, return to the subject in a future class meeting and simultaneously invite one’s students to revise their notion of what it is to be an expert.

Beyond situational considerations, however, there are a couple of general guidelines that can help delineate the boundary between defensible and negligent bullshit. First, while bullshit may be defensible when it is motivated by compassion, a commitment to justice or a desire to prevent harm to oneself or another, it is right to be suspicious of those who are indifferent to veracity out of a callous disregard for the welfare of others, or out of a desire to secure an exclusive and personal advantage over others by means of their indifference. Second, assuming a harmful indifference to veracity constitutes negligent bullshit, those who have entered into a relationship in which they have given at least tacit assurance to others that they care about the veracity of their assertions have a prima facie obligation to avoid strategic and unintentional bullshit. This is one reason it is generally wrong for teachers, experts, spiritual advisors and political leaders to bullshit others.¹⁶

5. The Needed Critique of Testimony

Bullshit invariably has its producers and consumers, its speakers and listeners. Those who have reflected on the ethics of bullshit tend to blame only the speaker. But with the possibility of unintentional bullshit, which renders its consumption and mass production all the more likely, there is cause to consider bullshit from both sides of the epistemic relationship. In fact, the main source of the bullshit in contemporary society – a good deal of which is negligent – is the unintentional bullshit transmitted by gullible persons, not the strategic bullshit of willful deceivers.¹⁷

Gullibility entails the absence of an epistemic immunity to the bullshit one encounters; once infected, the gullible person will inevitably and unintentionally transmit that bullshit to others. Because gullible persons bullshit others unintentionally, they are much more effective social vectors of bullshit than strategic bullshitters – for at least three reasons. First of all, deception tends to exhaust trust, the one social resource it requires. The more deceivers there are within a community, the less likely one is to succeed as a deceiver and the less rewarding the tactic will be. A community’s economy of trust thus serves to limit the number of deceivers, which would include those given to strategically bullshitting others. Unintentional bullshitters, on the other hand, are not invested in its potential advantage, and so will not be deterred by lost efficacy. Second, lacking the usual motivations of strategic bullshitters – such as greed, hatred or at least a disregard for the welfare of others – unintentional bullshitters can transmit their bullshit with the very best intentions. In many ways, this renders them asymptomatic bullshitters. Being unaware of their own bullshit, and lacking any intention to deceive others, there is no possibility that they might betray themselves and signal such things to their audience the way a strategic bullshitter might. And if the unintentional bullshitter is otherwise well-intended, the usual correlates of strategic bullshit – such as the personal advantage speakers will derive from another’s assent to their assertions – are not in place to warn others. Third, given the motives and risks involved in strategic bullshit, it is usually produced by those who gain our trust while remaining socially distant, often on the basis of institutionalized epistemic authority. This may explain why strategic bullshitters tend to be politicians, journalists and salespersons. But unintentional bullshit is much more resilient because it can be transmitted on the basis of a plurality of persuasive forces usually unavailable to strategic bullshitters, such as the trust and allegiance one has for family, friends, local or religious community members and so on. A community populated with gullible persons will assuredly produce an epidemic of bullshit.

In this light, to claim that one might know by faith alone – a common theme within Christian epistemology – can be quite pernicious. To subscribe to the notion that one can be informed simply by another’s testimony, without any need for further evidence or support, might be defensible when limited to one’s own religious choices, but an uncritical expansion of this epistemology – as seems to have occurred in American civic discourse – promotes gullibility.¹⁸ What is needed, given the preponderance of unintentional bullshit caused by gullibility, is a different standard of knowledge by testimony. In this respect, our civic discourse would be improved if we were to attend to the critique of testimony offered by the early Indian Buddhists.

Several Western philosophers have recently taken an interest in testimony; yet, arguably, the most thorough and rigorous accounts are provided by the tradition of Indian philosophy – which has discussed the issue for millennia.¹⁹ One of the basic questions in this tradition is whether testimony (śabda) is a unique and wholly reliable cause (pramāṇa) of only veridical cognitions. The Cārvāka skeptics, some of the first philosophers to consider testimony, argued that it was neither unique nor reliable, while philosophers of another school of thought – the Naiyāyika – attempted to rehabilitate testimony by delineating the parameters of reliable testimony, claiming that if a speaker were informed, honest and understood, then listeners could claim that their consequent cognitions were true. The early Buddhist position is somewhere between these two extremes.²⁰ Unlike the Naiyāyika, the early Buddhists do not regard testimony as capable of causing knowledge on its own; unlike the Cārvāka, the early Buddhists neither regard testimony as reducible to inference nor seek to totally deny any epistemic value to testimony.²¹ While testimony might importantly motivate behavior that can lead to the acquisition of knowledge, the early Buddhists argue that testimony is never sufficient for knowledge. This is because even with the best qualifications or reputation it is always possible that what a speaker asserts could be false (Nanamoli & Bodhi 1995, 780). The speaker might, after all, be momentarily careless or temporarily confused. Regardless of whether these are common occurrences, the potential for error demonstrates that testimony is not entirely reliable.²²

By rejecting testimony as a reliable cause of veridical cognitions, the Buddhists are not claiming that anything that is asserted by another is thereby false, only that an assertion alone does not grant another knowledge. Furthermore, despite their critical stance with regard to testimony, the Buddhists did not reject the epistemic importance of community and authority, nor did they think testimony was entirely irrelevant to the pursuit of knowledge. They did not endorse the skeptic’s subjectivism that would force one to rely solely upon one’s own wits in charting a path. Their considered view was that while a select few, such as the Buddha, might hit upon important truths on their own, many of us need the testimony of others and the wisdom of a living tradition in order to make meaningful epistemic progress. That said, the proper way to respond to testimony, according to the early Buddhists, is with – at most – provisional acceptance. This is to have confidence (śraddhā) in the truth-value of what is said, but to resist claiming that the testimony one has provisionally accepted excludes the truth-claim of all contrary assertions. To provisionally accept testimony is to regard the assertion as worthy of experimentation – of seeing whether the claim asserted is supported by one’s own perceptual experiences. Should it be verified by our experience, then, and only then, would it be proper to claim to know what was originally said. One reason to distinguish between these two stages of provisional acceptance and personal verification – or ‘safeguarding the truth’ and ‘discovering the truth’ as the Caṅki Sutta expresses it – has to do with the fact that we often lack the capacity to personally verify the claims of experts, and that it is only by regarding their claims as provisionally true that we gain the experience requisite to evaluate them. This is not unlike the sequence in a scientific education where one starts by trusting the assertions of experts and textbooks in order to develop the wherewithal to eventually be able to test the claims initially taken on trust. Understandably one cannot – and probably should not – provisionally accept all claims one encounters. We have limited resources for experimenting with these claims, we are often compelled for one reason or another to select one of two or more contrary claims and there are some claims that it would be foolish or even immoral to attempt to verify. The Buddhist counsel is to be careful in what we experiment with or what claims we trust, and this is where the wisdom of others and tradition play a role in helping us identify those whom we might regard as experts.

Applied to American civic discourse, the Buddhist response to testimony would render all assertions of journalists, politicians, advisors and so on as insufficient for knowledge – though potential starting points. To safeguard the truth, or adopt any of these assertions as worthy of verification through personal experience, we would need to assess the motives and conditions of these speakers, looking for the ‘defilements’ of greed, hatred or ignorance.²³ If the speaker lacked relevant training or proved themselves to be inconsistent in their claims, for example, we would likely have cause to ignore their assertions. Finally, to gain any knowledge from the assertions of others would presuppose nothing less than personal experimentation and verification. Before we could claim to know whether a vaccine was safe and effective we would have to conduct the relevant studies, just as the claim to know that we will personally not experience any significant side-effects upon taking the vaccine would require us to actually take it and see. Our trust in experts can certainly be helpful but, as this example illustrates, there is the potential for significant risks involved in the attempt to learn the truth. Given our finite epistemic resources, it is clear that we must prioritize what it is that we wish to know.²⁴ This does not preclude our relying upon experts to navigate practical affairs we do not have personal knowledge about, but it does highlight the fact that when we rely upon experts this does not entitle us to claim to know.

There are several benefits to be derived from adopting the early Buddhist position on the limited epistemic merit of testimony and the proper preconditions of the provisional acceptance of another’s words. For one, while knowledge will be more difficult to come by (which may very well be nothing but the result of adopting a realistic view of knowledge acquisition), the corollary is that one will claim to know fewer things and, thus, be less likely to bullshit. An added benefit of this epistemic restraint is that one will also be less likely to disagree with others, and less likely to experience outrage or fear because of what others assert. I would speculate that a community-wide adoption of a Buddhist response to testimony would render strategic bullshit less economically and politically successful. This, in turn, would reduce the amount of bullshit we become complicit in transmitting to others.

6. Conclusion

Despite the moral interest we ought to have in preventing or disrupting negligent bullshit – unintentional as well as strategic – it is perhaps inevitable that such bullshit will continue to pervade contemporary society. And when negligent bullshit is common practice in a community or a specific profession, there are bound to be institutionalized pressures that run counter to our moral interests. Newly employed in sales, one might discover not only that every colleague bullshits the customer, but that bullshitting is a de facto job requirement. The same might be said for those engaged in politics and many other professions or roles. In response to these social forces we might choose – as Frankfurt and others since have so elected – to focus on those who participate in the institutions and roles most given to bullshit. One might go a step further and selectively focus on those who produce bullshit due to gross negligence – those, in other words, who cause grave harm to others by their indifference to veracity when such indifference could easily be avoided.²⁵ Yet, given the prevalence of unintentional bullshit, the most effective way to disrupt negligent bullshit may be to focus on ourselves as careless purveyors of bullshit, rather than seeking to shame or otherwise sanction others – even if they happen to be grossly negligent in their indifference to veracity. It is, after all, often easier to guard against our own bullshit than change another’s conduct through remonstrance. The crucial ethical question with respect to bullshit thus becomes quite personal: What can I do to resist situational pressures to engage in negligent bullshit, and to prevent my own gullibility when listening to others?

Acknowledgments

Over the last few years I have led conversations on bullshit and science communication in several graduate level courses offered by the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis. For this unique opportunity to engage in cross-disciplinary work I would like to thank Drs. Cassandra Swett, Dave Rizzo and Tiffany Lowe-Power. I would also like to thank the graduate students who participated in these class discussions and helped me refine my understanding of the subject. I am also grateful to Jeremy Henkel and the two anonymous reviewers at Social Epistemology for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Thorian R. Harris

Thorian R. Harris is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses primarily on the application of early Chinese philosophy to contemporary ethical issues.

Notes

1. According to the OED, ‘bullshit’ is an early twentieth century invention of American English. The term, however, was influenced by the British English ‘bull’ – in use at least as far back as the seventeenth century and derived from the Old French boul, boule, bole (fraud, deceit, trickery).

2. It is a sub-variety of defective assertions, namely ‘unclarifiable nonsense’, that Gerald Cohen (2002) addresses. Under the heading of assertion defects referenced by ‘bullshit’ we might also include unfalsifiable and incoherent assertions.

3. Harry Frankfurt’s (1988, 2002, 2006) account of bullshit as strategic indifference to the veracity of one’s assertions is one such asserter defect. Chris Heffer (2020a, 2020b) has recently argued for the relevance of what he calls ‘dogmatic bullshit’. It is characterized by asserting an evidentially worthless claim out of an ‘unwillingness to revise one’s beliefs in accordance with the evidence’ (2020a, 127). Since the nonsense of what is said and the dogmatic attitude of the speaker are both relevant to the occurrence of dogmatic bullshit, it appears to straddle the distinction between asserter and assertion defects.

4. Military drills that undermined unit discipline, or exercises that did nothing to increase relevant skill or efficacy both appear to be paradigmatic examples of ritual bullshit. A similar variety of bullshit can be involved in applying for federal funding to support scientific research. Given the highly competitive nature of the process, scientists may feel a need to fabricate predictions and to oversell the wider impacts of their research. If the ritual of applying for federal grants encourages habits contrary to those required for excellent scientific inquiry, those features responsible for this counterproductive outcome might fairly be described as bullshit.

5. Gary Hardcastle (2006), Andrew Aberdein (2006) and Heffer (2020a, 2020b) have all suggested that we think of bullshit as a variety of negligence. Unfortunately, only Heffer appears to realize the novelty of the suggestion. Hardcastle either does not realize that negligence is not defined by a state of mind, or does not realize that Frankfurt’s definition is centered on the speaker’s state of mind. The latter appears to be Aberdein’s mistake.

6. In the only collection of essays published on the subject (Hardcastle & Reisch 2006), of the 10 contributors who evoked Frankfurt’s account of bullshit, all but two misconstrued it in one way or another – most often by failing to recognize that Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit involves more than simply an indifference to veracity. A similar defect plagues the works of Laura Penny (2005) and André Spicer (2018); both authors claim to be consistent with Frankfurt’s definition of the term yet fail to realize that bullshit, as he defines it, occurs only in contexts in which the truth-value of our assertions is understood to be vital.

7. This is most explicit in Frankfurt (2002, 340).

8. Frankfurt (2002) presents a slightly different account of bullshit’s essential features. While admitting Cohen’s (2002) point that there are more varieties of bullshit than the one he discussed in his first essay, Frankfurt (2002, 340) summarizes the variety that interests him as essentially involving ‘a lack of concern with truth, or an indifference to how things really are’. Strangely, no mention is made in this recapitulation of bullshit of the attempt on the part of bullshitters to hide that indifference.

9. This third essential feature of bullshit is not explicit in Frankfurt’s (1988, 2002) other accounts.

10. Between ‘On Bullshit’ and On Truth, the heart of bullshit – that which he regards as most essential to the concept – shifts from ‘indifference to how things are’ (Frankfurt 1988) to the attempt to hide that indifference in an effort ‘to manipulate the opinions and attitudes of those to whom’ one speaks (Frankfurt 2006).

11. It is also why Frankfurt (1988, 126) claims that what is said during a bull session does not count as bullshit in the sense of strategic indifference to veracity.

12. Even if inveterate bullshitters might habitually, and thus in some sense unintentionally, be indifferent to the veracity of their claims, they cannot be indifferent to veracity in the way that counts. The indifference that counts, according to Frankfurt, is strategic in nature; it involves a specific intention.

13. Heffer (2020a, 127) might appear to consider the possibility of unintentional bullshit in one of his examples. He imagines a professor who bullshits her way through a lecture she was unable to adequately prepare and says that while she may know she is bullshitting and continues to do it, ‘she does not intend to bullshit’. Yet because she is clearly aware of her own ignorance on the subject matter, actively seeks to hide this ignorance from her students, and does so to ostensibly preserve her authority, she has the state of mind of a Frankfurtian bullshitter. When Heffer says she did not ‘intend’ to bullshit he can only mean that she did not plan on bullshitting the students when she accepted the lecture assignment, or perhaps that she bullshits unwillingly. But, in either case, her bullshit is clearly not unintentional.

14. That the agent’s state of mind does not determine negligence is explicit in the fact that negligence can either be willful or passive – either ‘deliberate with the intentional disregard for other people’s welfare’ (Black’s Law Dictionary 2021c) or nothing more than a failure ‘to act or perform an obligation’ (Black’s Law Dictionary 2021b). Of course, if the contractor in our example were willfully negligent she would be doubly blameworthy and likely prosecuted for her intentions rather than her negligence. But, even intentionally indifferent to the welfare of others, she would remain negligent.

15. By implication, not every instance of asserter bullshit involves deception (pace Frankfurt).

16. Heffer (2020a) defines the negligence involved in bullshit as a speaker’s failure to attend to the specific epistemic duties she has because of her unique epistemic roles. Yet even if negligence sometimes stems from the obligations of specific epistemic roles, Heffer is wrong to think we cannot be epistemically negligent when we ‘do not have a specific duty of epistemic care’ (133). Say I am dishing up at the table of a departmental potluck and someone asks me whether a certain dish was made with peanut oil. Mistaking their question as an attempt at idle talk (because I am unaware that anyone might be allergic to peanuts), I might bullshit, ‘no’ – having no idea if my response is true or false, and not caring. But suppose the dish was made with peanut oil, the person eats it, and is rushed to the hospital. In light of the two facts that I was ignorant of something that might be said to be common knowledge, and that my bullshit significantly endangered the person, I am surely morally culpable – despite lacking a specific epistemic role in the situation. Jennifer Saul’s (2018) account of epistemic negligence, which considers not only our specific epistemic roles, but likely consequences, as well as our ability to avoid harming others, is thus preferable to the one we find in Heffer.

17. Heffer’s (2020a) position on those who repeat false or ‘fake’ news is that even if they might be said to be epistemically irresponsible, they cannot be said to be ‘morally culpable, or negligent’ because, he says, ‘ordinary readers … do not have a specific duty of epistemic care’ (133). There are several reasons to reject his moral assessment. First, as was shown above, even those who do not have a unique epistemic role with specific duties of care can be guilty of negligence. Second, Heffer arrives at his conclusion that someone might be ‘epistemically irresponsible to a greater or lesser extent’ without being ‘morally culpable or negligent’ only by equivocating on what he means by ‘moral’. His argument is that because epistemic responsibility ‘is an intellectual vice rather than a moral one’ epistemic responsibility is not relevant to the question of moral responsibility (132). Assuming he is alluding to Aristotle’s distinction between ‘moral’ or character virtues and intellectual virtues, Heffer is mistaken to think that an intellectual virtue or vice is outside the realm of moral culpability. Third, Heffer restricts his moral evaluation of gullible bullshitters to those who repeat false news produced by a generally reliable news source. Even those who agree with his assessment of such persons might still be able to say that anyone who repeats the false news generated by unreliable sources out of an indifference to the veracity of their assertions is guilty of negligent bullshit.

18. I have in mind the widespread habit of citizens believing something simply because it was asserted by one of their favored politicians or media outlets. Not everyone is willing to grant faith-based religious assertions a pass. The way Heffer defines bullshit (2020b, 195), for instance, implies that the term applies to any assertion based on faith alone.

19. As Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (2006, 1) put it, with the notable exception of Thomas Reid, ‘traditional [Western] epistemological theories focused primarily on other sources such as perception, memory and reason, with relatively little attention devoted specifically to testimony’.

20. The early Buddhist position being presented is drawn from the Pali Canon (particularly the Caṅki Sutta [Mijjhima Nikaya 95] and Kalama Sutta [Anguttara Nikaya 3:65]), and the relevant commentary of Kulatissa Jayatilleke (1963). While there is a lot that could be said to justify favoring the position of the Naiyayika, at least on theoretical grounds, the position of the Buddhists functions as the best corrective to our negligent epistemic habits today – and it is this curative function that is behind the selective focus on the Buddhist account.

21. The early Buddhist non-reduction of testimony obviously contrasts with the position taken up by later Buddhists, Dignāga and Dharmakīrti.

22. The Nyāya response would be to say that in such instances of careless assertion we have a non-ideal or pseudo instance of testimony. The problem with the response, and what lends the Buddhist’s position comparative merit, is that in practice it seems impossible to be alert to such instances all the time. We fall back on reasonable confidence that the expert will assert carefully, and so can often fail to recognize such non-ideal cases when they occur.

23. It is worth mentioning that when the Caṅki Sutta discusses these preconditions for trust it warns its readers against being taken in by those whom we are describing as bullshitters. The text speaks of those who ‘while not knowing … might say, “I know”’ (Nanamoli & Bodhi 1995, 781). While it is possible that some people who satisfy this description might be aware of their ignorance (and thus be engaged in lying rather than bullshitting), the Caṅki Sutta says that at least some people will claim to know while they do not know – and be conditioned to speak this way because of their ignorance of their not knowing. Such speakers would clearly be bullshitting.

24. The Culamalunkya Sutta (Mijjhima Nikaya 63) discusses this point.

25. This characterization of gross negligence is similar to, but not identical with, the relevant entry in Black’s Law Dictionary.