Is truth a moral value?

[Photizo]

Well, it always depends upon the situation. I think that telling of truth all the time is not right and sometimes even unwise. For example, there can be situations when there's somebody who seems to be unsympathetic as a person to you. However, he didn't make anything bad for you. Thus, telling him the truth that you don't like him will be just out of place.

He should already be aware of that--unless you are being a hypocrite.

 

[Tiassa]

If it is, then what does that say about people who deny the truth...?

That would most likely depend on why and how any particular person denies the truth.

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That is simply wrong. At least within Western society the notion of the "little white lie" is commonplace.

I would add to that three important sectors of our society where deception is not only acceptable, but expected: sales, juristics, politics.

I would also note that a certain degree of happiness is required for individuals to participate in a healthy society. Look at my beloved America, and what we've done to ourselves; this isn't healthy.

• • •​

Well, it always depends upon the situation. I think that telling of truth all the time is not right and sometimes even unwise. For example, there can be situations when there's somebody who seems to be unsympathetic as a person to you. However, he didn't make anything bad for you. Thus, telling him the truth that you don't like him will be just out of place.

Welcome to our humble bedlam.

I don't disagree with your general point, but I do think it only begs further questions. To wit, "If this is the case, what does that say about the state of people and the society?"

To wit, I'm engaged in a running, low-key dispute with certain members of my family that wouldn't disrupt anything except that they keep bringing it up. At some point, I ran out of routes for talking around certain aspects. And, yes, it hurts people's feelings to tell them they're wrong. They don't even want to hear why.

Thus it results that we can only have the discussion as long as we don't discuss the heart of the issue.

This, to me, does not seem a healthy situation for anyone involved. Yet, somehow this is the socially proper way? Okay, so what would that affirmation imply about social propriety?

Then again, there really isn't any polite way to question another so fundamentally. And in my little microcosm, the way it works is that the offense against dignity is a one-way issue. And I can see the patterns in human relations all the way up the ladder to the macroscale. So the idea that simply telling someone they mistakenly asserted as fact something that isn't true will offend them. The larger dynamic seems really, really unhealthy.

So while I wouldn't dispute your point, it does seem to beg further question.

 

[danshawen]

Truth, even mathematical or logical truth, is not something that is absolute. It is a value. Materials science is one application of this idea, but there are many others.

The value we place upon the truth of anything speaks volumes. We rather strongly value truth in counting, and with good reason, from a science or engineering standpoint. But since when was counting, literally, knowing how many of something or the magnitude of some property of something (tensile strength, hardness, density, etc) anything even close to an all-encompassing description of truth, on any level except the parts we happen to value from the perspective of survival. A bridge or structure that is not strong enough will certainly collapse of its own weight, but this is hardly the whole truth about the materials used or the configuration a a structural engineer may decide upon. A chemical engineer will have an entirely different set of applications and know many truths about the chemical properties of materials that are of little no interest to a structural engineer. Ignoring things that, while true, about something that are irrelevant to our situation is something we do continuously. If we did not, we'd likely drive ourselves crazy considering details irrelevant to whatever it is we are trying to accomplish.

Unless you are omniscient as well as having unlimited cognition, you may never know the whole truth about anything, nor could you convey the entire truth to someone else of lesser cognitive ability. For every truth about something we value and understand, billions of truths not related to immediate survival values will be ignored because they have to be.

Mathematical disciplines like number theory concentrates on the properties and truth of numbers themselves, independent of any geometric or topological applications. No single such discipline may lay claim to a monopoly on mathematical truth, nor would anyone expect it to. Hence, any representation of truth is subject to limitations based on whatever ideas we value most. Ignorance is essential to any intelligence that has cognitive limitations.

In a way, Nicholson was right. Human beings literally can't 'handle' or grasp the whole truth about anything. Small bits of it are the limit for finite minds.