ben_tilly posts:

As for moral relativism, you just mangled an issue which I care about quite a bit.

And I flinch, because I was aware when I posted that I was making casual and imprecise use of the term, but was too distracted/lazy to craft the sentence with more care. So instead of taking this to Flame Quarantine ("Subject: Oh yeah? Who gives a shit what you think, et cetera") I hang my head.

However, there's lying and there's lying. As I've indicated back in the jobs forum, the individual with the phony credentials is now intimated to be a rather unpleasant character with many enemies in her field. She was copied in on the original message; I'm guessing that her employer's website got its own version of the J'accuse. This thing will wind to its conclusion without further intervention from me. But I also remember another case many years ago, which I must needs render in the vaugest terms in the retelling, when a friend of mine--call him "A"--gave a deposition under oath that included a statement of facts, one of which he knew to be untrue, but which served to strengthen the position of "B," a coworker, who had been suspended from his normal duties and was facing dismissal by their common employer (not mine, I'm pleased to say). The case looked as though it was about to go to court. At issue was a workplace policy I will not further specify except to note that it is widespread in this sorry land of ours, and widely considered unjust. A and I go way back; he is one of the very best people I know--I will refine that: there are a couple of people whose integrity I hold in equal regard, but none higher--and I would trust him with my life. B I knew just casually, an amusing but irresponsible and somehow untrustworthy character with whom I was vexed, when I later learned (from B himself!) the particulars of the case, for enlisting A in his cause.

To make a long story shorter (and to keep it vague), there turned out to have been some very grave procedural irregularities on the employer's side, of which the employer was already aware (and which probably accounts for B having been reassigned rather than fired outright when he advised them he intended to engage private counsel rather than his own union's [apparently toothless] attorney, and fight like mad). Moreover, a very highly-placed manager himself gave a false deposition, claiming to have seen B at a place and time where B was not. The employer's case collapsed when B's cunning attorney isolated a most embarrassing set of meeting notes from several hundred pages of discovery documents--notes which, as B later described them to me (greatly to the irritation of his lawyer, whom I also knew), would have got the employer laughed out of court, or worse.

Well, friends, if I understood B's smirking account of his ordeal, he had in fact committed the infraction his employer believed he had. The employer, apparently, also lied in an attempt to paper over the procedural irregularities. My friend A lied, not, I believe, because he held B in any particular regard (I have myself never discussed the case with A), but because he felt that the policy over which they proposed to fire B was an unjust one. I would do the same for A, I hope; regarding B...well, as James Carville once said of Hamilton Jordan, I wouldn't piss down his throat if his heart was on fire.

ben_tilly might argue that A had no right to decide on his own that the policy was sufficiently unjust to warrant A's effective perjury--an erosion of the civil compact--and I can only respond that I believe A gave this consideration due weight. Put another way, when the Gestapo asks you if you know where any of those pesky Dutch Jews are hiding, you don't point up to Anne Frank's attic hidey-hole. Instead you lie and say "no" because--well, because it's the Gestapo.

Obviously résumé-padding exists in a moral universe very remote from the last-named instance. I'm not going to be lifting a finger on her behalf unless to excise the offending bits on the pages I control once so instructed. But I think my correspondent, Inspector Javert, would have pointed gleefully up to the attic--and "truth' would have been served.

cordially,

[edit: typo]

b_t reproaches:

There are times when I'll agree that lies are appropriate and ethical. But trying to wind up in a position of influence within a charity isn't even close to being one of them

moving me to ask, a bit testily, what part of

Obviously r\ufffdsum\ufffd-padding exists in a moral universe very remote from the last-named instance

didn't you understand?

less cordially,

to be defending the Beast with the Phony Diplomas? I am not. And for your part, who are you to say whether my disclaimers are wholehearted or half-hearted? --damned cheeky of you, say I. As to "attempting to obscure the topic," you may have found my remarks obscure owing either to limitations of my expression or your comprehension, but be good enough to refrain from imputing motives quite so freely.

less cordially still,

We appear to be doomed to speak here at cross-purposes, one or both of us misconstruing the other's remarks to the point where no effective exchange is taking place. Perhaps someone else more simpatico will turn up here to help you develop these themes--clearly I'm not the man to do it.

cordially,