To Tell Or Not to Tell

...Bok never gets to asking, much less answering, such questions I do not mean to suggest that Bok should have written a more theoretical or arcane work, but that her insights into human character lack sufficient richness Secrets is a gloss of examples of our behavior informed by a few basic admonitions and precepts It is a start, and we should be thankful for that Much more, however, can be done...

...Why is a great deal of modernist literature organized around a game of concealment and disclosure...

...To Tell or Not to Tell_ Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation By Sissela Bok Pantheon 332 pp $16 95 Reviewed by Richard H. King Associate Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal State College, author, "A Southern Renaissance," "The Party of Eros" The last decade or so has seen a rekindling of interest in ethical and political theory among philosophers Discourse on these subjects, once dismissed as "emotive" and therefore of little philosophical importance, now draws serious attention from thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition In our country, the center of the renewed activity has been Harvard, where John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Michael Walzer teach With the completion of her two thematically related works?Lying, published in 1978, and the present volume—Sissela Bok, a member of the same faculty, makes abid to join the distinguished company In certain ways, lying and keeping secrets resemble each other One might say that protecting a secret often entails a he, and a lie is a refusal to reveal a secret Bok notes that the two also share an intentional dimension, clearly distinguishing them from, for example, an error But while lying is "prima facie wrong," the author argues, secrecy "need not be " To be sure, a lie may be called for on particular occasions, yet it must always be strongly justified With secrets the issue is a bit more complicated Although Bok states that she has no presumption at all concerning secrecy, this claim needs clarification Rightly recoiling against the cult of openness and cant of honesty that have dominated popular culture in recent years, she tends to defend the keeping of personal secrets In the public, and especially the political, realm she leans more toward the side of disclosure According to Bok, the making or keeping of a secret produces insiders and outsiders, those who know and those who don't Indeed, our ability to be secretive develops in childhood along with our consciousness of a self different from other selves It is only by retaining secrets, Bok observes, that we can protect our identities, formulate actions, and avoid having to be "for" others every waking moment If we were required to publicize everything, we wouldn't do anything Moreover, our sense of the sacred and the profane is closely tied to our capacity for secrecy Of course, secrecy has its dangers A person overly given to the practice could easily be tempted to conceal all his thoughts and deeds, and could come to suspect those around him of doing the same The suspicion might even prove self-fulfilling, for excessive covertness is naturally reciprocated Secrecy on the part of a group or organization prevents the exposure of crucial matters to outside discussion and assessment, and thus frequently leads to an inflated collective feeling of self-importance plus seriously skewed judgment As an illustration of the sorts of blunders that can ensue, Bok might have mentioned an affair that, more than Watergate, represented the reduction ad absurdum of governmental secrecy This was the Justice Department's threat in the late 1970s to prosecute journalist Howard Morland for publishing a crude diagram of a nuclear device—a "secret" that was in the public domain Striving to present an all-encompassing survey of her topic, Bok examines a wide range of relevant situations secret societies, the religious confessional and the therapeutic relationship, gossip, scientific and social scientific research She concludes with the dilemmas posed by corporate, state and military secretkeeping Throughout, she asserts the theme that secrecy is power and so has to be carefully controlled Where, as in the state and military sphere, some secrecy is inevitable, she calls for constant public discussion on what types of information it is morally correct to put off limits If the secrets themselves need not be aired, that is, the rationale for keeping them must be In the disputed area of social science research, she rejects as unethical studies that—like Stanley Milgram's famous Obedience to Authority—use unwitting subjects Freedom of inquiry, as she sees it, has to take a back seat to respect for the individual To evaluate Secrets, it is important that we first situate Bok's applied ethics within the range of contemporary ethical theory At one end of this spectrum is the so-called "deontic" position, derived from Immanuel Kant This holds that we should act according to fixed moral principles, regardless of the consequences A categorical imperative exists against lying, for instance, not because of that action's negative effects on those lied to and on the social fabric, rather, lying contradicts the tenet of treating others as ends, not means The opposite pole is occupied by the utilitarians, or consequentiahsts, who trace their roots to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill They argue that the morality of an action is to be assessed by its outcome What is right is what produces the greatest good for the greatest number Lying, then, is not wrong in itself or without exception Bok—as might be expected, given the basically practical nature of her enterprise—lands somewhere between the two extremes On Wing, her heart is with Kant, her head with the consequentiahsts As for secrecy, both her evident support of it in private lite and the limits she would place upon it in the public sector seem fairly Kantian Ne\ -ertheless, in a broader sense her emphasis on concrete ethical concerns appears to suggest that neither doanne is defensible when slavishly lollowed—a stance I find perfect and refreshing In tact, Bok exphcitK attempts to remedy some of the weaknesses that have marked the theoretical approach?namely the citing of essentially trivial examples and the propensity for relentlessly abstract reasoning Here, too, her effort is commendable If philosophy and ethics are to be of any use, they must confront the hard cases Though these may not make good law, they do spur vital thinking Still, there is something naggingly unsatisfactory about this book It may have to do with Bok's tendency to leap from case to case too quickly to do any of them justice Notably disappointing are the mere five pages she devotes to the Pentagon Papers and the profound questions they raised about national security, the breaking of oaths and the appropriate way of publicizing sensitive material At the end of the discussion, we know little more than when we started Style and tone are another weakness Aside from her annoying habit of making points by posing rhetorical questions, Bok is often circumspect and balanced to the point of rendering her precepts vacuous "Whistle-blowing and leaks," she writes, "may be starkly inappropriate when used in malice or in error " Yet if malice and error are so readily identifiable, one wonders what the problem is All this really says is that doing unnecessary harm is unnecessary and harmful In contrast to the numerous works of analytic philosophy that read, as Richard Rorty put it, like lawyer's briefs, all too many passages in Bok's text sound as if they were excerpted f rom a Ford Foun-dation or Common Cause report A certain depth of inquiry is missing from Secrets as well The shortcoming is apparent in the brief section on self-deception, which consists of a cursory look at Freud and Sartre, dropped just when it is starting to be interesting This is unfortunate, because the existence of the capacity to fool oneself casts doubt upon Bok's assumption?shared by many of her Anglo-American colleagues—that human beings are conscious agents who make plans and decisions based on rational consideration of interests and/or principles Surely such a view requires a more complex treatment—one that posits, say, a hierarchy of desires and needs, and takes into account the workings of the unconscious Otherwise our ethical thought will be superficial and excessively rationalistic, as Bok's sometimes is Bok's treatment of secrecy from an almost purely ethical standpoint also is ultimately limitting As her own distinctions between the private and public worlds indicate, secrecy can be a political issue Even though we call personal and political secrecy by the same name, we may actually be talking about two quite distinct phenomena Bok should at least have more thoroughly elaborated the differences Finally, there is a philosophical tradition that, from Fnednch Hegel onward, has stressed the importance of lying and secrecy as keys to understanding virtually all facets of human nature Clearly, secrecy is more than simply an ethical problem It is at the very center of our anthropological and esthetic self-definition Why are we so taken with detective and mystery stones...