I relate to the impulse, but I think I disagree on the substance. Public intellectuals are involved in many different types of what we might call cautiously call games, games that we can charitably and fairly assume often involve significant stakes. ‘Intellectuals should always be straightforwardly honest’, while well-intentioned and capturing something important, would foreclose broad spectra of ‘moves’ in these games that may be quite important, optimal, or critical at meta-levels.
To make this more obvious, I don’t see that this is all that meaningfully different from ‘people need to say what they actually believe.’ The problem, as I see it, is with the modal operator. It’s obviously pretty easy to generate counterexamples to the implicit absolutism here (when a member of the dictator’s security forces has a gun to your head? etc.).
‘It’s often important to say what you actually believe’, while a little more flexible and thus softer, works better here I think. Then the work consonant with the OP is zeroing in on when people genuinely believe it’s tough or suboptimal to be fully honest and identifying when their latitude may be greater than they believe, and why.
I relate to the impulse, but I think I disagree on the substance. Public intellectuals are involved in many different types of what we might call cautiously call games, games that we can charitably and fairly assume often involve significant stakes. ‘Intellectuals should always be straightforwardly honest’, while well-intentioned and capturing something important, would foreclose broad spectra of ‘moves’ in these games that may be quite important, optimal, or critical at meta-levels.
To make this more obvious, I don’t see that this is all that meaningfully different from ‘people need to say what they actually believe.’ The problem, as I see it, is with the modal operator. It’s obviously pretty easy to generate counterexamples to the implicit absolutism here (when a member of the dictator’s security forces has a gun to your head? etc.).
‘It’s often important to say what you actually believe’, while a little more flexible and thus softer, works better here I think. Then the work consonant with the OP is zeroing in on when people genuinely believe it’s tough or suboptimal to be fully honest and identifying when their latitude may be greater than they believe, and why.