WikiLeaks and our obligations to the web of tellings
The principles of free speech, discretion and bearing witness come into conflict when considering a case such as WikiLeaks
'WikiLeaks has been defended as legally free speech, but for it to be ethical requires the legal freedom to be justified by the moral freedom.' Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
The question: Is it wrong to bear true witness?
Most of what we know, we know because someone told us. So we are all aware of the vital support given to us by the great web of tellings that surrounds us and we care a lot about the strength of that web. The ninth commandment (thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour) sounds right to most of us.
To give witness is to contribute a thread to the web of tellings on which we depend, a thread on which we will place weight. False witness is spinning a thread that will give way: an untruth, a half truth, an insincerity, a prejudice, a deception, an utterance born of malice.
Is it only neighbours we shouldn't bear false witness against? To me it seems wrong against others as well, but I can imagine circumstances in which lying about one enemy to another might be right. Anyway, it seems right to include as my neighbour anyone to whom loyalty is owed, and allowing the strength of the duty to vary with the strength of loyalty owed.
We might reasonably regard many of the governments involved in the WikiLeaks cables as distant neighbours and, given the extent of the cables involved, selective publication could be used to bear false witness, which on this principle would be wrong.
Careless gossip about our friends and family is obviously wrong, and it is no excuse – indeed, it makes it worse – if the gossip is true. Some things between us are for us, not for others: to give them away is to harm our relationship. Loyalty therefore requires discretion: confidences are to be kept, not told. Perhaps there is here a principle analogous to the ninth commandment: thou shalt not bear true witness against thy neighbour.
This doesn't sound quite right to me. What makes the telling wrong is not so much that the truth tells against (or for) your neighbour, but that they do not want it known, or that enemies can use it against them. On the other hand, some truths that tell against your neighbour ought to be told, and told by you, whether they want it told or not.
So the duty of discretion isn't simply not telling the truth against your neighbour. Rather, it must weigh with you that they do not wish it known or that enemies may misuse it, and this must be outweighed by other considerations before you tell. Remembering my earlier point about distant neighbours, WikiLeaks owes some degree of discretion. Discretion would count against the publication of cables more for their value as gossip than anything else, and also against indiscriminate publication.
WikiLeaks has been defended as legally free speech, but for it to be ethical requires the legal freedom to be justified by the moral freedom. Defence of the moral freedom can be based on the benefit to the audience, on free thought requiring free exchange of ideas and on autonomy and self-possession requiring free expression. When we defend free speech on these grounds we don't just mean that it's OK if people don't like what you say provided you are speaking rightly without error. We mean you should be free to speak wrongly and in error. But that means to defend a moral right to free speech is to defend the permissibility of saying what is morally objectionable and false.
So now we can see the problem: if these three principles (no false witness, discretion and free speech) are right, bearing false witness and indiscretion are both forbidden and permitted, which is a contradiction.
The Scottish philosopher William David Ross offered a way round this problem when he proposed that ethical principles of the kind discussed here are not absolute but, as he put it, prima facie. What he meant by this is that there is no general precedence among the principles but that what is ethical is determined by the balance of the prima facie principles as they apply in each specific circumstance.
If Ross is right (a question still hotly contested by philosophers), in arguing the rights and wrongs of WikiLeaks we are trying to balance prima facie principles of (among others) free speech, bearing witness and discretion. The principles conflict. There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on. Granted our conflicting loyalties, we might still think we all owe something to civilisation and to that extent, while we should tell some truths about civilisation's failures, we also should be circumspect in indiscretions that give aid to barbarity.
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