Robin Downie
Mistakes and other errors
I have concerns about the deterioration of language, but I am willing to admit that sometimes they are a bit schoolteachery. For example, I deplore the way in which ‘different from’ is being replaced by ‘different to’. But this change is not misleading.
On the other hand, the misuse of words and expressions can be seriously misleading. Take, for example, the expression the ‘eye of the storm’. Correctly used the ‘eye of the storm’ is the still calm area in the middle of it, but the expression is now commonly used to mean the forefront of it, the area which gets the full force. The consequence is that when the expression is used it is no longer clear whether it is referring to a calm area or to a particularly stormy one. This is true also of metaphorical uses of the expression. If the speaker is in the eye of the expenses storm is he in the calm and innocent middle or in the stormy and guilty forefront?
A word commonly used at the moment in an attempt to disguise serious moral, indeed criminal, wrong-doing is the word ‘mistake’. We are not culpable, or not seriously culpable, for a ‘mistake’. To admit to a mistake is to invoke a valid excusing condition. For example, suppose that in the dim light of the bedroom where all the coats were piled on the bed during a party I took your anorak by mistake for my own. (Both were M&S’s finest.) Well, okay, perhaps I had drunk a little too much, but I’m really sorry to have caused you trouble. I think that would get me excused from moral blame.
But consider this: ‘I see now that it was a mistake to sniff cocaine’. What kind of a mistake was that? Did you think it was talcum powder? Or perhaps you didn’t notice you were sniffing it. Compare, ‘I was so absorbed in your fascinating story that I missed the turn-off to the B road’ with ‘I was so absorbed in doing a deal that I didn’t notice I was sniffing cocaine’.
Am I being too much of a nit-picking analytical philosopher when I think that, just perhaps, there is a bit of a difference? I am tempted to say, ‘Try that on the judge’, but alas, it might just work with some judges, the ones who say, ‘Mistakes will happen, so a little bit of community service is adequate’. Here’s another recent mistake. ‘It is true that I got some children to sign a document which said that they would keep quiet about their abuse, but I now see that that was a mistake’. Not even a venial sin, but just a mistake.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has an interesting concept which translates as ‘bad faith’. Bad faith has several aspects, but one is when you deceive yourself and do not accept moral responsibility for what you have done. The word ‘mistake’ helps with this self-deception because it encourages us to see moral or even criminal wrong-doing as events which have happened to us, as it were outside our rational control, rather than as actions we have deliberately performed. And deceiving yourself is an effective start in deceiving others, for we all know that even in the best of circles mistakes occur.
If we make a mistake we may try to put ourselves in the eye of the storm, as understood by meteorologists, when sometimes we should really be in the eye of the storm, as understood by journalists – other than SR journalists of course!
Robin Downie is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University
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01.04.10
Issue no 229
Why
Alton
Towers?
Kenneth Roy
on the Lanarkshire
school bus accident
[click here]
Mistakes
and other
errors
Robin Downie
on the language of
Purcell and the Pope
[click here]
Why don’t we
mind our
languages?
R D Kernohan
on the Scottish
reluctance to learn
foreign languages
[click here]
When friends
fall out
Alan Fisher
on the frosty relations
between America
and Israel
[click here]
Deer
The April poem
by Gerard Rochford
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SR’s freedom of
information campaign
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