Oğuz Atay'ın Kişisel Etiği

 

 

 

 

 

Lie Regulations

 

All societies must reconcile the fact that lying is socially toxic with the fact that nearly all their members engage in this practice. Every belief system does its best to regulate dishonesty with taboos, sanctions, and norms. Few such systems claim that every lie is always wrong. This would put them too far out of synch with facts on the ground.

Therefore a major task for all belief systems has been to determine when it’s permissible to tell a lie.

Those participating in this search have usually taken three basic approaches: (1) lying is wrong, period (Augustine, Wesley, Kant); (2) it all depends (Montaigne, Voltaire, Bacon); (3) there is something to be said for a good lie well told (Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Wilde).

Greek gods were celebrated for their skill at deceiving humans and each other. In The Odyssey, Odysseus the dissembler is a far more intriguing character than Achilles the truth teller. When Athena, no slouch herself in the deception arts, approaches Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca in disguise, she is favorably impressed by the persuasive yarns he spins about himself. “Crafty must be he,” Athena tells Odysseus, “and Knavish, who would outdo thee in all manner of guile.”

Even early ethicists who warned against telling lies seldom did so on absolute terms. Plato, who condemned lying on general principles, nonetheless thought it was crucial for the guardians of his ideal republic to propagate “noble lies” so that the masses would accept their place and not disturb social harmony. Across the Adriatic, Cicero’s On Duties emphasized the need for truth telling among free men. In Cicero’s world, lying to a slave was not considered dishonest.

Most societies leave the question of determining which lies are justified to their clergy. Over the millennia theologians of all stripes have occupied themselves with explaining why some lies are worse than others. Even though the fourth of Buddhism’s five precepts admonishes the faithful to abstain from lying, Buddhists distinguish between major lies (such as feigning enlightenment), minor lies (making things up), and lies told to benefit others (as when a doctor conceals the truth from a patient who is dying). The latter in particular are not considered much of a problem.

Like Buddhism’s fourth precept, Hindu ethics proscribe lying. The seminal text Laws of Manu admonishes Hindi never to “swear an oath falsely, even in a trifling matter.” That seems clear enough. In its next passage, however, Manu’s laws advise that “there is no crime in a [false] oath about women whom one desires, marriages, fodder for cows, fuel, and helping a priest.”

This is how it goes in most theology. Admonitions not to lie are followed by a list of circumstances in which lying is permissible. Muhammad said his followers should always be truthful, except when a lie was necessary to preserve domestic harmony, save their life, or keep the peace. The Talmud also notes a need to keep peace as justifying falsehood. According to Judaism’s civil and religious laws, a pious scholar is always to tell the truth except when asked about his marital relations, or to avoid sounding boastful, or when telling others how well he has been hosted might burden his host with too many other guests.

Both Testaments of the Bible, and the Old Testament especially, combine condemnations of dishonesty with admiring accounts of successful deception: Abraham claiming that Sarah was his sister, not his wife; Jacob passing as his brother Esau to win his father’s blessing (and inheritance); Egyptian midwives rescuing Hebrew children by telling Pharaoh that their mothers were so vigorous that—unlike Egyptian women—they gave birth before the midwives arrived. 

Cheating is Infectious

Cheating is common but that it is infectious and can be increased by observing the bad behavior of others around us. Specifically, it seems that the social forces around us work in two different ways: When the cheater is part of our social group, we identify with that person and, as a consequence, feel that cheating is more socially acceptable. But when the person cheating is an outsider, it is harder to justify our misbehavior, and we become more ethical out of a desire to distance ourselves from that immoral person and from that other (much less moral) out-group.

More generally, these results show how crucial other people are in defining acceptable boundaries for our own behavior, including cheating. As long as we see other members of our own social groups behaving in ways that are outside the acceptable range, it’s likely that we too will recalibrate our internal moral compass and adopt their behavior as a model for our own. And if the member of our in-group happens to be an authority figure—a parent, boss, teacher, or someone else we respect—chances are even higher that we’ll be dragged along.

Dead Grannies

Over the course of many years of teaching, I’ve noticed that there typically seems to be a rash of deaths among students’ relatives at the end of the semester, and it happens mostly in the week before final exams and before papers are due. In an average semester, about 10 percent of my students come to me asking for an extension because someone has died—usually a grandmother. Of course I find it very sad and am always ready to sympathize with my students and give them more time to complete their assignments. But the question remains: what is it about the weeks before finals that is so dangerous to students’ relatives?

Most professors encounter the same puzzling phenomenon, and I’ll guess that we have come to suspect some kind of causal relationship between exams and sudden deaths among grandmothers. In fact, one intrepid researcher has successfully proven it. After collecting data over several years, Mike Adams (a professor of biology at Eastern Connecticut State University) has shown that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren’t doing so well in class are at even higher risk—students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students.

In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adams speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students’ grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams. This would indeed explain why fatalities occur more frequently as the stakes rise, especially in cases where a student’s academic future is in peril. With this finding in mind, it is rather clear that from a public policy perspective, grandmothers—particularly those of failing students—should be closely monitored for signs of ill health during the weeks before and during finals. Another recommendation is that their grandchildren, again particularly the ones who are not doing well in class, should not tell their grandmothers anything about the timing of the exams or how they are performing in class.

To All Grandmothers Out There: Take care of Yourselves at Final Times

Feeling to Need to Give Back and Tricks of Representatives of Medical Companies

Let’s consider the way representatives for drug companies (pharma reps) run their business. A pharma rep’s job is to visit doctors and convince them to purchase medical equipment and drugs to treat everything from A(sthma) to Z(ollinger-Ellison syndrome). First they may give a doctor a free pen with their logo, or perhaps a notepad, a mug, or maybe some free drug samples. Those small gifts can subtly influence physicians to prescribe a drug more often—all because they feel the need to give back.

But small gifts and free drug samples are just a few of the many psychological tricks that pharma reps use as they set out to woo physicians. “They think of everything,” my friend and colleague (let’s call him MD) told me. He went on to explain that drug companies, especially smaller ones, train their reps to treat doctors as if they were gods. And they seem to have a disproportionately large reserve of attractive reps.

The whole effort is coordinated with military precision. Every self-respecting rep has access to a database that tells them exactly what each doctor has prescribed over the last quarter (both that company’s drugs as well as their competitors’). The reps also make it their business to know what kind of food each doctor and their office staff likes, what time of day they are most likely to see reps, and also which type of rep gets the most face time with the doctors. If the doctor is noted to spend more time with a certain female rep, they may adjust that rep’s rotation so that she can spend more time in that office. If the doctor is a fan of the military, they’ll send him a veteran. The reps also make it a point to be agreeable with the doctor’s outer circles, so when the rep arrives they start by handing out candy and other small gifts to the nurses and the front desk, securing themselves in everyone’s good graces from the get-go.

One particularly interesting practice is the “dine-and-dash,” where, in the name of education, doctors can simply pull up at prespecified take-out restaurants and pick up whatever they want. Even medical students and trainees are pulled into some schemes. One particularly creative example of this strategy was the famous black mug. A black mug with the company’s logo was handed out to doctors and residents, and the company arranged it such that a doctor could take this mug to any location of a local coffee chain (which shall go unnamed) and get as much espresso or cappuccino as he or she wanted. The clamor for this mug was so great that it became a status symbol among students and trainees. As these practices became more extravagant, there was also more regulation from hospitals and the American Medical Association, limiting the use of these aggressive marketing tactics. Of course, as the regulations become more stringent, pharma reps continue to search for new and innovative approaches to influence physicians. And the arms race continues …

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Hearing stories from the reps who sold medical devices was even more disturbing. We learned that it’s common practice for device reps to peddle their medical devices in the operating room in real time and while a surgery is under way.

Janet and I were surprised at how well the pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner. Another clever tactic that they told us about involved hiring physicians to give a brief lecture to other doctors about a drug they were trying to promote. Now, the pharma reps really didn’t care about what the audience took from the lecture—what they were actually interested in was the effect that giving the lecture had on the speaker. They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. 

Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly.

The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off. They prided themselves on their ability to put doctors at ease. Sometimes a collegial relationship expanded into the territory of social friendship—some reps would go deep-sea fishing or play basketball with the doctors as friends. Such shared experiences allowed the physicians to more happily write prescriptions that benefited their “buddies.” The physicians, of course, did not see that they were compromising their values when they were out fishing or shooting hoops with the drug reps; they were just taking a well-deserved break with a friend with whom they just happened to do business. Of course, in many cases the doctors probably didn’t realize that they were being manipulated—but there is no doubt that they were.”

Yalan

Bir vatandaş olarak ülkenin yönetimini verdiğim kişinin gönlünün genç bir kadına kayması teknik olarak beni ilgilendirmez. Hatta böyle daha mutludur, dolayısı ile daha iyi çalışır, motive olur. Ancak bu yasak aşkta beni ilgilendiren olayın YALAN yönüdür. Karısının, çocuklarının, çevresinin gözüne baka baka yalan söyleyen bir siyasetçi bana haydi haydi söyler.

Turgay Oğur
Meydan Gazetesi, 10 Ocak 2016

Öğretmenler İçin Beden Dili 2

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Yalan ve Siyaset

Siyasetin ve medyanın yalanı sıklıkla tekrar etmesini Hitler’in propaganda subayı Goebbels’e bağlayan çoktur. Malum zat şöyle demiş: “Bir yalan yeteri kadar tekrar edilirse sonunda herkes ona inanır.” Yalnız propaganda subayının unuttuğu bir şey var sanırım, bu kadar sık yalan söylenirse, bir süre sonra en mutlak hakikat bile yalancının ağzında sakil duracak, inanan kimse kalmayacaktır.

Bilmem Yalancı Şahitler Kahvesi’ni bilir misiniz?

Epey eskiden adliyenin karşısında bir kahve varmış. Sakinlerinin tamamı yalancı şahitlerden oluşurmuş. Kimin hangi mahkemede sıkışıp, yalancı şahide ihtiyacı olursa, gidip bu kahveden gerektiği sayıda şahit bulurmuş. Adamın birinin böyle bir ihtiyacı olmuş ve bir dostunun salık vermesiyle Yalancılar Kahvesi’ne gelmiş. Fakat kahvede bir ocakçı, bir de miskin miskin oturan biri varmış. Adam ocakçıya yanaşıp, “Bana, burada yalancı şahit bulunurmuş dediler geldim ama hiç kimse yok.” demiş. Ocakçı, “Aslında kalabalıktır ama herkes bir cenazeye gitti şuradaki arkadaşı nöbetçi yalancı olarak bıraktılar, istersen onunla bir konuş.” demiş.

Bizimkinin gözü pek tutmasa da, eli mahkum yanaşmış:

- Affedersin bilader bir şahitlik işi vardı da...

- Yardımcı olalım abi, konu neydi?

- Bir alacak-verecek meselesi…

Yalancı şahit bir anda ciddileşmiş:

- Vaaay!.. O it herif hâlâ ödemedi mi borcunu abicim?..

Bizimkisi şaşırmış ve düzeltmiş.

- Yok öyle değil, borçlu olan benim.

Yalancı şahit daha da kendinden emin:

- Yahu abicim kaç defa ödeyeceksin o dürzünün parasını? Hadi duruşmaya yetişelim de hakime bir de ben anlatayım!!!

Medyamızın hızla yalancılar kahvesine döndüğü bir süreçten geçtiğimizin farkındasınız değil mi?

M. Nedim Hazar, Zaman