Is always speaking the truth practical?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
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is always being truthful practical answer it’s not a matter of being practical or not practical it’s a matter of being purposeful no virtue can be elevated to the level of the supreme virtue without considering context the Mahabharata talks about two kinds of moralities we could say categorical ethics or categorical morality and contextual morality contextual ethics categorical ethics means that whatever happens this is right anything that falls in this category is right and whatever happens anything that falls in that category is wrong and now in this perspective speaking truth is always right speaking false is always wrong and there are no nuances in this but that is not the proper understanding of things because we also know that there are times when speaking truth may not be the best thing say if terrorists are chasing a friend of ours and we give the French shelter in our home the terrorists knock on our door and ask rather the rioters ask is XYZ over here? and if we say yes we will become the cause of the death of that person so now there we may say that the consequence is so clearly wrong that the right becomes wrong the truth becomes a disservice speaking the truth becomes a disservice so what I would say is that there is life and there is death and there is all that is in between which is important for us to see that we maintain our life and we maintain the quality of our life and we maintain a value of life of integrity so integrity means that we through our life journey make a constructive contribution to our lives and to the lives of others so in some situations if the consequence of a particular action which is normally considered good the consequence is bad then we need not do that so we could say that broadly speaking the Mahabharata analysis considers that the rightness or wrongness of the actions can be decided by three factors intent, content and consequence sometimes our intent may be good the content of the accident may still be bad and then does the intent act as a wholesale license or protection from doing bad? No not at all it’s just that the intent can act as a protector not as a intent is one factor to be considered it is not the sole factor to be considered so similarly we look at the content and we look at the consequence and based on that we use our God given intelligence and consideration to understand how to make wise