What's "detraction"?

Alexander Pruss has just written about the sin of detraction. It's a term I'd never heard. "In detraction," says Pruss, "one discloses, without sufficient moral reason, the faults of another and one speaks the truth (or what one thinks is the truth)." This is different from slander, in which the speaker lies about another person.

He goes on to consider the puzzle of how refraining from speaking truth could be a good thing for Christians, who consider themselves people of Truth, and comes up with a number of reasons for refraining from detraction. I'm interested in the second and fifth points:

We are all sinners. By disclosing a hidden fault of another, we make it seem like this person is worse than all the people whose hidden faults are not disclosed. Frequently, the person is made to seem worse than the detractor. There is, thus, an injustice when there is no special reason to disclose the sins of this individual.

[...]

When the faults of another are disclosed to sinful humans, these humans will be tempted to take an inappropriate attitude towards these faults, an attitude of judgment rather than forgiveness. Thus, detraction is not only a sin against the person whose reputation is being unjustly tarnished, but also a sin against the listener who is being tempted into sin.

It's good to have a word for this thing I do too often.

Selfishly convenient.

David Foster Wallace’s penchant for footnoting makes him a little bit hard to excerpt, but I’m going to use an asterisk to represent what is a numbered footnote in the text:

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings;* and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any kind of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

* Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals.

-David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster.” Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2006. (253)

Yeah… pretty much. I am so far from a moral example on this one.

UPDATE: Bought myself some couscous. Felt no guilt when I ate it. (Couscous isn't made from animals, right?)