Quote:
Originally Posted by haguruma
I counter, revealing the truth can be just as destructive.
It is a matter of how truth is handled and Umineko never made the point "knowing the truth is bad" it simply went for "there are truths that are to delicate to be revealed without care".
If Ange actually revealed the whole truth then everything would go to hell. Captain Kawabata would be arrested for or at last accused of aiding Kinzô in keeping his daughter hostage and without proper education.
The money given to the families and the Ushiromiya fortune would probably be confiscated as it was gained from illegal sources (stolen gold).
The Nanjô clinic would probably go out of business when it was revealed that the father of the current chief of medicine and former chief of medicine was aiding Kinzo during the incestuous birth of his daughter and concealing said daughters death.
Heck, Nanjo's son, Kumasawa's son...even Ange could likely be arrested for not notifying the police about the mysterious cash in the bank vaults they received keys for.
etc.
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Have you considered that all of those things are things which perhaps
ought to happen? If true, most of what you said is probably right: Kawabata assisted in kidnapping, Kinzo was a thief, Nanjo was a bad doctor, and Nanjo and Kumasawa's sons are concealing evidence from police. If that is indeed the truth, is it suddenly wrong for them to face the just consequences of their immoral actions? Is it wrong that the Ushiromiya fortune, which was built on murder and fraud, be reduced to what it always was: Nothing?
Nobody said (or nobody should be saying) that the truth cannot be harmful. Indeed, a premise of the whole "stop hiding the truth from Ange" thing is that there's little question it probably
will be harmful, and it
is harmful, but the truth is better in the end because truth is what truth is and once it is known it doesn't go back.
Uncertainty is more harmful than truth, but
even if it were not, truth is morally superior to uncertainty and thus the default is that it needs to be known and it needs to be revealed.
You seem to be taking a consequentialist view that "if hiding one unpleasant truth minimizes the harm to others, we should accept the concealment or at least agree that it should be breached with care." I flatly reject this. I believe that such a decision is one which we cannot universalize because we lack the faculties necessary to determine when it may be permissible, and that
in general truth causes no harm to the innocent.
I grant that truth can cause harm to Ange, but I would argue that's a result of prior moral failings on behalf of individuals and not because "the truth is painful." The truth is painful because someone (presumably) acted immorally. Though it may cause distress to her or to other individuals to learn that other people behaved immorally, it is ultimately better to know that some individuals were moral and others were immoral than to
suspect that some or all individuals were immoral without sufficient reason (as, after all, we do not want to universalize the notion that anyone whose actions we don't know about should be thought of as having acted immorally). How someone should react to that information is their own decision. Ange chooses to be hurt by the truth, it doesn't hurt her. Revealing the truth is good.
The only person who fails morally but acts with good intentions is Eva, so I'm inclined so say she was wrong but forgivably so, because she believed (wrongly) that she had a duty to Ange which was higher than her duty to truth.