SanchoPanza wrote on Jan 8
th, 2008 at 2:46am:
Intentionally using countermeasures is dishonest and therefore immoral. Under your logic, should a Navy Fighter Pilot decide that the vision requirements or testing procedures aren't fair then he would be perfectly justified in attempting to manipulate the testing procedure so he could maintain flight status. Perhaps, lets say, by educating himself as to the order of letters he would have to recite from a chart during the exam so he can try to manufacture the response the doctor is expecting during the exam.
You didn’t differentiate between mental and physical countermeasures in your statement that using countermeasures is dishonest and therefore immoral. It seems reasonable to believe your statement includes both types of countermeasures.
I am curious as to how a person is behaving dishonestly and therefore immorally if they answer all the questions on a polygraph exam truthfully, without withholding any information, and then they do long division or recite poetry in their head? I don’t see how a person doing such a thing is behaving the least bit unethically. They are answering the questions truthfully, which is what they are required to do.
Your “Navy Fighter Pilot” analogy is simply deliberate obfuscation. The pilot in your example is not reading the eye chart, which is precisely what he or she is required to do during an eye exam. A subject in a polygraph test is required to answer all questions truthfully and without withholding any information. If they do that they are fulfilling the only reasonable expectation they can possibly be held to.
It simply seems unreasonable to tell the subject of a polygraph that, despite answering all questions truthfully and not withholding any information, they will be disqualified for “dishonest and immoral” behavior because after each truthful answer they chose not to go over their responses in their heads for several more minutes in order to create a physiological response.
A better analogy would be a person arrested for drunk driving that agrees to blow into the Intoxilyzer. If he or she blows into the machine when told to do so, but at the same time they decide to do long division in their head or to mentally recite poetry, they are still doing everything that is required of them. If the person refused to blow because they think the Intoxilyzer is an inaccurate method of measuring BAC, then they are not completing the test. But if they blow into machine they are fulfilling their ethical responsibility to comply with the test, regardless of what they may be thinking at the time they blow.
If the Intoxilyzer was incapable of rendering a analysis unless the subject was thinking about how much they drank that night it would certainly indicate to most reasonable people that the Intoxilyzer was not scientifically valid. It would not indicate that the person who blew into the machine but chose not to dwell on how much they drank that evening was doing anything immoral or dishonest.