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Stone Choir

Conflicted Interest

Stone Choir

Stone Choir

Education, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2025

⏱️ 126 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hosts

Corey J. Mahler

coreyjmahler.com

@CoreyJMahler

    Woe

    aka Eschatologuy

    @treblewoe

      Every man has a collection of interests. A man has an interest in his family; a man has an interest in his job; a man has an interest in his financial positions; a man has an interest in his city; a man has an interest in his nation. These interests can sometimes come into conflict. To have a conflict of interests does not mean that the man in question is necessarily compromised or untrustworthy, but it does mean that he is in a position where he will have to make a choice between those competing interests.

      In our legal system, we recognize this in a number of ways. We take the interests of a witness into account when weighing his testimony (and not just for credibility purposes); we take into account whether a statement is made against interest; we dismiss jurors who have certain interests in the outcome of a given case. The same is true of many other parts of our government (e.g., regulators are supposed to at least disclose any interests they have in the entities they regulate).

      It is not that having an interest means that a man is automatically disqualified; rather, it is that the interests of the man must be taken into account when assessing his arguments, and it is also that men should generally disclose their interests — and those who fail to do so are suspect. However, there most certainly are instances where a man with a conflict of interests should or even must be disqualified from participating in the discussion — this is not only to protect the discussion itself, but also to protect the man from having to make a choice between his legitimate (and possibly even equally important) interests.

      Handling these issues is a matter of wisdom, and one that has been neglected for far too long in Christian circles. God does not command us to be fools; rather, He commands us to be wise and to be wary of wolves.

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      Show Notes

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      Parental Warnings

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      Transcript

      The transcript for this episode can be found here

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      Transcript

      Click on a timestamp to play from that location

      0:00.0

      The

      0:07.0

      The Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still, whoa. On today's Stone

      0:44.7

      Choir, we're going to be discussing conflicts of interest or conflicted interest. For anyone

      0:50.7

      who is joining us after the break that we took for December, thank you for checking out the back catalog and for coming back.

      0:57.6

      The break was very helpful for my sanity.

      1:00.2

      Thank you for the folks who gave some very generous donations just before and after Christmas.

      1:04.1

      We appreciate that a lot.

      1:05.7

      And if you just joined us, we are not the firebomb throwing maniacs that everybody says where.

      1:11.9

      So you start listening like, that's not remotely what I was told.

      1:15.5

      One of the reasons that we're doing this week's episode about conflicted interest is that we want to basically make the case that there are people in participation of the public discourse of the conversations that are going on,

      1:30.0

      both in public and private, who should not be permitted to participate. There are people that

      1:36.0

      need to be forced to shut up, not necessarily told to shut up unless they persist. But we have

      1:43.3

      this egalitarian notion that everyone has to have

      1:45.6

      their say and everyone has to participate. And there can be no possible discernment or regard for

      1:50.9

      any particular man's motivations. You just say your peace. And it doesn't matter what sort of baggage

      1:57.1

      or backstory anyone brings to the table. Everyone, for every conversation, you're just

      2:01.3

      completely starting from scratch, which is just crazy. That's not how human anything has ever worked.

      2:07.3

      So we're going to make the case today for a very basic principle that you find in the court system,

      2:12.8

      you find in the civil law and contracts. And more generally, it's something that I think we intuit some,

      2:19.8

      but we do not apply it as rigorously as we should. And so we're going to lay out some basic

      2:24.7

      principles today for how to determine when something is a conflict of interest, when you have a

      2:30.1

      conflicted interest. And again, the point is that when these things are detected,

      ...

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