
On Lying - blegh
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/lying-language-knowledge-ethics-and-politics/
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roenxi
Requiring something like 'intent' makes the picture impossibly murky. Intent
can never be established with total certainty. Establishing intent requires
mind-reading (ie, is impossible) or a confession that might itself be false.

So intent can only ever be established to some standard of evidence (possible,
probable, likely or no plausible alternative interpretation). This introduces
a huge amount of uncertainty which starts to dominate the moral situation. The
lie cannot be disentangled from what the evidence is that it is a lie; because
intent is always a fuzzy concept that cannot be measured or uncovered.

This is where the issues discussed here start to spring from - people imagine
different standards of evidence then ask what the moral interpretation of that
standard of evidence should be.

~~~
chimi
I think intent matters a lot. If you lie to me to take something from me
because you want it, that's worse than lying to me in order to prevent me from
going somewhere you know someone is waiting to take something from me.

I would never thank you for lying to me like a scammer would. I might thank
you for lying to me like a parent would though.

Intent matters. Why you are lying to me is more important than the lie itself
in my opinion.

~~~
AstralStorm
And the consequentialist ethical standpoint is that intent does not matter as
much, but the result does. And unlike intent, short term consequences are much
more amenable to analysis.

In case of scammer vs parent, the results are obviously different.

But if say that parent lied with good intentions but caused harm, it could be
as bad if not worse. The other thing that matters is whether consequences were
predictable by the agent that lied. This is related to but not entirely the
same as intent, however estimating that is pretty hard too. Typically done
using a reference group.

Note that intent implies prediction of behavior of parties that are being lied
to. The opposite is not true.

The argument in short is that the ethical difference between outright
deception and gross negligence with same results is non-existent.

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olooney
The submitted link goes to a brief review of a recently published collection
of essays; however, there's a table of contents and an abstract for each essay
in the book itself available here[1].

I picked up Sissela Bok's book _Lying_ [2] a few years ago. While in someways
it echoes the old "categorical imperative" argument (lying is wrong because
you wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone routinely lies) I found it
to be much more nuanced than Kant's heavy handed and inflexible system. There
are in-depth discussions of paternalistic lies, lying to dying patients, lying
to protect confidentiality, and much more.

[1]:
[https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019874...](https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198743965.001.0001/oso-9780198743965)

[2]: [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15606/lying-by-
siss...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15606/lying-by-sissela-bok/)

~~~
oska
Thank you for mentioning the Sissela Bok book, it looks interesting.

------
ncmncm
The biggest advance in the field was the recognition of the role of bullshit.

Bullshit is talk that fills a role other than truth or falsehood. The speaker
doesn't actually care whether it is true, false, or meaningless, but only what
effect it has on listeners. Most political harm, from Hitler and Stalin to
Trump and Bojo, arises from deployment of BS.

