The fallacy is in considering a corporate account-management procedure as 'them'. There's no person there. There's a process set up. Do what you have to, to defeat the obstacles presented by that process.
Like all such processes, this one is defined by people, and implemented mostly in terms of a set of actions available to those employees of the corporation who handle cancellation requests. Telling such a person that you're deaf, and thus unable to communicate by voice telephone, is no less a lie because that person happens to be acting on behalf of his employer. If your morality forbids lying, then this lie violates it no less than any other.
There seems to me a somewhat troubling trend of reaction to the widely derided "corporate personhood" principle in law, by deliberately depersonalizing such "persons" to an extent which appears to me to increasingly include not only the "corporate person" per se, but the actual people persons who constitute that corporation, and who implement and act upon its policies - to regard the modern corporation as a faceless alien behemoth, after all, is of necessity to overlook the fact that it is an organization of people, in theory (if to a somewhat greater extent than in practice) around a common goal.
Your comment here is squarely in this line. "There's no person there", after all, is blatantly erroneous: of course there is a person there, otherwise there'd be no one to whom to worry about lying. It's been a while since I last reread The Authoritarians, but I seem to remember this kind of depersonalization being a significant theme in its analysis of how your category of authoritarian followers become willing to countenance human rights abuses. In that light, it surprises me to see you express a perspective which includes precisely that kind of elision, and I'm curious whether you see a substantive difference where I do not.
Yet there is also a process. Its impersonal by design. You are not even likely to talk to the same person twice. So the rules are different. If you pretend its a one-on-one relationship, you will be manipulated, lied to and frustrated.
Miss Manners reports trying to get her newspaper address changed. She called several times, but no result. Finally an agent told her that they are instructed to not do anything unless the customer was angry. She politely asked "Would you put me down as having been livid?" He politely agreed.
Did she lie? We all know we're just trying to get the system to work for us. Today, when you can't even begin to talk to a real person on the other end, you have less (no?) requirement to pretend you're interacting with one.
You are accusing the victims of authoritarianism of being authoritarian when they fight for their rights against organizations trying to oppress them. Wow.
It's clearly important to treat people with respect, even when they find themselves in a job position whose description goes against your interests.
But you wouldn't be lying to them, as I can assure you the customer service worker couldn't care less whether you're really deaf or not. As an analogy, telling a lie via telegram only counts as lying to the recipient, not to the post office clerks typing and handling the telegram.
In fact you would be lying to a faceless entity that is not a human being, whose charter clearly states that its purpose is to extract as much money as possible from you and funnel it somewhere else. Where to? Into the (ultimate) pockets of people who have built this entire construction in order to be as removed as possible from the moral and legal implications of the faceless entity's actions. Not to mention remaining very well hidden. Cowards and thieves, at the very least.
Whether you believe I'm lying to the faceless entity or to the cowards and thieves who built it that way (which is a valid philosophical point) I have no qualms whatsoever doing either thing.
Let me pose to you another scenario, and you tell me if you think my actions where abhorrent:
Whenever I work from home, there's often a knock at the door from someone trying to sell me solar panels. It's always a hard sell, they don't take "no" for an answer, and I don't have the time to deal with it. So when they ask if I'm the homeowner, I respond, "No, I rent.". They thank me and continue on their way.
Whether it's okay to lie to them has no obvious bearing on whether it's necessary. Where did you learn morality? A shallow reading of the New Testament?
From my parents, thanks. I fail to see how it's "necessary" in any sense here. Nobody's going to die because I called the company to cancel my account instead of emailing them.
You are right. What makes it okay to lie is that no harm is done to anyone I care about not harming. That they made themselves someone I no longer care about harming is their own issue.
Moreover, the person you'd be lying to couldn't care less if you're lying or not. The person is most likely paid by the hour and is counting down hours to clock out and go home.
Sorry, I'm not a consequentialist. And if harm is your criterion, what harm is done to anyone by calling customer service to cancel your account instead of lying so you can do it via email?
Any company that treats is customers so badly is likely to have a long hold period if you phone them up, probably by design. Calling them could easily take half an hour and my life only contains a finite number of half hours.
I'd like to think that I could do something productive with that time that would make my life or the world slightly better. Plus the frustration of sitting on hold would negatively impact my health and state of mind.
That seems like quite a lot of harm; certainly not worth an empty idealistic gesture that would not help anyone.
You can do something productive regardless. It's really baffling how many people seem to treat being put on hold as something that requires you to actively devote time to. Is this an age thing?
Being put on hold does put limits on what one can do. Can I be at the movies? Can I be having a discussion with friends and family? Can I driving? No to all of these (without having a performance impact).
Being put on hold does far more damage than lying in this particular case.
