Arguing for a normative plateau at this point, on this level, defeats it’s hypothetical acuity, it’s reductiveness, defeats its substantial content in identifying the significant elements.
That is the only purpose in anyone lying. Your claim is that “in most cases lying is permissible”.
What would be the reason for making the claim “lying is morally permissible”? We need to understand a person’s motive for making such a claim. There is more than one option as to why they are saying that.
What you’re saying here is that you are prone to falling for lies told by more subtle and sophisticated liars. Are you OK with that?
Yes, we need to rank-order the values in question here. If the Nazis show up at your doorstep and demand you turn over Albert Einstein, who is hiding in your cupboard, is it morally wrong for you to lie and say he isn’t here? Of course not.
Lying is neither always nor necessarily good or bad. This was the whole point I was trying to make with my previous post in this topic. It is stupid to treat something like “lying” as an objective Good or Evil. That sort of ‘morality’ which would do that is simply the absence and death of what morality really means. And even worse, to hold such an objectivist standard means that one is not looking for the deeper reasons and circumstances involved, you can be be quite sure that such a person is not interested in truth and is instead interested in something else, usually in their own personal psychological self-coherence or, more accurately, to clinging to a sufficient image of such. Avoiding cognitive dissonance at all costs, which motive is quite anti-philosophical.
Wyld: I am not saying I am prone to that. Though I think it is fair to say that I would be more likely to fall for a lie told by a subtle and sophisticated liar than a one who was bad at it.
My point is that lying does not, by itself, have the moral status to be worth being considered when determining the best choice in a given circumstance. In the case of the Nazi’s and Albert Einstein, it is not a matter of weighing the wrongness of deceiving the Nazi’s against the wrongness of them murdering Einstein (or anyone), as the first category weighs nothing at all.
The reason for saying is is generally morally permissible is that in many circumstances (I would venture to say most but wouldn’t object to strongly if you wanted to instead categorize it as a large minority), lying does not violate the ability of persons to understand and make their own decisions, and that is the criteria I am using for value.
Can you point out some cases wherein lying does not alter the understanding or any decisions being made by the one being lied to?
Yes. I think we are going to differ on what qualifies as understanding a choice and what qualifies as knowing the consequences of that choice, but I think I can give a fairly uncontroversial answer too.
Let’s say you are in highschool and your friend tells you that over the weekend he lost his virginity in a threesome with a pair of super hot girls that you don’t know, because they go to a different school. Whether or not you believe this story (and I would recommend being rather skeptical of this claim), your understanding of your own choices remains the same.
I think that you are losing the subtleties of the desire to influence others. The question arises, “Why would a person tell such a story”.
People speak so as to exercise influence. Generally the influence is not intended to make a grand difference, but rather a subtle difference. In even a casual conversation, perhaps at a bar, words are formed into sentences as required by the audience in anticipation of compatible response. The truth is that no one ever says anything without an intent to influence.
And exactly what is being influenced through conversation? Isn’t it the behavior of others? Their behavior is determined by what they believe to be true (including what they believe to be untrue). Thus in every conversation, even the idle telling of anecdotal stories, a reflective response is expected. Perhaps the intent was merely to appear to be interesting … perhaps merely to help maintain an distractive atmosphere (its own influence on would-be decisions).
Everything one intentionally says to others, serves the intent of influencing the decisions of others, whether lying or telling truth, whether subtle or dramatic. Do you ever post anything on this forum without the intent of having at least subtle influence? Does anyone? Even asking a question is an attempt to cause the reaction of answering it (something that no one would have decided to do without someone posing the question).
Then yeah, you are saying you are prone to that. At least whatever " I would be more likely to" means to you, since those are your own words here.
That is your historically-benefited position, and of course morally self-righteous one. You assume “anything related to the Nazis has no moral weight at all!”, well life doesn’t work like that. If you were alive back in 1940 you would think differently, which was the point I was trying to make. Morality isn’t “one thing”, morality is a relative juxtaposition between historically-situated agents.
So a lie is only “bad” when it violates the ability of persons to understand and make their own decisions? What the fuck? If it does not do that, then it isn’t even a lie. The entire point of a lie is that it deceives someone. That is its onto-epistemic nature. If you want to talk about deceptions of this kind that have no impact on a person’s decisions, then you’re just talking about white lies, or useless lies. Which seems far less philosophically interesting.
Are you trying to get to the heart of the matter, or are you just trying to find the most convenient way through the problem that you don’t need to look at it but can still pretend to be addressing it?
Wyld: Not because they are Nazis, because lying in such a circumstance does not violate their freedom.
To both of you, I would suggest that deceiving someone about the potential consequences of their actions does not make them fail to understand what the choice they are making is. If I tell you that there are lots of attractive women at a party I am trying to get you to go to, I have not made you misunderstand your choice of whether or not to come to the party. Whether there are attractive women there is not your choice to make, whether you choose to attend is. I have indeed influenced your choice, and deceived you about the consequences of making it, but I have not stopped you from understanding the choice that you are making.
McKay: I have to reaffirm the way I see it: to reduce your normative theory to the question -what a lie is, is to take lying to be material. Lying is only a negative affirmation, of truth. It is rarely, if ever a denial. So, this idea of normative, based on negative
Identification of the absolute proposition of truth fails. What say you? Am I full or do I have something here worth noticing?
Then I suggest that you reflect on that claim a lot longer. It is absolutely false.
You proposed that my choice was to go to a party that has a lot of women or not. Yet that wasn’t reality. You proposed a false understanding of my choices. That is why people dislike lying and liars.
Their freedom? How does freedom come into play here? In what sense does the Nazi have “freedom” to either find Einstein (who is hiding in your closet) or not? How is the concept of freedom even relevant to that scenario? And couldn’t you say that by lying you are violating the Nazi’s freedom to do his job and find Einstein?
If you are saying that the concept of freedom is not relevant to that scenario, AND you are saying that the moral wrongness of lying is predicted upon the fact that lying “violates the freedom” of the person to which the lie is told, then you are saying that the scenario (in which a Nazi asks me where Einstein is and I lie and say I don’t know) is either not a morally relevant situation or that the lie in that same situation is not a morally relevant lie.
Are you defining morality as “violates another’s freedom”, or are you just defining the moral wrongness of lying according to that metric? If it is the former then we will have some problems of course, but I am assuming it is just the latter, in which case you are comfortable saying that the above-mentioned scenario is entirely irrelevant and amoral (not possible to have any moral value at all)?
Let us use another example: let’s say the FBI comes to your house and asks you where your son is, and you happen to know that your son stole some things from a store. You know where your son is. Is it morally wrong to lie and say you don’t know? If you lie then your son gets to keep his freedom, but the store owner loses the freedom of having justice on his stolen goods (and, potentially and if you want to see it this way, the FBI agent loses his freedom to do his job according to the way he wants to do it); but if you tell the truth then your son loses his freedom but the store owner (re)gains his freedom as his goods are returned to him, and/or he gets legal justice on your son the thief. You can substitute “stole something” with “plans to kill someone” if you need a more concrete dilemma here.
So, what say you?
Yes you have. The choice I make, and my understanding of it, is predicated on whether or not there will be many attractive women at the party. If I conclude there will be many attractive women at the party and choose to go, and turns out there are no attractive women or not very many attractive women there, then the choice I made was not in accord with my own metric for how to make the choice. You deceived me into violating my own metric, which is to say you deceived me into making a bad choice.
Of course either way I understand my own metric regarding the choice itself, my metric is “I want to party with many attractive women!” You are right that whether or not you lie to me about it being the case that there are many attractive women at the party, my metric still holds for me; but you have indeed changed how I understand my metric with respect to the given situation at hand, for now I have misapplied my own metric relative to the facts of the situation. “I choose to go to a party with no attractive women, or not many attractive women” violates my metric in this case, yet I choose it anyway. Thus I failed to understand how my own metric applied in this situation.
Instead we might come up with another class of lies that would actually directly change a person’s own metric against their knowledge and desire… let’s say you tell me “hey I am going to this party, there are many attractive women there, but cmon man, you don’t want to be shallow, you don’t really want to date these women because they are shallow and uninteresting and many probably have STD’s. Why don’t you go for the more moderate and normal-looking women who have better personalities and more brains?” …and this causes me to change my metric and I no longer want to go to the party with the many attractive women.
Have you lied to me? No, you have just convinced me to change my own metric, from what it used to be to something different. That isn’t “a lie”, unless you happen to not believe what you told me, in which case you lied to me about how and why I should change my metric, and I did change my metric in response to your statements, but the lie here isn’t in the metric or the reasons why I changed it, the lie is simply in the fact that you do not happen to believe what you are telling me. The lie is only in the fact that you presented yourself as if you believe something when in fact you do not believe it. But that doesn’t make what you are telling me untrue, just like your belief that what you are telling me is true doesn’t make what you are telling me true. Assuming that I can judge for myself the perspective and information that you gave me, and I am not just going to believe what you say uncritically, then potentially it doesn’t matter that much whether or not you lie to me with that above statement, I will take what you said and think about it and decide if it changes my own metric. It might, or it might not, and regardless of whether or not you lied to me, and even potentially regardless of whether or not you lied to me and I happen to find out that you lied to me.
Maybe the next day you say to me “hey all that stuff I said about not dating attractive women, that was bullshit man, I lied”, it might still be the case that I choose to continue following that new metric. Because the truth of the metric doesn’t depend upon whether or not you happen to believe it yourself, although in many cases whether or not you believe it will likely have at least a little influence on me, assuming I have at least some respect for you.
Their freedom to make their own choices doesn’t come into play, which was my point. Einstein’s freedom does come into play, rather obviously but the Nazi’s have no claim on you telling the truth here.
The store owner doesn’t have freedom to “get justice” but their freedom over their property has been violated and your son being caught might mean he has to return the goods. Also there are some potential deterrent affects here. In either this case or the planning to kill someone case the question is not whether you should lie to them, as the lie is not what has the moral content, it is whether you should aid your son evade capture by the authorities for a crime they either have committed or one they are in the process of attempting to commit (in the case of the conspiracy to commit murder one) I would say that you should probably tell the FBI where your son is, especially in the case where he is planning to kill someone, though it will depend on the specific circumstances of the case (if for example doing prison time is liable to get your son killed because he is wanted by prominent gang members with chapters in most major prisons then turning him in for the theft is going to have potentially much worse consequences if he gets any prison time at all)
No, your choice is whether you go to the party or not. The consequences and reason for making that choice may relate to who is going to be there, but those are not things you are morally entitled to know. One needs only to understand what choice it is that they are making, in this case one of bringing themself to a party. This would be different than had the person said “hey come through this door there is a party in here with lots of attractive women” and actually the door opened onto a pitfall trap filled with spikes which killed me. In this case I have not chosen to die, and the person has violated that freedom through deceiving me about what choice was really on offer. But whether or not there are attractive women somewhere is not my choice to make, so you have no violated my freedom in lying about it. Whether I have deceived you into making a choice you then consider bad is not relevant.
In short, you have lied to yourself so much that you can’t comprehend the truth.
Typical.
It’s the exact same thing, the only difference is of degree. If a trap door opens and I die, you have deceived me about the choice offered and thus violated my freedom; if the party sucks and no hot girls are there then you have deceived me about the choice offered and thus violated my freedom. There is no real distinction here.
Similarly for the Nasi example, how is your lying to them not a violation of their freedom to do their job, carry out their desire, and have accurate information? How are you defining freedom? And precisely why is that definition you are using the only relevant metric for understanding the moral significance or lack thereof of lying?
There is a significant different. Your life is yours and whether you continue it is your choice to make. Whether the party is to your liking and the number of hot girls there is not your choice to make.
You’re conflating things. The difference is not categorical at all. I am indeed “free” to choose to live or die, just as I am “free” to choose to attend a party or not. If the party I end up attending isn’t the one that I chose, then my freedom was violated, at least according to your understanding of freedom.
If you trick me and I fall down a hole and die, my freedom to choose to live or die was violated by you. If you trick me and I attend a shitty party with no hot girls, then my freedom to choose to attend a party with many hot chick or not attend a party with many hot chicks was violated by you. There is no logical distinction here.
There is indeed a distinction. You may be free to attend the party or not in that you are free to move yourself to the location, but you have no freedom to be where the hot chicks are. If, for example, all the hot chicks leave upon hearing you are coming, your freedom would also not be violated. The point is that attending a party with lots of hot chicks if not your choice to make. You only have a claim to yourself and your property, not to the actions of others, including their attendance at a party.