question about lying

[afterzir]

In "Universally Preferable Behavior", Stefan writes:

lying is morally between "being late" & assault.

 

So, "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction"

is morally between "being late" & assault?

 

[dsayers]

The act of lying and the content of a lie are not the same thing.

[labmath2]

The act of lying and the content of a lie are not the same thing.

Does the content of the lie matter and why?

[Jaeger]

In "Universally Preferable Behavior", Stefan writes:

lying is morally between "being late" & assault.

 

So, "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction"

is morally between "being late" & assault?

The lie  "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction"  is not as bad as the assault (War in Iraq) that came after the lie.  There were two wrongs committed, the assault being more serious.

[EclecticIdealist]

In "Universally Preferable Behavior", Stefan writes:

lying is morally between "being late" & assault.

 

So, "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction"

is morally between "being late" & assault?

Stefan recognizes that lying is immoral from an "empirical" standpoint, but does not view lying as wholly unavoidable. Thus, he's stuck with lying not quite fitting within the realm of either aesthetic (an avoidable negative obligation) or ethic (an unavoidable negative obligation).

 

I believe this can actually properly be resolved by properly identifying the fact that lying is unavoidable in the sense that it is an assault on one's concept of reality, thus clearly making it immoral. It should also be recognized that like assault, the lie may be small and relatively inconsequential, or large and of great consequence. The proper and just response to such assaults, or lies must necessarily be proportionate to the assault or lie. A lie which results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of property valued in the hundreds of millions is of much greater consequence than a lie which results in the loss of a dozen lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars of property, or a lie which merely hurts someone's feelings or results in the loss of a few dollars or cents.

[dsayers]

I believe this can actually properly be resolved by properly identifying the fact that lying is unavoidable in the sense that it is an assault on one's concept of reality, thus clearly making it immoral.

This is true in the parent-child relationship. In all other relationships, in order for your claim to be true, a person would have to be less responsible for their own perceptions than others are. This cannot be universalized. The recipient of a lie is not bound either by the lie or its content and therefore it is ineligible for consideration as immoral.

[EclecticIdealist]

This is true in the parent-child relationship. In all other relationships, in order for your claim to be true, a person would have to be less responsible for their own perceptions than others are. This cannot be universalized. The recipient of a lie is not bound either by the lie or its content and therefore it is ineligible for consideration as immoral.

No.  It has nothing to do with how responsible you are for your own perceptions.

 

Let's apply your reasoning to assault, robbery, rape, and murder.

 

In order for your assertion to be true, a person who is assaulted, raped, robbed, or murdered would have to be less responsible for their own personal safety, security, and life than others are. This cannot be universalized.  The victim of assault, robbery, rape, and murder is not required to avoid martial arts or personal fire arms training, advanced tactical awareness training, or training on how to secure one's property from robbers and thieves, they may avoid the assault, robbery, rape, or murder simply by exercising due diligence for their own personal safety and property; therefore, assault, robbery, rape, and murder are ineligible for consideration as immoral.

 

Therefore, nothing is immoral because each and every individual has greater personal responsibility for themselves, their property, and what they believe than anyone else does.

 

dSayers, if we apply that standard of reasoning to everything else, not just lies, nothing may be considered immoral by the standard of UPB. But let's take things a step further with respect to lying. Instead of lying to you, what about lying ABOUT you--libel, and slander. You certainly can't claim that libel and slander are immoral, because they're nothing more than lies; and by your standard, the person doing the libeling and slandering is less responsible than those who believe the lies and slander; therefore, one should never sue the libeler or slanderer for damages to one's reputation as that would be unjust according to your way of thinking; rather, one should sue those who gullibly believe the libeler and slanderer since they are the more responsible parties according to you. This fails not only the internal consistency test - rationality, but the external consistency test as well - empirical natural or intuitive moral or ethical sense.

[RichardY]

Lying can be way worse than assault, its poison, much more persistent in the minds of those affected, though sometimes "beneficial" if it allows you to re-evaluate and make better decisions. Anything from tampering  with scientific research data that people depend on, to lying about cement mixtures in Apartment blocks or lying about baby formula in China. 

 

Lying is especially devastating when combined with situations of duress such as torture or even positive reinforcement bribery(Judas) or false friendship , especially when the situations involve moral "confessions" about people and/or yourself. 

 

A prominent example I can think of is some of the resistant fighters during WW2 and some of the moral questions, that raised in the minds of those effected. Other things that come to mind of are people being tortured in Medieval Europe for confessions or someone fabricating one anyway, bit like the movie Braveheart at the end. 

 

The lie might even seem inconsequential to the person lying, thinking of the film The Deer Hunter.

Where Robert de Niro says that he won't leave anyone behind in Vietnam but goes home anyway leaving his best friend there. 

 

Assault can be bad enough especially the physical and emotional scars it can inflicts, but to really crush the life out of someone, destroy their will to live, nothing can be more devastating than a lie or lies. Granted some people are more effected by lies than others but as Stefan said "We are social animals." like it or not.

 

I think there are two immoral aspects to lying one is contract violation, the other is social. Social, because people have incomplete knowledge and rely on information from others to make decisions on how to act towards each other and with physical reality.

[dsayers]

Let's apply your reasoning to assault, robbery, rape, and murder.

 

In order for your assertion to be true

I made an argument, not an assertion. You cannot apply "my reasoning" to theft, assault, rape, and murder because lies are not binding upon another whereas those behaviors are. If you punch me in the face, I can't choose to not have been punched in the face. If you tell me that your way is clear at an intersection, I can choose not to proceed as if what you've told me is true. And if I did proceed and in doing so caused a collision, *I* would be responsible for that collision, not you. If anybody were to blame you, they would be saying that you are more responsible for my behavior in that scenario than I am, which cannot be universalized and is therefore clearly false.

[EclecticIdealist]

I made an argument, not an assertion.

You made an argument around the assertion that personal responsibility not to believe a lie exculpates the teller of the lie of moral responsibility. I used your assertion and reasoning to demonstrate the ridiculousness of your assertion and argument supporting it. 

You cannot apply "my reasoning" to theft, assault, rape, and murder because lies are not binding upon another whereas those behaviors are. If you punch me in the face, I can't choose to not have been punched in the face. If you tell me that your way is clear at an intersection, I can choose not to proceed as if what you've told me is true. And if I did proceed and in doing so caused a collision, *I* would be responsible for that collision, not you. If anybody were to blame you, they would be saying that you are more responsible for my behavior in that scenario than I am, which cannot be universalized and is therefore clearly false.

Nice try. When you say that theft, assault, rape, and murder are binding, what you are ACTUALLY saying is that the attempted theft was successful, the attempted assault was successful, the attempted rape was successful, the attempted murder was successful. You are thereby suggesting, that because a lie is not necessarily believed, i.e. successful in convincing a person that something is true that is actually false, or something is false which is actually true; that it is not binding. This is a cheat on your part, but even your cheat fails as I demonstrated previously by showing that if lying is not binding if one is able to discern the lie and choose not to believe it, then theft, assault, rape, and murder are equally non-binding if one is able to prevent them from being successful as well. Thus we see that your conception of why an action is considered immoral is not mitigated by the personal responsibility of the victim or recipient. That makes as much sense as saying the rapist is not immoral for engaging in rape because the person he raped has greater responsibility to take the initiative to prevent themselves from being raped, such as learning self-defense and never being alone with anyone they do not wish to have sex with. 

 

When speaking of morality, we speak of actions, not their results or consequences. When we say that robbery and theft are immoral, we are not saying that only successful robbery or theft is immoral we are saying that the act of committing robbery or theft is immoral. When we say that assault, rape, and murder are immoral, we are not saying that only successful assault, only successful rape, and only successful murder are immoral, we are saying that the act of committing an assault, the act of committing a rape, and the act of committing murder are immoral. Note also that if these actions are unsuccessful, we don't consider them to be less than immoral or merely aesthetically negative. The actions, successful or not, are what we deem to be immoral, not their successful completion or their resultant consequences. When they are said to be "binding", what is meant is that the actions are unavoidable. The act of lying is unavoidable in that one cannot readily avoid the act of being lied to; one can only hope to mitigate the effectiveness of the act of lying on one's or another's conception of reality.

 

But let's go back to your analogy with driving a car. If I see that a car is coming, but I lie and tell you that the way is clear to proceed, I am responsible for attempting to create a false conception of reality in your mind. If you proceed on this false conception of reality rather than verifying whether the way is clear to proceed with your own eyes, you are being an irresponsible driver as far as the laws of society are concerned. As the driver of an automobile, you are considered to be responsible for the accident and liable for the damages. To my knowledge, tort law does not make any accommodations for shared responsibility with passengers of the car who lie to the driver. Does this mean that the lie which resulted in the accident was not immoral? Not at all. It simply means that liability for the accident is not the same as moral culpability for the accident. When it comes to moral culpability, both the driver and the liar are responsible for the accident, the liar for deliberately attempting to cause a crash with their lie, and the driver for negligently relying upon the words of another when property and lives were at stake. In a truly just legal system, both would be held liable, and the liar more so than the driver for intentionally causing the collision.

[dsayers]

When you say that theft, assault, rape, and murder are binding, what you are ACTUALLY saying is that the attempted theft was successful, the attempted assault was successful, the attempted rape was successful, the attempted murder was successful.

Nope.

[EclecticIdealist]

You cannot apply "my reasoning" to theft, assault, rape, and murder because lies are not binding upon another whereas those behaviors are. If you punch me in the face, I can't choose to not have been punched in the face.

yup.

 

Or if that's not what you're saying then:

 

"You cannot apply 'my reasoning' to fibbing, telling falsehoods you know to be true, libeling, and slandering because lies are not binding upon another whereas those behaviors are. If you fib to me, I can't choose to not have been fibbed to."

 

Yup, that's exactly what you're saying.

[algernon]

Interesting the traffic at an intersection debate was brought up. You can be held liable for an accident by giving incorrect information to the driver. And example would be if you stop short of a driveway, and wave someone out that is trying to turn left, if they are then an accident due to you directing them out into traffic you are liable.

 

Another example would be if police are directing traffic at an intersection, and due to officers negligence directing traffic into each other, they (or their employer) are held liable.

 

This can be applied to almost any situation in life, to say the lie (or negligence) of another individual is of no consequence to the actions that are taken is incorrect.

 

I hand someone a drink and tell them to drink it, that it's safe, yet I know it's poisoned, am I not liable? Well I didn't force them to drink it, they made the conscience decision.

 

I am an employer and tell my employees to work in a building I know is full of dangerous gasses and fumes, am I not liable?

 

Some time back I read a story of a catsup company who shipped out catsup contaminated with Listeria, the CEO was informed that the tomatoes might have been contaminated and he said to ship it anyway, someone died and he was found liable in court. No one forced anyone to eat the catsup.

 

There is the legal precedent of Good Faith or bona fide,

 

Honesty; a sincere intention to deal fairly with others.

Good faith is an abstract and comprehensive term that encompasses a sincere belief or motive without any malice or the desire to defraud others. It derives from the translation of the Latin term bona fide, and courts use the two terms interchangeably.

 

If you are working with someone in good faith and cause an accident, you would not be morally responsible but still legally responsible for an accident caused by your negligence, if you are lying and not working in good faith, you are morally responsible.

 

My example of the police directing traffic, if they are negligent and cause an accident it is different than they are lying (saying it's clear to proceed when it's not, and they know it) and cause an accident.

 

To my knowledge, tort law does not make any accommodations for shared responsibility with passengers of the car who lie to the driver

 

 

Actually it does, this was not a passenger but a close comparison. http://yournjlawyer.com/index.php/2009/04/waving-a-car-into-traffic-prior-to-crash-results-in-liability/

[EclecticIdealist]

Actually it does, this was not a passenger but a close comparison. http://yournjlawyer.com/index.php/2009/04/waving-a-car-into-traffic-prior-to-crash-results-in-liability/

I stand corrected. Apparently in some jurisdictions, this is the case.

[dsayers]

"...I can't choose to not have been fibbed to."

Which doesn't violate your property.

[EclecticIdealist]

Which doesn't violate your property.

Ah.  What you mean by "binding" is "violates your property"?

If someone attempted theft/robbery, attempted assault, attempted rape, and attempted murder but were unsuccessful, then they didn't violate your property either, so I guess that makes those actions not immoral, but merely annoying or unpleasant, right?

 

And of course, when someone attempts to alter or distort your mental concept of reality with their lies, that's not violating your property, right? I mean, it's not like you own your thoughts and your mental concepts of reality.

[dsayers]

Ah.  What you mean by "binding" is "violates your property"?

If someone attempted theft/robbery, attempted assault, attempted rape, and attempted murder but were unsuccessful, then they didn't violate your property either

Nope. Dance, little monkey!

[EclecticIdealist]

Nope. Dance, little monkey!

Nope, I'm done trying to figure out your inconsistent, special-case reasoning why you think lying isn't immoral when I've provided ample arguments to show, even by your own flawed reasoning (if you'd only use it consistently) why lying must either be considered immoral because it is unavoidable, or why nothing must be considered immoral because no one is more responsible for your personal safety and that of your possessions than you. If you want to claim victory with even a semblance of rational consistency, you must prove why lying isn't immoral without using ambiguous terms with uniquely contrived and secret meanings only you seem to know..

[dsayers]

I've provided ample arguments

Strawmen are not arguments.

[EclecticIdealist]

Strawmen are not arguments.

Illustrations of errors in logical consistency are not Strawman arguments.

[dsayers]

Illustrations of errors in logical consistency are not Strawman arguments.

Deliberately misrepresenting what somebody has said is a Strawman.

[EclecticIdealist]

Deliberately misrepresenting what somebody has said is a Strawman.

But I did not deliberately misrepresent ANYTHING you said; therefore, NOT a strawman as you claim. Your claim that I did is the Strawman.

 

Maybe he's just that dense?

I'm not mentally slow, but you and dSayers seem to be; that or dSayers is simply stubborn and irrational.