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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

> Just say no. And lie if you have to.

I'm extremely interested in the modern morality of lying, because on the one hand, we find some lies to be so heinous that they are career-ending (plagiarism among them), and some lies to be so necessary that _not_ lying is viewed as heinous (e.g. "Would you lie to an S.S. soldier about whether you were hiding Jews in your house?")

Here, Jacques spends the entire blog post trying to persuade people to avoid immoral behavior -- but then advocates lying. Is lying not immoral anymore?

I would be very interested in knowing what percentage of people view lying as objectively wrong, and how that has changed over time.

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In philosophy of ethics, this is still something people think about.

In utilitarian style ethics, the ends (mostly) justify the means, so if in lying you are overall increasing utility/happiness for more people than if you told the truth, then it would be considered an ethical action.

By contrast, Kant's Categorical Imperative states "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law". By that logic, lying is viewed as an unethical action, because if everyone lied then no one would trust each other, resulting in an unworkable universe.

There's a lot more to both sides and many attempts to create more nuanced systems, but ethics is and will likely continue to be an important field of study with not a lot of hard answers.

...if everyone lied then no one would trust each other, resulting in an unworkable universe.

The universe worked just fine before humans invented proscriptions against lying. Biological organisms lie to each other all the time. Predators appear harmless; prey appear harmful, etc.

Actually most humans would be well-served by both lying more and being more perceptive of the lies that are told them.

Killing someone is a bad outcome no matter how you look at it. But we make a moral distinction between defensive and offensive killing and allow for "justifiable homicide". Similarly, I think the same test would hold true for lying. If you're doing it offensively, it's bad and wrong. If you're doing it defensively (as is the case in this story), I don't think anyone would question that it was morally justifiable.

Speech is a weapon, don't wield it unless you intend to hurt somebody or defend somebody.

Lying is like any other tool. Its morality is based on how its used.

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