but would not that make you feel a little guilty as you are lying to the person just to cancel a subscription?
If you saw that a soda machine always dispensed a Coke when you pressed the Dr. Pepper button would you feel bad pressing that button to get the Coke you wanted?
There are times when it's moral to lie, other times when it's immoral to lie, and still other times when morality hardly has anything to do with it at all (such as the above scenario.) We tell small children that it's immoral to lie because we don't trust their moral judgement and would prefer they always tell us the truth.
None of this should suggest I think it's obviously wrong to lie to a stranger about whether you're deaf in order to avoid a conversation - that might be permissible according to generally accepted social rules. My point is more that when you start talking about deciding for yourself when to obey moral rules, you are on shaky ground, no matter how wise or logical you are.
While I agree with your first two sentences and think that they are well said, the third doesn't demonstrate the first; it demonstrates only that "hurting people can be done without lying", not "lying can be done without hurting people."
Is it ever morally acceptable to tell a lie? Kant thought not. His example of the would-be murderer explains his reasoning. Read by Harry Shearer. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.
Should you kill a person to save two? Kill two to save one? Does matter who the people involved are? Anti-Kantian philosophies don't have good consistent answers to this -- at least they don't live according to their philosophical answers.
This is a utility-maximizing lie. You're saving both yourself and the other person time. Unless you subscribe to some belief-system that holds truth-telling to be some sort of moral good in and of itself, everyone is better off.
And that's aside from the fact that the patter you'll hear trying to keep you paying is going to be full of, at the very least, deceptive statements lacking any objective truth or falsity.
I was reading a Matt Levine column in which he described some litigation over selling bonds that was very analogous to the car dealer situation. And apparently what happened is that it was decided that lying about the price paid was ok per se, but creating falsified documentation to back it up was fraud. Which seems weird!
It’s like the squares/grid stuff used by car salespeople to get you to get a car loan instead of buying the car with cash.
You can take that as "not at all guilty".