On Lying | Hacker News Reader

On Lying

ndpr.nd.edu

21 pointsblegh7 comments

Requiring something like 'intent' makes the picture impossibly murky. Intent can never be established with total certainty. Establishing intent requires mind-reading (ie, is impossible) or a confession that might itself be false.

So intent can only ever be established to some standard of evidence (possible, probable, likely or no plausible alternative interpretation). This introduces a huge amount of uncertainty which starts to dominate the moral situation. The lie cannot be disentangled from what the evidence is that it is a lie; because intent is always a fuzzy concept that cannot be measured or uncovered.

This is where the issues discussed here start to spring from - people imagine different standards of evidence then ask what the moral interpretation of that standard of evidence should be.

I think intent matters a lot. If you lie to me to take something from me because you want it, that's worse than lying to me in order to prevent me from going somewhere you know someone is waiting to take something from me.

I would never thank you for lying to me like a scammer would. I might thank you for lying to me like a parent would though.

Intent matters. Why you are lying to me is more important than the lie itself in my opinion.

And the consequentialist ethical standpoint is that intent does not matter as much, but the result does. And unlike intent, short term consequences are much more amenable to analysis.

In case of scammer vs parent, the results are obviously different.

But if say that parent lied with good intentions but caused harm, it could be as bad if not worse. The other thing that matters is whether consequences were predictable by the agent that lied. This is related to but not entirely the same as intent, however estimating that is pretty hard too. Typically done using a reference group.

Note that intent implies prediction of behavior of parties that are being lied to. The opposite is not true.

The argument in short is that the ethical difference between outright deception and gross negligence with same results is non-existent.

> Establishing intent requires mind-reading

Philosophical discussion of intent, unlike legal discussion, isn't necessarily concerned with what you can externally establish. It is still useful for answering questions about your own conduct, like: "would I be lying if I say something I know to be false, which I don't expect others to believe?"

I think another problem (both in philosophy and law) is that intent is not binary. If I do something without wishing a particular outcome, knowing that such outcome may likely happen, and not attempting to mitigate it, is it intentional? For instance, if I knowingly made a false accusation that some person is a criminal, uncaring whether it was perceived as sarcasm or truth, and some listeners understood it to be a truthful accusation, what is my level of culpability for libel?

The submitted link goes to a brief review of a recently published collection of essays; however, there's a table of contents and an abstract for each essay in the book itself available here[1].

I picked up Sissela Bok's book Lying[2] a few years ago. While in someways it echoes the old "categorical imperative" argument (lying is wrong because you wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone routinely lies) I found it to be much more nuanced than Kant's heavy handed and inflexible system. There are in-depth discussions of paternalistic lies, lying to dying patients, lying to protect confidentiality, and much more.

[1]: https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019874...

[2]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15606/lying-by-siss...

Thank you for mentioning the Sissela Bok book, it looks interesting.

The biggest advance in the field was the recognition of the role of bullshit.

Bullshit is talk that fills a role other than truth or falsehood. The speaker doesn't actually care whether it is true, false, or meaningless, but only what effect it has on listeners. Most political harm, from Hitler and Stalin to Trump and Bojo, arises from deployment of BS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com