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Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

> Saying the truth no matter what the cost is extremely dangerous advice to follow literally.

An example I use is someone knocks on your door and asks if you know where Maria is. You do, and you’re sheltering her. If you tell the truth, the person at the door will kill Maria. If you lie and say “I haven’t seen Maria”, the person will leave and continue looking elsewhere.

In this case, telling a lie is the moral thing, and telling the truth would be evil.

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Someone who is unable to lie is classified by psychiatrists as "cognitively impaired".

Just fix your mind on another Maria who isn't here, and tell the truth about her.

That’s what lying is.

Just don’t dob in the other Maria

I mean, you can truthfully say "even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you".

This invites much more opportunity for speculation on the person hunting a vulnerable person that you’re trying to protect. This is precisely what someone would say if they were avoiding lying but are trying to cover for a vulnerable person.

It's also the sort of thing that someone would say who wants waste the time of an evil government to delay them from carrying out their plans.

An evil government would just drag them out of their house.

If everyone on the street did it it would cause significant problems for the government.

Why would you try to waste the time of someone who has murderous intent? I think you might have lost the plot a little bit.

By wasting their time, they can't spend as much time murdering other people. Maybe you know your next door neighbor is running an underground railroad, and you want to distract from that.

Alas the first part "even if I knew" when you know that you do know, is not truthful..

And if you were not sheltering Maria, you could truthfully say "no", and would probably do so. The discrepancy in behavior is as good as a "yes'.

A common anecdote from Kant. Im not Kantian but I think (feel) that he is somewhat right that the lie IS wrong. I think the key is that no one can be perfect, and sometimes you have to make a decision between two things that are wrong. In this case lying is much less wrong than not.

This suggest a sort of morality that contains the axiom "lying is always wrong", which then demands torturous philosophical gymnastics in order to justify one's actions in circumstances when lying is obviously right. To say that lying is sometimes right does not diminish the merit of truthfulness, rather it is an acknowledgement that communication is a means to an end, and not the end itself.

This is why I reject the categorical imperative. The claim kant makes is that you still lie because it's more unethical to normalize a society of people being given up to murderers than it is to normalize a society of (white?)-liars.

I claim that this has degenerated into utilitarianism. This is also word for word what scopenhaur (a huge fan of kant) has to say about Kant's categorical imperative in his critique of Kant's ideas...

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