The morality of deception
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William G. Lycan
Abstract
Outright lying is one end of a scale or spectrum, with deliberately misleading very close to it. Then:misleading somewhat; concealing facts; “lies of omission”; withholding information; not disclosing; lack of transparency; . . . ?. Many people talk as if these items are listed by degree of deceptiveness, and as if that order presumptively corresponds to degree of moral objectionability. This paper defends two claims: (1) No good arguments support the intuition that plain flat lying is, other things being equal, morally worse than deceiving merely by implicature. (2) Although in some contexts one can deceive by remaining silent, and there are other cases in which silence is morally wrong, there is a large and principled break in the aforementioned scale, between positive lying or misleading and merely not revealing something that one knows. Special attention is paid to the semantic and pragmatic relations between questions and answers.
Abstract
Outright lying is one end of a scale or spectrum, with deliberately misleading very close to it. Then:misleading somewhat; concealing facts; “lies of omission”; withholding information; not disclosing; lack of transparency; . . . ?. Many people talk as if these items are listed by degree of deceptiveness, and as if that order presumptively corresponds to degree of moral objectionability. This paper defends two claims: (1) No good arguments support the intuition that plain flat lying is, other things being equal, morally worse than deceiving merely by implicature. (2) Although in some contexts one can deceive by remaining silent, and there are other cases in which silence is morally wrong, there is a large and principled break in the aforementioned scale, between positive lying or misleading and merely not revealing something that one knows. Special attention is paid to the semantic and pragmatic relations between questions and answers.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
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I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
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II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
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III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
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IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
-
II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
-
III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
-
IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
