Odin wrote:


I understand the point of the hypotheticals but it is important to include all neccessary information in order to evaluate the situation at hand.

Acting morally is contingent on other people you are interacting with doing the same (the 'I won't kill you if you won't kill me' type of thing). Yes, lying to save the world is immoral. But since, as you said, the world being destroyed is going to undermine all morality anyway, we're going to make the sacrifice and do a little bit of 'evil' to allow the concept of 'good' to continue existing. The same question arises: why do you have to lie to save the world? There are, in fact, probably some circumstances in which lying actually wouldn't be wrong (I know I've contradictd myself slightly there), but again, between 2 non-related people whether I act morally to them depends on whether they do so to me as well. I haven't done evil if I kill someone trying to kill me. Nor do I do evil if I lie to someone trying to kill me, or lie to someone holding me against my will, because any condition of morality that existed no longer exists. So if someone is trying to destroy the world all all human life on it, and I lie in order to stop him, I haven't done anything wrong.

Wolfman wrote:


You are suggesting that whether it is morally permissible to lie to another individual or not depends on whether that individual would afford you some degree of moral respect. You say that lying to an attacker in order to avert harm is permissible. This directly contradicts your claim that lying is immoral under all circumstances though. It looks like you are retracting this claim. Fair enough, but I think there is another problem though. You state the following:

1. Lying is immoral because it destroys or inhibits our ability to fulfill our obligations or create new life.

2. Lying is justifiable if the individual you are interacting with does not afford you a certain level of moral respect. (Here you are appealing to an idea of reciprocity when you say, "Acting morally is contingent on other people you are interacting with doing the same (the 'I won't kill you if you won't kill me' type of thing).")

But it seems that there are a multitude of cases in which lying seems perfectly acceptable, even to another individual who has a moral disposition towards you. Certainly you have heard of questions along the lines of, "Do I like fat in this dress?" or "Are you enjoying your kidney pie?"

One might respond that we can be tactful and avoid giving direct answers. I think this response is rather disingenuous though. Realistically there is only so much dodging that we can do, and sometimes we just can’t avoid finding ourselves in these kinds of pickles. So I think we should be more charitable and realistic in our answer.

You could say that lying is still immoral in these cases. You might maintain that since the person we are lying to has not violated our moral agency in any way (they are not lying to us or trying to kill us, for example), we should not lie to them. But this seems contrary to our shared moral intuitions and the common way we think about morality. Furthermore, we can imagine that this kind of lying has been around for millennia, so the argument that they would threaten to collapse our system of morality seems far-fetched.

OR, you could say that these sort of "white lies" are permissible. I am going to focus a little more on this option, because I think you would tend to favor it over the first option. At any rate, there seems to be a problem. If you take this route, you can not justify this kind of lying by appealing to your ethic of reciprocity (the same principle you used to justify lying to someone trying to kill you). This is because, in this case, you are not lying to someone who fails to afford you moral respect. You are lying to another agent who has a moral disposition towards you. So you need a different argument to show why these kinds of lies are permissible. At this point, someone in your position would probably want to show how these more innocuous lies differ from the kind of more egregious lies that threaten to undermine morality. The problem that you must come to terms with now, I think, is delineating a boundary between lies of the former and latter type. This is no trivial task though, and determining when a harmless lie becomes a dangerous lie seems quite arbitrary in my estimation. This difficulty looks similar to the one involved in the paradox of the heap. I am not sure how you can avoid opening a metaphysical Pandora’s Box and prevent your theory from collapsing into bare-faced intuitionism. These problems serve to illustrate the very real difficulty in claiming that a certain action, i.e., lying, is immoral, but permissible under some circumstances.

Odin wrote:


hehe to say Rawls expertly drew out anything is rediculous in my opinion. His conjecturing means little to me, I've read some of Rawls writing and it is rubbish.

Understand that not everything that is morality neccessarily has to become a law. Morality encompasses a little bit more. There are some things that our obligations say are immoral that simply cannot be made against the law. In that sense you are right that it is a practical rationale. What's your point? Your own thoughts and actions in private can betray your sense of morality (and what morality actually is), but making immoral thoughts illegal would create immoral situations in other ways. Usually we conclude that freedom is freedom to do anything that doesn't harm another person. I somewhat agree with that. If we show what actions directly betray our obligations (and are therefore harmful to others), we should be able to make those things illegal.

I'm afraid I may have missed the point of what you're saying though.