Benevolent Lies

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Is there such at thing? I would like some input before I say much, but I feel that lying restricts the victims of their autonomy by making their knowledge of the world false, thus any decisions made based on these lies would lack sturdy ground. (This, of course, was realized with help of a philosophical essay I read; I’ll get the author’s name soon and post it here).

That would be saying, though, telling your mother that she will die in a week when she is on death bed is what one ought to do, as opposed to not giving her such information and allowing her to pass, to her, unexpectedly.

I suppose this touches not only on benevolent lies, but also the good in knowing all knowledge in a given situation, which I would like to not discuss if possible.

Insight please.

2

Well, first off, you’re going to be sorry you started a thread with the word ‘lies’ in it. Your query will soon be ignored and the thread will be hijacked as was another thread that used the same unfortunate term.

To the question: Yes there are benevolent lies. The difficulty come’s in deciding what is ‘in the best interests’ of the person to be deceived. Intent is the issue. Am I willing to take responsibility for deceiving someone to shield them from knowledge that would bring them pain or hurt? Am I attempting to be compassionate or merely patronizing? The benevolent lie should be carefully weighed. We all know examples of how the ‘little white lie’ blew up in someone’s face.

There are those who like life wrapped in cotton candy, but there are also those who would rather deal with obdurate reality and would resent not having the ‘facts’. You would want to know the person(s) extremely well to practice the benevolent lie or you could cause more hurt than having told the uncomfortable truth.

JT

3

Now JT, there is no guarantee that somebody will come here and hijack this thread with posts the focus on their own message. (But it is a distinct possibility.)

I agree with JT, in that there are some people who prefer blunt honest over a polite or benevolent lie. My good friend Eric has a pet peeve against lying to him. He HATES lies. He would rather have a blunt, unpleasant, uncomfortable truth than a comforting lie. Lies anger him to no end.

On the other hand there are people who cannot take it. They really cannot handle the truth.

How you deal with lies depends a lot on whom you are dealing with. Although for the sake of simplicity its best to use truth when dealing with strangers. :wink:

4

Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t be spreading hate and discontent, but every once in a while…

An addendum: While benevolence may be the intent, deception is still deception, and it put’s the deceiver in the position of playing God. I have found that the unvarnished truth (as I see it), presented in a loving, caring way is almost always accepted regardless how uncomfortable the message. Failing that, the fall-back position is the ‘sin of omission’. I just kind of forget to say anything that might hurt that person. I mean, saying nothing isn’t lying is it? :unamused:

JT

5

I think you’re right, JT. I was going to say that the truth only hurts because it brings about undesirable situations that are totally subjective. The truth doesn’t intrinsically cause pain nor are ever bad. A “rational” person would be able to realize this and plan accordingly. Only “irrational” (sorry for the broad uses of the word) people wouldn’t be able to realize such truth thus becoming belligerent.

Lies are lies. Omitting the truth is, indeed, omitting the truth.

6

I heard that Aquinas or maybe it was Augustine either of whom I would think of as being rather strict on the lying thing. Had 5 categories of acceptable lies.

And then there is the joke that George Bush did not find WMD weapons of mass destruction but did use WMD words of mass deception. He might tell you he was justified

7

Well, where, then, is it that lying wrong on such occasions?

Thomas Hill’s book, “Autonomy and Self-Respect”, is where I began thinking about this. He states that the main argument against benevolent lies is that autonomy is restricted/hindered in such cases. Does anyone agree?

8

Maybe it’s possible that in some cases autonomy is restricted by telling the truth, in the case that the truth somehow smokescreens the more relevant action that needs to be taken, i.e., telling my four year old about what the terrorists just did this week may hinder other, more important autonomies, for example, it may deprive him of self-direction in nursery school because he’s so traumatized and confused because he doesn’t realize that what happened is not normal or common and that it probably won’t happen to him; so the truth lead to passive lie, feeding him with what can only be misconstrued given the context of a four-year-old mindset.

9

I argued that point exactly, and I thought it would hold some weight, which it does, but only to an extent.

When you tell a lie, you’re giving the victim a false sense of reality, which causes them to to make judgement calls that could cause harm or whatever that may come from believing in lies. In almost the same sense, though, it would seem that if you told someone truths about the world that they simply couldn’t handle, they too would make judgement calls that could cause harm or have negative impacts. I had argued that telling a mother, who’s otherwise rational, that would become delirious after knowing that she would die soon would be restricting her from making good judgement about what to do with her last days.

BUT, as my prof has stated to me, there comes responsibility and maturity that comes with truth, and one still must realize that truth will always to true, and must deal with it in a rational manner. “My” mother is not restricted of autonomy BY ME, but BY HER, so it wouldn’t work in this case.

If you can understand what I’m saying, then you can see that if this argument WERE true, then benevolent lies would not exist, either. Autonomy would be restricted in either case, but it seems that it lies in who is actually restricting it.

So can anyone think up of a way that the source of restriction of autonomy is irrelevant?

10

I’m going with Gamer on this one. The restricted autonomy assume’s the capacity to understand the concept(s) involved that would be affected by a deception. A person would have to be capable of reason for restricted autonomy to be relevant. - The person deceived would have to understand the alternatives available to them from: hearing the ‘truth’, and hearing the deception.

JT

11

First off I don’t think you have the TRUTH. What you know is professional medical opinion. Doctors don’t know the truth any more than the rest of us.

Secondly why not ask if you are dying what would you want to do? That neither answers the question nor disrupts the autonomy.

12

One of the themes developing in the arguments against white lies seems to be that you give the recipient a false view of the world, which seems incoherent to me. Firstly everyone already has a false view of the world completely biased and made up by their society around them. Secondly a white lie can actually preserve a closer link to reality than the truth may, the recipient may extrapolate the truth given to them to create a reality further removed from the truth, e.g.:

Take a woman who believes she is of a particular attractiveness, which is true. She then asks her friend if she has a big bum.

Truth: Yes, it’s big. This recipient then extrapolates that this means they are unattractive and their self confidence drops to a lower level than is warranted by their overall attractiveness.

Lie: No, it’s fine. The recipient is reassured about their physical appearance, although suspecting her friend may have lied , she retains her self confidence.

I know this isn’t the best example, but trying to say you need to give truth to a person all the time as otherwise your are distorting their reality seems a baseless argument to me as you have no idea on how they will interpret a truth. The truth may create a greater false reality (for want of a better term) than a lie would.

13

Unfortunately, this topic assumes that metaphysics or epistemology aren’t issues. If they were, then it wouldn’t worth discussing practically anything. If that were so, then you would be correct. I understand your point and the possiblility that your truth may in fact be actually false would mess up this situation as well, but this situation assumes these things.

We can argue whether we are able to know THE TRUTH, as we do since we consider ourselves philosophers, but the “fact” is that most common people do not question it, unfortunately. So I feel that my assumption are okay to assume.

What kind of truths are at question here are those that indeed truths (under the above conditions and assumptions), such as the grass is green, the sky is blue, etc. I believe that most of you understand the types of truths I’m referring to. A big ass is very subjective, and the diagnosis of a doctor can definitely be subjective, but to assume that the diagnosis is true seems to be easier than assuming that an ass is big, I think. Either way, I think you get the idea.

Having said that, then, what about omitting the truth? Is that a form of lying and/or acceptable as opposed to the bold-face lies?

14

I you are only going to accept absolutes the "“You should not lie” is the absolute, the load star the aim. If you follow Kant the general rule can never be to lie.

The devil is always in the details. The old question of the Gestopo knocks on the door. Are you empowering the autonomy of the officer by telling him “Yes a family of jews live in the carriage house.” You did not lie neither did you decide waht he would do with the truth.

It is easy to establish morals. There are about 5 of them. The diffculty is the exceptions. Perhaps some of those exceptions can be generalized perhaps some you have to play by hear.

I don’t think whatever you tell dear old mum is wrong, as long as you try to let her and encourage her do wahtever it was she she would have done in the last 5 days.

15

It is “okay” to “lie,” if and only if the intended outcome jibes with whatever it is your deepest heartfelt notions of justice dictate. Sorry, no easy answers. You WILL need to tell lies. You WILL need to be honest. Good luck, and may purity of heart and mind guide you through your tribulations.

16

I always felt that the world revolves on white lies. Is the truth always neccessary?

That being said sometimes harsh realities are needed to. A mother is dying, and you tell her she has a week to live. Perhaps this is for the best. She can get her affairs in order and say goodbye to those she loves.

I am the type of person who likes to hear the truth, rather or not it is ugly. Do I look ok in this? Yes or no…telling me yes to appease me will bring me inevitable embarassment when appearing in public. Little things like that in life.

Also someone brought up the thought of what would you do if the Gestapo knocked at your door. Do they need to know the truth? Is it your duty to lie? I think perhaps telling someone a lie is dependent on rather or not the truth needs to be told. And thats where the blurry line comes in…who determines what we need to know?

17

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

About how we can distinguish the sky is blue and the grass is green kinds of truth, the hard, cold facts, from other, say, more subjective “facts.”

Do any of us question whether or not the sky is blue or if the grass is green?

It may be either interesting or annoying (or both (had to be “honest” and display my ability to observe as many facets of this fact as possible)) to point here that the sky is not always blue nor the grass always green.

And even if we exclude cases of different colors, metaphysics and epistemology still won’t give us an easy time establishing that things actually “are” the way they seem.

With all this work still not out of the way, let’s nevertheless skip to the fact that the truths we are concerned with are usually not of the same “color” as the question of what stuff is what color.

In other words, it is impossible to omit an “obvious” fact.

The truth that is in question, therefore, must be stuff that is not so obvious but maybe useful to its recipient.

That appears to be the great question.

Is it OK or not OK to leave certain things out.

In speech, writing, communication in general?

I was a little upset before because I had attempted to post a reply about an hour ago and my computer shut down on me. I was (humility stop me, please) quite impressed with it (I shouldn’t admit this, it sounds cock) and felt I would not be able to do as good a job in this post (I shouldn’t say this, it may reduce the impact of my point) (I’m so pleased with my display of honesty here at this point in this philosophical answer, for the reason that it illustrates a point about omission vs. inclusion, hopefully through an inspiration of questions like Do I really need to know all this? and Does this individual really expect these rantings to be considered “philosophy”? to which the response is If this aint then nothing is! which is probably too self-assured-sounding and could use a revision).

Basically, its point was the same as this expression (the truth is one big mystery that performs itself to be the same basic point in whatever it does, point being, essentially, defineable only in a tangential and abstract artform, philosophy coming enjoyably close, if you enjoy it, to expressing it, yet not being superior in any way, certainly not clearer unless you just happen to “see” as one “sees” through any of truth’s mysterious ways,

and I’m not 100% sure of what this is I’ve just said), just there were some italics involved with some accidents on the keyboard to “truthfully” expose my weakness, this weakness being true if you first perceive me as stronger than I am, or false if I am perceived weak to begin with, or perhaps this expulsive approach would be embraced as courageous in society, that I simply feel like running on rather than obeying the rules of grammar…

Law-following is based on the omission of truth, we don’t protest as often as we’d like to, and obedience itself often depends on the omision of thoughts concerning how we truly feel (if such thoughts can even ever be truthfully described (they can!) ).

This is all to say nothing, of course, concerning the respective value of either choice: obedience or disobedience…

Yet there is no way to avoid the omission of truth.

We do it every day.

We do it in every way imaginable, i was on the phone with my mother during that post that we spoke of and now I’m thinking of aspects of myself that I AM deliberately omitting because i simply don,t wish for the exposure of these particular things, we do it, we do it, we cannot be 100% honest in our expression…

                                                                      ...yet we [i]are[/i]

through the very way this aspect of us which seems to filter truth
is actually preserving our intergrity as beings who are capable to choose the aspects of reality we wish to reflect.

In this very uncommonly observed sense, it’s all true.

…

18

I think this discussion could proceed (somewhat) independently from epistemology if ‘lie’ encompasses disingenuous communication - meaning notions of ‘truth’ are not involved, rather, a lie is insincere communication overriding what is geniunely thought by someone.

If this is the perspective in which ‘benevolent lies’ are viewed, I would consider the superficiality of the relationship/communication if one is compelled/impelled to ‘lie benevolently’. I think in most (I say ‘most’ because I am admittedly hesitant to say ‘all’) examples that could be thought of in which benevolent lies seem appropriate, there is a stronger approach to the situation. Rather than quibbling over what is ‘appropriate’ to say, I would spend my energy trying to discover this genuine approach.

Take for example the situation of a dying mother (having never experienced this situation, forgive my ignorance if you are offended). I view death rather differently, namely that the acceptance of mortality is an important understanding to live by as I find it disingenuous to believe I am immortal. However, I understand that death is often feared, and in such cases, I would rather afford to the dying the strength to accept death.

Now, the above example is different (not really - but it seems so) from responding to a common North American greeting, “Hey, how are you??”, with “Oh fine”/“Not bad”/"Good’. This cultural tradition I have yet to figure out, but since I find I achieve little from answering honestly, I superfically answer it (likely what the other person wanted to hear anyways).

19

This may be off topic, but regardless of what others do or do not do, what precludes you from questioning such ideas? Those questions seem trival though they never seized to inspire wonder in those before us. Now they are often taken for granted all in the name of ‘progress’. I indulge in such trivial questions despite that certainty of any answer seems whimsical.