> but I can imagine many people would see telling a noble lie (of omission) to defer that inevitability for as long as possible as the right call.
Whatever the benefits of that “noble” lie are have to be weighed against entire generations of people learning that there government has no qualms about lying to them.
> Who really wants to live in a world where it’s so much easier and effective to lie than to tell the truth?
I don't think anyone wants that, but this has been the case since the invention of the printing press and probably longer. It also gets really tricky when what is a lie vs. what is truth is not obvious.
>There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie.
So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
> Just playing the devils advocate here, but what if you're not lying.. what if you're just keeping your mouth shut, for millions, maybe tens of millions?
The you're not just lying to others but also to yourself.
If it would be prudent to do so, and if there is enough reasonable doubt that they could get away with it.
Edit: This is the rationale for telling lies, twisting truths, or otherwise being dishonest. I'm not actually claiming they were indeed lying, just giving a cynically Machiavellian answer.
I found that lying is no more intrinsically bad than truth telling is intrinsically good. Both truth and lies commonly enable terrible harms.
Like pretty much everything, it depends. Consideration is a much better policy than honesty.
> lying is bad, especially when done for profit.
This so often ends up in a bad place that I'll likely flag it as problematic - even before I have complete information. But that's because of reality & history, not an arbitrary rule.
> Was there ever a time people would trust a piece of paper in isolation?
Pretty much all of history. We love it when facts supporting our beliefs are isolated in a single source. We also love it when a source is ambiguous enough to let us draw our own conclusions.
The lie of omission has a long track record of being effective. It has the benefit of being useful to the source and/or the receiver. There's redundancy in falsehood selectors. Either the source will lie or we, on the receiving end, will lie. The truth often doesn't stand a chance; somebody is gonna find a way to isolate.
Trust is not a behavior that is reliably rational. One could argue that it always has an element of emotional attachment to the familiar.
>I would trade a supernuclear family over truth any day of the week.
This is interesting. If you had an incredibly happy life, why would you always choose potentially emotionally damaging truth over that? Especially if the alternative is that you never know there is a lie and that lie doesn't actually matter.
Whatever the benefits of that “noble” lie are have to be weighed against entire generations of people learning that there government has no qualms about lying to them.
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