Physics-like systems in information ethics: Application to lying

Abstract

Information ethics has evolved over the years into a multi-threaded phenomenon stimulated by the convergence of many disciplines in the cyber world. It has been suggested that information ethics can provide an important conceptual framework for understanding a multitude of ethical issues arising as a result of new information technologies. The act of lying is described as the most significantly destructive political act in the Information age, with amplified scope and effects. This paper focuses on one of the major philosophical but controversial approaches to lying: Kant's deontological principle that unyieldingly demands universal truth. The paper presents a new description derived from physics for Kant's approach to lying based on a physicists favorite system: gas contained in a box where molecules are free to flow at random, and all possible arrangements of gas molecules in the box can appear in microstates. The main idea is to consider analytical statements (classified as true and false) as elements in an ethical system that takes microscopic truth values and measures them in terms of the macroscopic values of moral and non-moral systems. Just as with the gas in a box, the statements may flow between true and false values, forming a set of states that include maximum entropy, a state in which true and false statements are distributed uniformly. The results shed new light on the conceptual territory that forms the base for such ethical dilemmas as the moral duty to be truthful to a murderer, producing a better understanding of the notion of lying.