Abstract
AbstractThe moral comparison of the three venues of deception—lying, falsely implicating, and nonverbal deception—is a central, ongoing debate in the ethics of deception. To date there has been no attempt to advance in the debate through experimental philosophy. Using methods of experimental economics, we devised a strategic game to test positions in the debate. Our article presents the experimental results and shows how philosophical analysis of the results allows drawing valid normative conclusions. Our conclusions testify against the dominant position in the debate—that lying is morally worse than all non-lying deceptions. They offer prima facie support to the view that the venue of deception makes no moral difference.
Highlights
The moral comparison of the three venues of deception—lying, falsely implicating, and nonverbal deception—is a central, ongoing debate in the ethics of deception
We move to the central task of extracting valid normative conclusions from our experiments. (Since both experiments yielded relevantly similar results, the discussion conveniently applies to both.) Prior to this, we should mention that we can draw traditional conclusions, in terms of descriptive ethics: since we did SHLOMO COHEN AND RO’I ZULTAN
Descriptive observations are always relevant to moral judgment, viz. in determining whether a moral principle at all applies to the given situation (for example, trivially, the application of ‘murder is wrong’ is relevant only when one person intentionally killing another is the issue at hand)
Summary
The moral comparison of the three venues of deception—lying, falsely implicating, and nonverbal deception—is a central, ongoing debate in the ethics of deception. We first present the inference from the experimental finding of equivalence among investors across the three conditions to the normative conclusion; we discuss methodological and theoretical assumptions that support this inference—that is, a set of insights which, taken together, entail that our results justify deriving moral judgment regarding the relative wrongness among the three modes of deception. The first argument for the classical view that we consider is that people trust the veracity of assertions more than of other forms of communication, and that lying amounts to a greater betrayal of trust (and is for that reason morally worse).
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