1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Why Is Truthfulness Considered A Virtue?
As we are witnessing in arguably the worlds richest and most powerful persons, being truthful is certainly not one of their virtues and lying appears to serve them well.
I think we should be considerate of the presence of survivorship bias here. Maybe the world's richest and most powerful persons have succeeded on the backs of lies, but it wouldn't follow from that that all or even most lying serves anyone particularly well. It's not like we don't also find lying among much less successful individuals. Some of us here might be old enough to remember the Enron scandal in which accounting fraud (a form of lying) bankrupted a 70 billion dollar company and brought charges against its corporate leaders. I think a lesson of childhood most of us learn is that getting away with a lie takes some skill. Another example is playing poker - there's real skill in bluffing and detecting a bluff. Other times lying succeeds because of aligned incentives or just sheer luck. It's actually quite risky!
However, to the philosophy, Kant's approach isn't really concerned with personal advantage. For Kant, morality is grounded in our capacity to make free, rational choices, and lying undermines that capacity. Lying undermines interpersonal trust in general. Lots of people distrust the world's richest and most powerful persons whether or not the latter they actually lied to achieve their position! And I'd expect there to be a lot of solid statistics that show low-trust societies being overall worse than high-trust societies by almost every metric - higher crime, for example.
Comment by voxpopper at 29/06/2024 at 04:41 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you, that's a very interesting take. Perhaps skillful liars/exaggerators by dint of lying and other abilities, circumstance, and luck, become amongst the most notable persons in history. However, there might be countless others that fall by the wayside. It doesn't just have to be wealthiest or most powerful, but logically a majority of religious leaders have used untruths to achieve their prominence. For each of those however there have likely been countless others who failed in their endeavours.
So, being truthful appears to have at least a utilitarian quality.