The definitional boundaries of “abuser,” as Scott notes, are in large part about coordinating around whom to censure. The definition is pragmatic rather than objective.*
If the motive for the definition of “lies” is similar, then a proposal to define only conscious deception as lying is therefore a proposal to censure people who defend themselves against coercion while privately maintaining coherent beliefs, but not those who defend themselves against coercion by simply failing to maintain coherent beliefs in the first place. (For more on this, see Nightmare of the Perfectly Principled.) This amounts to waging war against the mind.
Of course, in matter of actual fact we don’t strongly censure all cases of consciously deceiving. In some cases (e.g. “white lies”) we punish those who fail to lie, and those who call out the lie. I’m also pretty sure we don’t actually distinguish between conscious deception and e.g. reflexively saying an expedient thing, when it’s abundantly clear that one knows very well that the expedient thing to say is false, as Jessica pointed out here.
*It’s not clear to me that this is a good kind of concept to have, even for “abuser.” It seems to systematically force responses to harmful behavior to bifurcate into “this is normal and fine” and “this person must be expelled from the tribe,” with little room for judgments like “this seems like an important thing for future partners to be warned about, but not relevant in other contexts.” This bifurcation makes me less willing to disclose adverse info about people publicly—there are prominent members of the Bay Area Rationalist community doing deeply shitty, harmful things that I actually don’t feel okay talking about beyond close friends because I expect people like Scott to try to enforce splitting behavior.
The definitional boundaries of “abuser,” as Scott notes, are in large part about coordinating around whom to censure. The definition is pragmatic rather than objective.*
If the motive for the definition of “lies” is similar, then a proposal to define only conscious deception as lying is therefore a proposal to censure people who defend themselves against coercion while privately maintaining coherent beliefs, but not those who defend themselves against coercion by simply failing to maintain coherent beliefs in the first place. (For more on this, see Nightmare of the Perfectly Principled.) This amounts to waging war against the mind.
Of course, in matter of actual fact we don’t strongly censure all cases of consciously deceiving. In some cases (e.g. “white lies”) we punish those who fail to lie, and those who call out the lie. I’m also pretty sure we don’t actually distinguish between conscious deception and e.g. reflexively saying an expedient thing, when it’s abundantly clear that one knows very well that the expedient thing to say is false, as Jessica pointed out here.
*It’s not clear to me that this is a good kind of concept to have, even for “abuser.” It seems to systematically force responses to harmful behavior to bifurcate into “this is normal and fine” and “this person must be expelled from the tribe,” with little room for judgments like “this seems like an important thing for future partners to be warned about, but not relevant in other contexts.” This bifurcation makes me less willing to disclose adverse info about people publicly—there are prominent members of the Bay Area Rationalist community doing deeply shitty, harmful things that I actually don’t feel okay talking about beyond close friends because I expect people like Scott to try to enforce splitting behavior.