The target, meanwhile, is acting in a way which is entirely right and proper, a way in which they have every right to act.
I haven’t said they’re acting wrongly; I’ve said that they’re lying in a socially sanctioned way. If you don’t think these are distinct claims, why not?
I wonder how much of the problem is exactly this. Claiming someone is lying is by default, claiming that someone is doing something wrong. So if something isn’t wrong, it must not be lying—thus saying things ‘aren’t really lying’ rather than biting the bullet and saying that lying is OK in a situation.
This does seem to break down in sufficiently clear circumstances (e.g. the Gestapo searching for Jews in the attic) but even then I think there’s a strong instinctual sense in which people doing this don’t consider it lying.
Also, it seems to me as though when people evaluate the “Jews in the attic” hypothetical, “Gestapo” isn’t being mapped onto the actual historical institution, but to a vague sense of who’s a sufficiently hated adversary that it’s widely considered legitimate to slash their tires.
In Nazi Germany, this actually maps onto Jews, not the Gestapo. It maps onto the Gestapo for post-WWII Americans considering a weird hypothetical.
To do the work of causing this to reliably map onto the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, you have to talk about the situation in which almost everyone around you seems to agree that the Gestapo might be a little harsh but the Jews are a dangerous, deceptive adversary and need to be rooted out. Otherwise you just get illusion of transparency.
Related: arguments ostensibly for a policy of universal “honesty” or “integrity,” on the basis of “adopt the policy you’d be rewarded for if people could inspect the policy directly,” tend to conflate lying with saying socially disapproved-of things. In fact people will punish you for lying when you’re supposed to tell the truth, and for telling the truth when you’re supposed to lie, and largely reward you for conforming with shared fictions.
I haven’t said they’re acting wrongly; I’ve said that they’re lying in a socially sanctioned way. If you don’t think these are distinct claims, why not?
I wonder how much of the problem is exactly this. Claiming someone is lying is by default, claiming that someone is doing something wrong. So if something isn’t wrong, it must not be lying—thus saying things ‘aren’t really lying’ rather than biting the bullet and saying that lying is OK in a situation.
This does seem to break down in sufficiently clear circumstances (e.g. the Gestapo searching for Jews in the attic) but even then I think there’s a strong instinctual sense in which people doing this don’t consider it lying.
Also, it seems to me as though when people evaluate the “Jews in the attic” hypothetical, “Gestapo” isn’t being mapped onto the actual historical institution, but to a vague sense of who’s a sufficiently hated adversary that it’s widely considered legitimate to slash their tires.
In Nazi Germany, this actually maps onto Jews, not the Gestapo. It maps onto the Gestapo for post-WWII Americans considering a weird hypothetical.
To do the work of causing this to reliably map onto the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, you have to talk about the situation in which almost everyone around you seems to agree that the Gestapo might be a little harsh but the Jews are a dangerous, deceptive adversary and need to be rooted out. Otherwise you just get illusion of transparency.
Related: arguments ostensibly for a policy of universal “honesty” or “integrity,” on the basis of “adopt the policy you’d be rewarded for if people could inspect the policy directly,” tend to conflate lying with saying socially disapproved-of things. In fact people will punish you for lying when you’re supposed to tell the truth, and for telling the truth when you’re supposed to lie, and largely reward you for conforming with shared fictions.
Note this comment, where I clearly distinguish between the case of “not actually lying” and “lying, but lying is perfectly OK in this circumstance”.