Maybe your point is that “lie” feels like a natural category in a way that “meta-lie” doesn’t, so basing your clear bright moral lines around the latter category feels unduly arbitrary?
You’ve actually hit the nail right on the head and put my thoughts into words I couldn’t quite find, thank you.
Any moral code that contains non-absolute rules (in this case, “Don’t lie, except when...”) will of course require some amount of arbitrariness to distinguish it from the infinite range of other possibilities, but given the amount of difficulty the prohibition on “meta-lies” introduces if you decide to also uphold the prohibition on gathering object-level information, it definitely feels excessively arbitrary.
Really, the whole thing would work just fine if we were to pick just one of those restrictions: either don’t gather object-level information (but be free to meta-lie), or don’t meta-lie (but be okay with gathering object-level information). Dealing with both is, as far as I’m concerned, intractable to the point of uselessness.
You’ve actually hit the nail right on the head and put my thoughts into words I couldn’t quite find, thank you.
Any moral code that contains non-absolute rules (in this case, “Don’t lie, except when...”) will of course require some amount of arbitrariness to distinguish it from the infinite range of other possibilities, but given the amount of difficulty the prohibition on “meta-lies” introduces if you decide to also uphold the prohibition on gathering object-level information, it definitely feels excessively arbitrary.
Really, the whole thing would work just fine if we were to pick just one of those restrictions: either don’t gather object-level information (but be free to meta-lie), or don’t meta-lie (but be okay with gathering object-level information). Dealing with both is, as far as I’m concerned, intractable to the point of uselessness.