Moral Progress

yes but you see my friend, your conceptions of what constitutes 'acceptable art', are limited by your knowledge of the subject, for i am sure, that if you were fully aware of the conceptual ideas behind those works, your understanding and thus your enjoyment would be enhanced. draughtsmanship is a skill, not an art form. Artists have progressed beyond mere imitation of nature, the mind has enabled them to transcend beyond it, thus, your little daughters efforts have merit, an expression of the subconscious? use of the imagination? simply because we do not understand something does not necessitate that we lie to make up for the deficiency in understanding, surely not? However, she may ask you, 'do you like it daddy?', what are you to say? If you lie by saying 'oh its wonderful i love it, what a glorious day!', you are being untrue to yourself and your daughter, better it is to quickly think of some positive aspect, 'oh its very imaginative, its wonderfully colourful, is that squiggle your mummy and so forth?', thus your conscience shall remain clean and you will have delivered a positive and encouraging message to your daughter with recourse to the lie. Why is it so hard to think positively, to be encouraging without lying? You must think about this deeply my friend!

i have defended my argument to the best of my ability, with reasoning, with sublime illustrations, with realistic scenarios and would consider it a moral capitulation against everything for which i stand to admit that lies have value and as yet there is still no credible reason for me to abandon these principles for you have not demonstrated why there should be any exceptions, thus making it neither unjustified nor assumptive.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
yes but you see my friend, your conceptions of what constitutes 'acceptable art', are limited by your knowledge of the subject, for i am sure, that if you were fully aware of the conceptual ideas behind those works, your understanding and thus your enjoyment would be enhanced. draughtsmanship is a skill, not an art form. Artists have progressed beyo d why there should be any exceptions, thus making it neither unjustified nor assumptive.

yes but you see my friend, your conceptions of what constitutes 'acceptable art', are limited by your knowledge of the subject, for i am sure, that if you were fully aware of the conceptual ideas behind those works, your understanding and thus your enjoyment would be enhanced. draughtsmanship is a skill, not an art form. Artists have progressed beyond mere imitation of nature, the mind has enabled them to transcend beyond it, thus, your little daughters efforts have merit, an expression of the subconscious? use of the imagination? simply because we do not understand something does not necessitate that we lie to make up for the deficiency in understanding, surely not? However, she may ask you, 'do you like it daddy?', what are you to say? If you lie by saying 'oh its wonderful i love it, what a glorious day!', you are being untrue to yourself and your daughter, better it is to quickly think of some positive aspect, 'oh its very imaginative, its wonderfully colourful, is that squiggle your mummy and so forth?', thus your conscience shall remain clean and you will have delivered a positive and encouraging message to your daughter with recourse to the lie. Why is it so hard to think positively, to be encouraging without lying? You must think about this deeply my friend!
Hmm...you really don't want a long discussion with me on the subject of art...I'm a hopeless case from most other people's perspective on this matter.
Did I I ever tell you I place value on pragmatism?...see, as far as I understand the child psyche (I have no children...I do have a neice though) they show you what they did in school and they're not looking to understand how their current masterpiece(???) may be improved...They are looking to hear that their efforts are wonderful...they want to see an expression of joy and amazement as they show you their efforts. A sharp swift lie costs neither of us a thing and achieves this objective quite well. They're happy, I'm happy...no one loses out.

We're at an impasse it seems because you probably with your current conception of God have (somehow) a great deal to lose by compromising on this position. Your objectionss seem to be of the form *well you could achieve the same ends by the following (longer) steps that are border-line not lying without explaining the harm done by just keeping it simple and telling harmless (until proven otherwise) lies.

I'm willing to just beg to differ and hope that should we have discussions on a different topic you'll steer clear of invoking this idea 🙂

mmm, we have as yet not touched upon the role of conscience in all of this, for it is here that the very essence of why lying constitutes such a grave error of judgement. It seems to me my illustrious and learned friend that you have not demonstrated why lying should be preferred to the truth and is therefore completely unnecessary except of the grounds of mere expediency, which is hardly a reason at all. There are of course many examples where it can be demonstrated to be outright destructive, breeding distrust and strife sowing harmony and discord. But it is in the conscience that it is felt the most, for it is like an internal umpire either excusing our actions or condemning them. What is more, it can be demonstrated (as in Nazi Germany and elsewhere) that when an ideology superseded the exercise of the human conscience, all manner of atrocities and injustice occur as the conscience is supressed, now admittedly this is a far cry from a so called 'little white lie', as if there ever was such a thing, but it demonstrates that our conscience may be insensitive to the effects and like a compass that is subject to magnetic interference, may point us in the wrong direction. One or two degrees off course on the top of a mountain during a white-out and you just may walk over a precipice.

i am of course conscious that you are an atheist and have not quoted any biblical scriptures and kept any references to God at a minimum, out of respect for your stance, merely making reference to principles indirectly.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
mmm, we have as yet not touched upon the role of conscience in all of this, for it is here that the very essence of why lying constitutes such a grave error of judgement. It seems to me my illustrious and learned friend that you have not demonstrated why lying should be preferred to the truth and is therefore completely unnecessary except of the gro t a minimum, out of respect for your stance, merely making reference to principles indirectly.

When you say "conscience" do you mean an ability to *know right from wrong* and the guilt/emotional discomfort one might feel for having commited what they believe to be wrong? Or do you talk in a religious sense (with all the assumptions that come with it)?
I ask this because if in a number of situations I find that serving the greater good is achieved through relaying false information, then I clearly won't judge it from my perspective to be a wrong action (and you've probably guessed I don't subscribe the notion of objective right/wrong) and so I have difficulty seeing how this could have any adverse effect on my conscience.

But that aside, I probably haven't been extravagant enough with the boundless freedom offered by *lying is always bad* to be creative. Let me warm up with the following:



Suppose Bill, a wealthy businessman is sitting working from home in his secluded, well hidden mansion when a crazed sadistic madman (we'll call him Jake) shoots his way past all Bills' security team, shoots out both of Bill's kneecaps (bringing him helplessly to the floor) and holds him at gunpoint. Now Bill has a computer, and on that computer is a database with the names of 50,000 staff; their addresses, next of kin, etc...But he also has installed a program that only allows him to access this data with a 12 character password. Furthermore he can only enter one character of this password every 5 minutes (and whether the entry is correct or incorrect can only be ascertained once the final character has been entered).
Now Jake, knowing that there is no way to circumvent this password, and holding a gun to Bills' head says that which is at the foot of this post.

If Jake gets the correct password, he and his evil cohorts will visit the pain and suffering described below to all of those on Bills' database. If Jake gets the wrong password, then the first wrong character prompts the computer to silently alert the authorities there might be a problem. The second will prompt them to gear up, storm the place and rescue Bill, his family and tens of thousands of innocent people and their families.
The nearest authorities are half an hour away.
1)If Bill gives neither the right nor wrong password then since no distress call is made, Jake will honour his promise and get away with it.
2)If Bill gives the right password, no distress call is made and since Jake is a crazy sadistic madman he will do the same thing just for his own twisted pleasure and get away with it.
3)If Bill gives the wrong password he gets rescued.

What Jake told Bill was:
"You must give me the password...if you don't give it to me in the next five minutes I will wait here for your family where I shall boil your wife in frying oil and then rape/torture your daughter (age 12). After she tells me where her grandma and granddad live (Bill's mum and dad) I'll rip out her eyes then ransack this house to find the password, then burn this mansion to the ground with you and your daughter still inside nailed to the walls."



Should Bill not lie??? 😕

Originally posted by Agerg
When you say "conscience" do you mean an ability to *know right from wrong* and the guilt/emotional discomfort one might feel for having commited what they believe to be wrong? Or do you talk in a religious sense (with all the assumptions that come with it)?
I ask this because if in a number of situations I find that serving the greater good is achieved throu ll gives the wrong password he gets rescued.
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Should James not lie??? 😕

Conscience comes from a composite of two words, con - science and literally according to the original Greek (i shall spare you the actual words) means with knowledge, co knowledge or knowledge with oneself.

It is the capacity to render judgement about oneself, is exercised and trained through use and discernment, convictions and rules implanted in a persons mind through both study and experience. Based on these things, it makes a comparison with the course of action being taken or contemplated. Then it sounds a warning when the rules and the course conflict, unless the conscience is “seared,” made unfeeling by continued violations of its warnings. Conscience can be a moral safety device, in that it imparts pleasure and inflicts pain for one’s own good and bad conduct. All persons have the faculty of conscience.

so it is not strictly as it is often perceived and as you have asserted 'a pang of guilt', for it may render pleasure as when a course of action is taken leading to a 'good conscience'.

Alas how it pangs me!!, the situation you give to support your hypothesis is of itself entirely hypothetical in itself, and thus, i am sadly grieved to say, cannot be subject to proper analysis and evaluation on this basis, for the role of conscience is also guided by experience in the real world. It would be much better for your argument if you could provide 'real scenarios', where you have found it to be expedient to tell 'porky pies', and i shall guarantee, that in every instance, one would have been better off withholding information or simply finding an alternative to the lie, thus making my original premise, not assumptive but firmly grounded with in the realms of truth.

i salute your creativity, imagination and concept of design, while pointing out the flaw that it is impossible to render to such a work to anything other than a hypothetical answer.

Therefore hypothetically James should follow the dictates of his conscience. 🙂

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
Conscience comes from a composite of two words, con - science and literally according to the original Greek (i shall spare you the actual words) means with knowledge, co knowledge or knowledge with oneself.

It is the capacity to render judgement about oneself, is exercised and trained through use and discernment, convictions and rules implanted swer.

Therefore hypothetically James should follow the dictates of his conscience. 🙂

Thanks for the definition.

I'd like to press on with your objection to my hypothetical scenario. The statement all lies are bad applies to *all* situations where asking about lying has meaning (whether they have happened yet or may yet happen). Nothing in my scenario was remotely impossible since...
1) there do exist and have existed crazy sadistic horrible people
2)Getting 50,000 people's names into a database is neither impossible nor even unrealistic.
3)Making a program to allow you access to this data subject to the constraints given in my scenario would be easy
4) silent alarms exist (in particular banks make use of these things)
5) guns exist

So I would argue you certainly can actually assign meaning to the question of whether Bill (I screwed up with my names halfway through) should lie or not. If Bill should not lie (because you take for granted that it never fails to be true that lying is bad) I would much appreciate your analysis that gets you to this conclusion.
🙂