The Morality of Lying in Contrast to the Philosophies of...

The young girl gazes at you helplessly from within the tangled wreckage. You witnessed the crash – a massive truck careened into a minivan as it passed on the highway, killing the driver on impact, and virtually tearing the girl in half. Now she hangs from the car, held together by the seatbelt. Her nervous system critically damaged, she can’t feel much pain, but she knows that her situation is not optimal, to say the least. She is six years old – she probably doesn’t understand the concept of death. As you stare equally helplessly into her fear stricken eyes, the only words that you can muster are: â€Å"Don’t worry, everything will be okay.† This is obviously a lie – there is absolutely no chance that the dying girl will indeed survive and†¦show more content†¦For this paper, it is necessary to distinguish several of those forms, which vary in severity. First, there is the simple white lie, which is defined as â€Å"a trivial lie that is told for diplomatic or well-intentioned reasons.† These are typically inconsequential responses made in an effort to preserve one’s feelings, such as in the clichà © case of a spouse asking, â€Å"Do these jeans make me look fat?† They rarely have any lasting effect, and are, for this argument, considered moot. On the other side of the scale is the outright lie, also known as deception, which is â€Å"a sender intentionally trying to get someone to believe something that the sender knows to be false† (Gass Seiter, 1999). These lies are the sort that have most often garnered scorn, as they are typically malevolent (or at the very least, selfis h), and utilized to serve a personal end. We will see that this is not always the case, but for the sake of argument, the â€Å"outright lie† will begin as an evil. Lying, as a whole, is perceived negatively, because it is most commonly used in negative instances because the sender wants to protect themselves from pain and embarrassment. It is the attempt to avoid punishment or retribution that spurns most people to lie, and therefore, the concept of speaking such an untruth became associated with the consequences of something injurious, and is frowned upon. TheShow MoreRelatedJustification for Kant’s Moral and Ethical Views in A Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals1639 Words   |  7 PagesImmanual Kant, unlike David Hume, aimed to establish an absolute system of morality based upon reason. Kant’s conceptions regarding what is moral and how someone should behave ethically, are often seen as contradictions to those proposed by Hume, who holds an empirical s tance. 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