I’m writing this partly to make what I think is an interesting point and partly to give myself an excuse for posting this:
Lying and willing suspension of disbelief are radically different moral acts.
Some cleverdumb arguments put out by champions of Lying for Jesus in the “prolife” cult of death claim that lying to their enemies in order get dirt on them, or tempt them to do evil so the vigilante can film them doing it, or trick them to make them look stupid is all fine because, hey!, actors pretend to be somebody else!
So far from showing they are brilliant reasoners, the people who make such arguments only succeed in showing just how corrosive to the mind and heart lying is.
Here’s the deal: Nobody stands up after the Exeunt Omnes at the Globe Theatre and shouts, “THESE PEOPLE LIED TO US! THEY AREN’T REALLY HAMLET, CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE AND THE REST! WE HAVE BEEN DECEIVED!!!!!” Nobody calls Steven Spielberg a liar for making us believe we saw a TRex attack a jeep. Indeed, we would resent it if he did his job so badly that we couldn’t believe it.
That’s because human beings can and do enter into social contracts all the time in which we practice “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to freely agree together to pretend that something we are seeing and hearing is “real” for the space of a performance. We know perfectly well that the person we are watching is really Ian McKellen. But for the next 11 hours, we will enter into a contract with him and accept that he is Gandalf. We enter willingly and without fraud into acceptance that the images which really are created by a team of people with computers are Middle Earth.
Using such social contracts as a justification for lying to somebody’s face is wretched reasoning, like claiming that because we tell fairy tales to children, it is therefore morally permissible to lie to them that their mother will die if they don’t clean their room. (And I find it difficult to believe the sophists who make such imbecilic arguments don’t know their arguments are awful. Willing suspension of disbelief, it seems. can also have an immoral dimension).
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One Response
Politicians lie, from both parties. But, could they get elected if they told the truth? The voters don’t really want the truth. Thus politicians tell the voters what they want to hear.