Episode #248 ... What philosophers say about lying.

Stephen West· Host0:00

Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. I hope you love the show today. So as you no doubt noticed when you saw the title of this podcast, this is gonna be an episode about the philosophy of lying. What were the thoughts of some of the greatest philosophers who have ever lived about lying, and what are their thoughts on whether it's a good thing for people to do or not? Now, for some people, this may seem like there's a really obvious answer to it. Why even talk about any of this stuff? But I think this is a good example of something where philosophy can deepen the way that you see the world by taking a minute to look at some of the less common sense ways of thinking about it. So I think it's worth noting here at the very start of this, a fairly typical way that people like to think about lying. There's no doubt gonna be plenty of people listening to this that assume a few different things about it. That what a lie is, is when somebody knowingly makes a false statement trying to deceive someone else. That lying is deeply wrong at its core. That I live my life, mm, ninety-nine point nine percent of the time not telling lies like this. And that as a general principle, living in alignment with the truth about the world is clearly superior to having a view of anything that's based on stuff that is false. I mean, what kind of person would you have to be to not wanna be living in the truth, this person might ask. And these may seem like very reasonable assumptions to make about how we go through life, but again, I wanna start this episode by using the work of some philosophers to introduce a healthy level of doubt, even a joyous level of doubt, into these otherwise very common ways of looking at things. And the first thing that needs to be questioned, I think, is this idea that the truth is something that is