The rules of deception. Why people believe political deception.
Hale Chair in Applied Ethics presents The rules of deception. Why people believe political deception.
Speaker: Juan Carlos (Philosophy, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia)
Traditionally, deception and lying are defined around the deceiver’s intentions and the falsehood of the statements proffered. Yet, this sort of definition i) leaves out phenomena we intuitively characterize as deception, ii) gives lying a prominence that obfuscates deception’s moral complexity, and iii) fails to explain why people selectively believe some deceptions and keep believing them despite evidence to the contrary. I propose a conception of deception without these failures. Its key difference is its pragmatic character: acts of deception are speech acts generating normative changes in listeners. Speakers leverage their social, political or economic position to change the normative position of their audience through speech acts they know to be false. Accordingly, most of the time, people don’t believe deception because they are dumb or epistemically unsophisticated, but because they are pragmatically forced to.
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