Lies

I, like many of the others, have found Bok's arguments to be far more convincing than those of Pasquerella and Killilea. P&K leave all to much to the intuition of the liar, and imply that one might be able to not only predict one outcome accurately, but be able to analyze which situation will undoubtedly have the best outcome. It seems bizarre to consider "chances of success" when there is no real way to measure such an idea.

The P&K argument digs it's own grave as it continually, like Nik said, "conveniently ignore[s]" Bok's argument that past lying can often lead to more lying. Public officials often put themselves in positions where they feel like they need to lie, whereas if they would have been straightforward from the beginning, there probably would have been less of a problem. Take one famous example: Bill Clinton. It would have been a scandal that he was sleeping with an intern, but it would have been very unlikely that his impeachment got as far as it did had he not lied under oath. I even understand to a certain extent, his evasiveness but at some point he should have given up and admitted his fault so we could all move on. It is difficult to justify lying on any level.

The only place I find myself torn is on whether or not I think that omission of information that is pertinent can be classified as a type of lying... I have few actual thoughts on this as of yet, so I look forward to seeing if this comes up in class debate.

Also (and this is my punishment for posting late, people have already said some of the things that I would have said), I agree with Jonathon's last paragraph where he outlines that lying should only be used as a last resort. I would not, however, equivocate or relate it's use to torture in that sense because I think that lying can probably be justified more often than torture can.