How Lying Hurts You
Lying hurts you because it hurts those around you. It does not always directly hurt you yourself, but it does hurt those you lie to. It makes people lose their trust in you and that can hurt you. If you lose someone’s trust in you it is hard to gain it back and in the long run it hurts you. When you lie, even if you think others will never find out, you will create a barrier in your relationship. When the other person finds out about your lying, it’s nearly impossible to gain trust. Also the people that you are lying to almost always find out, if you are lying it is better to come clean and tell the truth after the lie, because if you don’t it is only worse. Lying hurts us because it becomes a hurtful cycle that is
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Aristotle believed no general rule on lying was possible, because anybody who was ok with lying could never be believed. The philosophers St. Augustine as well as St. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, said no to all lying. According to all three, there are no circumstances in which one may ethically lie. Even if the only way to protect one’s self is to lie, it is never ethically ok to lie even in the face of murder, torture, or any other hardship. Each of these philosophers gave several arguments against lying, all in agreeance with each other.
Among the more important arguments are:
1. Lying is a wrongness of the natural way of speech, the natural way of which is to communicate the thoughts of the speaker.
2. When one lies, one undermines trust in society.
Some philosophers, most famously Immanuel Kant, knew that that lying was always wrong. He based this on his general principle that we should treat each human being as an end in itself and never as a mere means. Lying to someone is not treating them as an end in themselves, but merely as a means for the liar to get what they want. All in all the conclusion is that lying