What makes lying wrong?
In the following piece, I will evaluate different ethical theories about lying and determine which one is the best. There are many different ethical theories, which can be used as a basis for an ethical judgement, these range from Utilitarianism to Native Spirituality, from the manically consequential to the incredibly passive. In this piece, I will focus on Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics and the Golden Rule.
I will begin with utilitarianism. The fundamental principles of Utilitarianism assign value to actions based on the ‘greater good’ theory (fundamentally, greatest good for the greatest number) and the actions consequences. It is teleological and holds that the moral action is the one that maximizes utility. Without
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Overall, I believe virtue ethics is a better way to judge lying because it can be used more as a framework than utilitarianism and it isn’t …show more content…
Acting like an ethical guideline rather than a strict rulebook suggests that perhaps the golden rule doesn’t need to be taken so literally, and is more about empathy and sympathy with another’s situation. Regardless, It does have some flaws however, a large problem with the golden rule is that everyone likes being treated different ways, for example, a masochist would enjoy being hit but many other people would not, Karl Popper wrote about his ‘platinum rule: the golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto other, wherever reasonable, as they want to be done by.’ I think this is a good point because of the first criticism of the golden rule written above, however, Kant, Nietzsche and Bertrand Russel rejected this rule on a variety of grounds but the most important was its application, how can one know how others want to be treated? One could obviously ask them but this wouldn’t be widely applicable because one would have to ask every single person they interact with how they would