From Sisela Bok, Lying (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 24-26. Amazon paper, and used various prices.
Source: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~stanlick/lying.html
S.
D. Goodson (Provo, Utah) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
I think one of the greatest parts of this book is that Bok did not
just state her ideas and opinions on the issues being discussed. If you think
you are pretty honest person, read this book and see just how honest you really
are. After reading this book, I thought a whole lot about my own actions. I
realized just how many times in my life I am not completely honest. I am a
college student and in the week I was reading this book, I had two roommates
ask me to lie for them. The first one asked me to tell someone on the phone who
was not there. The guy was an ex-boyfriend who just didn't get the point that
she didn't want to talk to him, so I justified that I was helping out my friend
by lying for her. Before I read this book, I probably wouldn't have felt that
bad lying to guy, but this book made me rethink what I was doing. In the other
instance, one of my other roommates asked me to pretend to be her mom so she
could change her cell phone plan. Her mother knew she was chaning to plan, so I
justified it by thinking that, but it was hard when the person on the other end
asked me if I really was who I claimed to be.
My advice is that if you don't want to know how dishonest or
unethical you are in your life, don't read this book, but if you want to see
where you are going wrong or you think you are really ethical, read this book
to see just how ethical and honest you are in your life. I think you will be
amazed at the results.
Another thing I can say about this book is that I am currently in
a media ethics and mroal reasoning class, and I have read a few books in this
class, but I personally think this is the best one I have read in the class.
. . . In this
benevolent self-evaluation by the liar of the lies he might tell, certain kinds
of disadvantage and harm are almost always overlooked. Liars usually weight only the immediate
harm to others from the lie against the benefits they want to achieve. The flaw in such an outlook is that it
ignores or underestimates two additional kinds of harm – the harm that
lying does to the liars themselves and the harm done to the general level of
trust and social cooperation. Both
are cumulative; both are hard to reverse.
How is the liar affected by his own lies? The very fact that he knows he has
lied, first of all, affects him.
He may regard the lie as an inroad on his integrity; he certainly looks
at those he has lied to with a new caution. And if they find out that he has lied, he knows that his
credibility and the respect for his word have been damaged. . . .
Granted that a public lie on an important matter, once revealed,
hurts the speaker, must we therefore conclude that every lie has this
effect? What of those who tell a
few white lies once in a while?
Does lying hurt them in the same way? It is had to defend such a notion. No one trivial lie undermines the liarÕs integrity. But the problem for liars is that they
tend to see most of their lies in this benevolent light and thus vastly
underestimate the risks they run.
While no one lie always carries harm for the liar, then, there is risk
of such harm in most.
These risks are increased by the fact that so few lies are
solitary ones. It is easy, a wit
observed, to tell a lie, but hard to tell only one. The first lie Òmust be thatched with another or it will rain
through.Ó More and more lies may
come to be needed; the liar always has more mending to do. And the strains on him become greater
each time – many have noted that it takes an excellent memory to keep
oneÕs untruths in good repair and disentangled. The sheer energy the liar has to devote to shoring them up
is energy that honest people can dispose of freely.
After the first lies, moreover, others can come more easily. Psychological barriers wear down; lies
seem more necessary, less reprehensible; the ability to make moral distinctions
can coarsen; the liarÕs perception of his chances of being caught may
warp. These changes can affect his
behavior in subtle ways; even if he is not found out he will then be less
trusted than those of unquestioned honesty. And it is inevitable that more frequent lies do increase the
chance that some will be discovered.
At that time, even if the liar has no personal sense of loss of
integrity* from his deceitful practices, he will surely regret the damage to
his credibility which their discovery brings about. Paradoxically, once his word is no longer trusted, he will
be left with greatly decreased power – even though a lie often does bring
at least a short-term gain in power over those deceived.
*The word ÒintegrityÓ comes from the same roots which have formed
ÒintactÓ and Òuntouched.Ó It is
used especially often in relation to truthfulness and fair dealing and
reflects, I believe, the view that by lying one hurts oneself. . . .
=============================
he truth, but not perhaps all the truth, about 'lying', May 5,
2006
By Shalom
Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)
There are certain books whose subjects seem so important that when
one comes across them one immediately takes interest in them. Fortunate and
wise is the writer who is able to find or define such a subject. Sissela Bok
does this in her philosophical consideration of the subject of 'lying'.
She defines a lie this way, " an intentionally deceptive
message in the form of a 'statement'.
But her examination of the subject is broader than this definition
would imply.
In the first four chapters she considers the 'nature of lying ,
how it affects human choice, and basic a;pproaches to evaluating lies'. In
chapter 5 she takes a look at 'white lies'. In chapters 6 and 7 she 'considers
in detail what circumstances help to excuse lies, and whether some can actually
be justified in advance. Chapters 8 to 15 consider 'in greater detail certain
kinds of lies commonly thought justifiable:lies in wartime, for example, or to
children; lies told to protect confidentiality, or to conduct research.'
I especially appreciated her consideration and in some sense,
refutation of the arguments of Augustine and Kant who consider it forbidden and
wrong to lie in each and every case. Such draconian virtue is of course taken
exception to, and I think wisely, by the great majority of mankind.
At the background of Bok's investigation is her sense of a decline
in integrity in public life, and even in public expectation of honesty from
politicians.
But while she does make an argument and plea for greater honesty
in public life, the heart of her work is in a richly exampled and carefully
thought out of 'lying' in all its forms.
This is a thought - provoking book in
which I believe each and every reader will learn something important about
themselves, and their own occasional tendency to ' stretch it' for one reason
or another.
Racism's Cognitive Toll: Subtle
Discrimination Is More Taxing On The Brain
Science Daily — http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070919093316.htm
While
certain expressions of racism are absent from our world today, you do not have
to look very hard to know that more subtle forms of racism persist, in schools
and workplaces and elsewhere.
How do victims experience these more ambiguous racist
messages? Are they less damaging than overt hostility? And what are the mental
and emotional pathways by which these newer forms of discrimination actually
cause personal harm?
Psychologists have some theories about how the
experience of racism plays out in the brain--and what that means today compared
to before. All human beings are driven by a few core needs, including the need
to understand the world around us. When people do things to us, we must know
why, and if we are uncertain we will spend whatever cognitive power we have
available to diagnose the situation.
The problem is that we have limited cognitive
resources, so when we are solving one problem, we have difficulty focusing on
another at the same time. Some psychologists reason from this that subtle
racism might actually be more, not less, damaging than the plain antipathy of
yesterday, sapping more mental energy. Old-fashioned racism--a "No Negroes
Allowed" sign, for example--is hateful and hurtful, but it's not vague or
confusing. It doesn't require much cognitive work to get it. But if you're the
most qualified candidate for a job, and know it, and still don't get the job
for some undisclosed reason--that demands some processing.
Princeton psychologists Jessica Salvatore and J. Nicole
Shelton decided to explore this idea in the laboratory. They ran an experiment
in which volunteers witnessed a company's hiring decisions from the inside.
They saw the competing resumes of the candidates and the interviewer's comments
and recommendations. This wasn't a real company, and there were no real people
involved, but the volunteers believed it was all real.
The experiment left no doubt about which candidate was
best qualified, and sometimes that candidate was chosen, sometimes not.
Sometimes the company passed over the best candidate for blatantly racist
reasons; the reviewer might comment that the candidate belonged to "too
many minority organizations," for example. Other times the best candidate
was simply passed over for no good reason. The psychologists ran the experiment
many times, in every combination, so that both black and white volunteers saw
black candidates reviewed by whites and by blacks and the same for white
candidates.
After witnessing these fair and unfair hiring
decisions, the study volunteers took the so-called Stroop test. During this
test, the names of colors flash on the screen for an instant, but in the
"wrong" colors (the word "red" in green letters, for
example), and the idea is to quickly identify the color of the letters. It
tests capacity for mental effort, and the idea in this study was to see if
experiencing subtle racism interfered with that mental capacity.
It did, at least for blacks, and more than the overt
racism did. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, black
volunteers who had witnessed unfair but ambiguous hiring decisions did much
less well on the Stroop test, suggesting that they were using all their mental
resources to make sense of the unfairness.
Interestingly, white volunteers were more impaired by
overt racism than by the more ambiguous discrimination. Salvatore and Shelton
figure this is because whites rarely experience any racism; they do not even
notice the subtle forms of racism, and are thrown off balance when they are hit
over the head by overt acts. Many blacks, by contrast, have developed coping
strategies for the most hateful kinds of racism; it's the constant, vague,
just-below-the-surface acts of racism that impair performance, day in and day
out.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Association for Psychological Science.