Article by Don Fallis, of University of Arizona. More philosophical than legal. (h/t: Legal Theory Blog) Abstract:
According
to the traditional philosophical definition, you lie if and only if you
say something that you believe to be false and you intend to deceive
someone into believing what you say. However, philosophers have
recently noted the existence of bald-faced lies, lies which are not
intended to deceive anyone into believing what is said. As a result,
many philosophers have removed deception from their definitions of
lying. According to Jennifer Lackey, this is “an unhappy divorce”
because it precludes an obvious explanation of the prima facie wrongness
of lying. Moreover, Lackey claims that there is a sense of deception
in which all lies are deceptive. In this paper, I argue that bald-faced
lies are not deceptive on any plausible notion of deception. In
addition, I argue that divorcing deception from lying is not as unhappy a
result as Lackey suggests.