We address the ethics of scenarios in which one party entraps, intentionally tempts or intentionally tests the virtue of another. We classify, in a new manner, three distinct types of acts that are of concern, namely acts of entrapment, of intentional temptation and of virtue testing. Our classification is, for each kind of scenario, of itself neutral concerning the question whether the agent acts permissibly. We explain why acts of entrapment are more ethically objectionable than like acts of intentional temptation (...) and why these, in turn, are more ethically objectionable than like acts of virtue testing. Along the way, we scrutinize, and eventually reject, the view that acts of entrapment are ethically unacceptable because intentional temptation is involved in entrapment. (shrink)

The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary (...) people willing to ascribe deceptive intentions to artificial agents? (b) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (c) Do people blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than they presently receive. (shrink)

We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or (...) otherwise implying it. Now, as predicted by the well-supported assumption that we can also assert with pictures, the lying/misleading distinction appears to intuitively show up there too. Here I’ll explain how the debate confronting the two accounts plays out both in general and in that case, aiming to provide support for the adverbial account. (shrink)

Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction cannot contain lies, since their content is neither presented as true nor meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article presents two views that support a positive answer, and two that support (...) a negative one. After examining various ways in which fictions can deceive, it concludes in favour of the view that fictional statements can mislead, but never lie. (shrink)

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and (...) anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying. (shrink)