Rationality can’t be wrong, but it can be misused.
“People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.” is technically correct, but omits factors relevant to the situations when most people consider lying to be necessary. The fact that you know something is true is itself a truth.
So if you reason “they have to endure the truth whether I tell them it or not”, you also have to acknowledge that by telling them you’ve added a second-order truth, and they now have to endure that second-order truth that they didn’t before. The implication that telling someone the truth doesn’t change anything because it didn’t change the original truth… isn’t true,
Of course most people don’t think in terms of “telling someone a truth adds another truth”, but if you try to analyze it, it turns out that it does.
If you care about the truth … then
Virtually nobody “cares about the truth” in the absolute sense needed to make that statement logically correct. Most people care about the truth as one of several things that they care about, which need to be balanced against each other.
Virtually nobody “cares about the truth” in the absolute sense needed to make that statement logically correct.
As a matter of logic nobody caring about the truth (in whatever sense is meant by the claim) is sufficient to ensure that the statement is always correct (the part replaced by the ellipsis need not be resolved). (The problem is that it is then probably useless.)
Rationality can’t be wrong, but it can be misused.
“People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.” is technically correct, but omits factors relevant to the situations when most people consider lying to be necessary. The fact that you know something is true is itself a truth.
So if you reason “they have to endure the truth whether I tell them it or not”, you also have to acknowledge that by telling them you’ve added a second-order truth, and they now have to endure that second-order truth that they didn’t before. The implication that telling someone the truth doesn’t change anything because it didn’t change the original truth… isn’t true,
Of course most people don’t think in terms of “telling someone a truth adds another truth”, but if you try to analyze it, it turns out that it does.
Virtually nobody “cares about the truth” in the absolute sense needed to make that statement logically correct. Most people care about the truth as one of several things that they care about, which need to be balanced against each other.
As a matter of logic nobody caring about the truth (in whatever sense is meant by the claim) is sufficient to ensure that the statement is always correct (the part replaced by the ellipsis need not be resolved). (The problem is that it is then probably useless.)