How can you honour your word at all if the premise of the link was false for more than half the respondents? There is no action that is consistent with your words.
It seems quite easy to me. Imagine me stating “The sky is purple, if you come to the party I’ll introduce you to Alice.” If you come to the party then me performing the promised introduction honours a commitment I made, even though I also lied to you.
A closer analogy is “You are an interesting person, and I will introduce the first interesting person who comes to the party to Alice”. You come to the party, you’re told that you’re the first there, but you’re not introduced to Alice because you’re not an interesting person after all. Instead they introduce the first interesting person to Alice (who for some reason only has time to meet one person).
Ah never mind, I now see what you meant. Yes in general you can narrowly honour your commitment by carrying out the action, but I mean more by “honouring your word” than just that. As I see it, someone who deliberately lies has not honoured their word, regardless of any subsequent actions that they might perform.
They’ve made two statements, one vouching that something is true, and one vouching that something will be true. Ensuring that the latter will be true does nothing to restore their loss of honour from the deliberate falsity of the former. In this case they can’t even honour the latter part, since they made a mutually exclusive promise to two different people.
Seems to me that in this case, the two are connected. If I falsely believed my group was in the minority, I might refrain from clicking the button out of a sense of fairness or deference to the majority group.
Consequently, the lie not only influenced people who clicked the button, it perhaps also influenced people who did not. So due to the false premise on which the second survey was based, it should be disregarded altogether. To not disregard would be to have obtained by fraud or trickery a result that is disadvantageous to all the majority group members who chose not to click, falsely believing their view was a minority.
I think, morally speaking, avoiding disadvantaging participants through fraud is more important than honoring your word to their competitors.
The key difference between this and the example is that there’s a connection between the lie and the promise.
How can you honour your word at all if the premise of the link was false for more than half the respondents? There is no action that is consistent with your words.
It seems quite easy to me. Imagine me stating “The sky is purple, if you come to the party I’ll introduce you to Alice.” If you come to the party then me performing the promised introduction honours a commitment I made, even though I also lied to you.
A closer analogy is “You are an interesting person, and I will introduce the first interesting person who comes to the party to Alice”. You come to the party, you’re told that you’re the first there, but you’re not introduced to Alice because you’re not an interesting person after all. Instead they introduce the first interesting person to Alice (who for some reason only has time to meet one person).Ah never mind, I now see what you meant. Yes in general you can narrowly honour your commitment by carrying out the action, but I mean more by “honouring your word” than just that. As I see it, someone who deliberately lies has not honoured their word, regardless of any subsequent actions that they might perform.
They’ve made two statements, one vouching that something is true, and one vouching that something will be true. Ensuring that the latter will be true does nothing to restore their loss of honour from the deliberate falsity of the former. In this case they can’t even honour the latter part, since they made a mutually exclusive promise to two different people.
Seems to me that in this case, the two are connected. If I falsely believed my group was in the minority, I might refrain from clicking the button out of a sense of fairness or deference to the majority group.
Consequently, the lie not only influenced people who clicked the button, it perhaps also influenced people who did not. So due to the false premise on which the second survey was based, it should be disregarded altogether. To not disregard would be to have obtained by fraud or trickery a result that is disadvantageous to all the majority group members who chose not to click, falsely believing their view was a minority.
I think, morally speaking, avoiding disadvantaging participants through fraud is more important than honoring your word to their competitors.
The key difference between this and the example is that there’s a connection between the lie and the promise.