Essay On Passive Deception

677 Words2 Pages

In these next few paragraphs, I will attempt to give an accurate depiction of passive deception, focusing on how it applies to the field of healthcare, and its problems. Passive deception, in essence, is the act of withholding information from another person to whom it concerns or could concern. In his essay, “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person,” Mappes simplifies passive deception to “the simple withholding of information” (173). The counterpart to this, is active deception, which occurs when a deceiver lies outrightly. The key difference between these two is the action, or lack thereof, of the deceiver.
Something that complicates the concept of passive deception is what I call the question of importance. Passive deceit does not exist in every occasion in which information is withheld, but something is withheld in every instance of passive deception. So, what determines whether or not the withholding of information is sufficient enough to also qualify as deception? I contend that the two qualities, which I call determinants of deception, that separate deception from simple withholding are importance and likelihood, the latter is only necessary in situations with a certain level of doubt or during …show more content…

In this field there really are matters of life and death, which could be affected by deceit. Passive deception is mainly a problem because there is currently no way to determine whether the omission is an innocent or deceitful one. Furthermore, the determinants of deception which I presented have a great many flaws. These include the question of importance, which varies from person to person, and the question of what percentage of likelihood is substantial enough to require information to be given. Without the proper ways of classifying passive deception it will continue to pose problems in the healthcare field, in daily interactions, and in the other sectors of

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