Power Of Lying Essay

To what extent does one's ability to hide the truth and strategize make them more viable to thrive?

When individuals hear about politicians and businessmen or bankers they think of corruption. Individuals consider most of these people of power to be liars. Generally individuals say such things as “they got to be in power by lying”. Lying when done right can get people things they want such as power and wealth. Receiving these two things give an individual more means to thrive in the society we live in. With wealth you can bend other people of power to give you power, or with power you can create means to make wealth. With these two things someone can become almost an unstoppable force leading individuals who have less ability than them. This essays purpose is to explain the extent on how lying can make an individual, more prosperous in our society. The ways of knowing this extended essay will target will be emotion, because emotions are what drives ethics and faith, because lying deals with people being faithful in other people and also how the individual lying puts faith in that their lie will work. The areas of knowledge this extended essay will touch will be Ethics, and (religious knowledge systems).
SECTION NAME TBA
According to Stanford there is no universally accepted definition of lying. The Oxford English Dictionary 1989 states that lying is “to make a false statement with the intention to deceive”. (Should state most accepted one??) In 1773 Isenberg defined lying as “A

lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it”. In a more accurate way to define Isenberg’s as (Stanford) says is to make a believed-False statement to another person with the intention that the other person to believe that statement to be true.
There are for conditions for something to be considered a lie when going by Isenberg definition.
1) Lying requires that a person make a statement.
2) The person who tells the statement has to believe the statement to be false.
3) Lying requires that the untruthful statement be made to another person.
4) The person who told the untruthful statement has to intend that the other person is to believe the untruthful statement.

LYIN AND ETHICS
In Immanuel Kant’s (On Political Reactions) He states that “It is a duty to tell the truth”.

Kant also continues on to say that the concept of duty is inseparable from the concept of right. A duty is that which one being corresponds to the rights of another. Where are there are no rights, there are no duties. To tell the truth is this a duty: but it is a duty only in respect to one who has a right to the truth. But no one has a right to a truth which injures

others.
For a lie always harms another; if not some other particular man, still it harms mankind generally, for it vitiates the source of law itself. This benevolent lie, however, can become punishable under civil law through an accident (casus), and that which escapes liability to punishment only by accident can also be condemned as wrong even by external laws. For instance, if by telling a lie you have prevented murder, you have made yourself legally responsible for all the consequences; but if you have held rigorously to the truth, public justice can lay no hand on you, whatever the unforeseen consequences may be. After you have honestly answered the murderer's question as to whether this intended victim is at home, it may be that he has slipped out so that he does not come in the way of the murderer, and thus that the murder may not be committed. But if you had lied and said he was not at home when he had really gone out without your knowing it, and if the murderer had then met him as he went away and murdered him, you might justly be accused as the cause of his death. For if you had told the truth as far as you knew it, perhaps the murderer might have been apprehended by the neighbors while he searched the house and thus the deed might have been prevented. Therefore, whoever tells a lie, however well-intentioned he might be, must answer for the consequences, however unforeseeable they were, and pay the penalty for them even in a civil tribunal. This is because truthfulness is a duty which must be regarded as the ground of all duties based on contract, and the laws of these duties would be rendered uncertain and useless if even the least exception to them were admitted.

Lying is probably one of the most common wrong acts that we carry out (one researcher has said 'lying is an unavoidable part of human nature'), so it's worth spending time thinking about it. Most people would say that lying is always wrong, except when there's a good reason for it - which means that it's not always wrong. Lying is a form of deception, but not all forms of deception are lies.
Why is lying wrong?
Lying is bad because it corrupts the liar
• Telling lies may become a habit and if a person regularly indulges in one form of wrong-doing they may well become more comfortable with wrong-doing in general
• Some religious people argue Lying is bad because it misuses the God-given gift of human communication
• God gave humanity speech so that they could accurately share their thoughts - lying does the opposite
Some philosophers say lying is bad because language is essential to human societies and carries the obligation to use it truthfully
When people use language they effectively 'make a contract' to use it in a particular way - one of the clauses of this contract is not to use language deceitfully
Lies obviously hurt the person who is lied to (most of the time), but they can also hurt the liar, and society in general. It is a right of “humanity generally” to enter into and maintain a society. This right is violated by and untruthful statement made to others with the intention that it be believed to be true since in so acting one is necessarily intending to bring it about that “statements” in general are not believed. And hence that trust in contracts is undetermined and hence that rights based on contracts are undermined, sense rights based on contracts are required to create and maintain a society. The duty of right not to lie is the basis for all duties based on contracts: “truthfulness is a duty that must be regarded as the basis of a all duties to be grounded on contract, the law of which is made uncertain and useless if even the least exception to it is admitted.

The person who is lied to suffers if they don't find out because:
• They are deprived of some control over their future because
• They can no longer make an informed choice about the issue concerned
• They are not fully informed about their possible courses of action
• They may make a decision that they would not otherwise have made

Another place where this can be applied is in major corporations. Many of the board members meet up and decide whether to report hazards or fix them in general. These decisions cost unsuspecting people their money and they get away with it because they planned out how to work around laws. The question is “is this really ethical?” People take advantages in life like this all the time and most the time it’s just them capitalizing on others ignorance or mistrust. An example where the person doing this got “caught” is Bernie Madoff. He scammed investors out of $65 billion and he pocketed $20 billion of that himself. Essentially you can almost say it is the people who were scammed is their fault because they made the decision to invest which is a risky business in general (*1). This is considered stealing and as a general population we all say that stealing is ethically wrong. We consider stealing to be wrong ethically because we consider actions that hurt others to be ethically wrong and stealing is considered hurtful. Stealing is not only hurtful to the victims but hurtful to everyone around and even to the person who stole. The big picture to this is if everyone can steal from others we have anarchy and society cannot progress. If a business cannot own its place of business and protect it from theft the business cannot exist. This topples society and hurts people on the mass which is ethically wrong because it huts others (2*)
Donald J. Trump’s record on truth and accuracy is astonishingly poor. So far, we’ve fact-checked more than 70 Trump statements and rated fully three-quarters of them as Mostly False, False or “Pants on Fire”
In the Democratic race, Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are evenly matched at 28 percent (based on 43 checks of Mr. Sanders and 140 checks of Mrs. Clinton). Outside of the primary campaign, we’ve continued checking the public statements of Bill Clinton since 2007; he comes out slightly ahead of President Obama in his truth-telling track record.

You know.
1) Yang, Stephanie. "5 Years Ago Bernie Madoff Was Sentenced to 150 Years In Prison – Here's How His Scheme Worked." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 01 July 2014. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.
2) Brain, Marshall. "DecidingToBeBetter.com - On Ethics and Rational Moral Codes." DecidingToBeBetter.com - On Ethics and Rational Moral Codes. N.p., 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.
Immanuel Kant
On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~davpy35701/text/kant-sup-right-to-lie.pdf

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/lying/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lying-definition/
http://paws.wcu.edu/dhale/kant/pdf/KantOnLying.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie-some-lie-more-than-others.html?_r=0