Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.04747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In life-or-death situations, a benevolent lie may appear more moral than telling the truth. Yet such lies can backfire, producing unintended and sometimes fatal consequences. This tension, famously disputed by Kant and Constant in 1797, applies not only to lying but to assertive speech acts in general, raising the question of which utterance should be chosen when moral stakes are high. We present a logical framework for the ethical evaluation of sp