The Morality of Lying and Deception

At an early age, many children were taught to tell the truth. With this principle, we can improve our lives and maintain a trustworthy picture. Deception and lies, however, are continuously filtering into our lives. But it is only in that sense that deception is regarded. There are always two sides to a story, however. According to Merriam Webster, deception is the act of causing someone to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. This awareness is implemented at a very early age in several children.

People are told not to be dishonest repeatedly. Yet this simple principle is so violated that in one lifetime a person was unable to measure the number of lies told by mankind. Therefore, the question is why deception is being used by people. I agree with the definition and will expand on it by covering the measure of deception, self-deception, and deception in social media.

To me, deception is as minuscule as a white lie but can lead to giant lies.

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It depends, however, on the specific instance of the lie. When deception spreads to the point of a lie that hurts people around the deceiver and confronts for the benefit of no single person, then deception is wrong morally. Pamala Myers author of Liespotting, on a Ted Talk, states that “On any given day we're lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lies can be subtle and counter-intuitive.' Myers means that not everyone is an honest person and finding the dishonest people is difficult, but not impossible that they can be found out.

Nonetheless, deception is morally acceptable in the sense of saying something that may not be real and pushing that untruth onto other people. However, this changes when we start spreading deception onto ourselves.

Self-deception is how we explain the misconceptions we tell ourselves. There’s no question that sometimes we’re not truthful. Not all of our actions seem moral and deliberate. Ian Deweese-Boyd expresses that “self-deception represents an obstacle to self-knowledge, both individually and collectively”. Deweese-Boyd means our deception towards ourselves is the obstacle that holds us against everything because we have a set image about ourselves and ignore everything around us. We avoid the truth at times, we deny the facts, and we trick ourselves. Not only do we get trick by ourselves, but we are also every time we go on social media.

Deception in social media is intended to mislead users, observers, organizations, etc. Among many, there might be some misunderstanding of content background, gender, age, gender, or area. The unique circumstances of social media enable and promote dishonesty. For a wide variety of reasons, lying is rampant in social media, being an innocent white lie and resulting in a serious consequence of one's work and life being at risk. Therefore, researching deception in social media is significant. Dan Misener for CBC News states that “If we have a better understanding of dishonesty online...we can be less naive in our online interactions.” Misener means that if we can be less arrogant about our online interactions, we can better our understanding. Deception of social media needs to be exposed so that we can strengthen our knowledge and trust in using social media, creating and implementing safeguards to reduce the negative impact of deception. By reducing the impact of deception, we can find that deception is a major problem.

In conclusion, deception is causing others to believe in misleading information given to them. Deception can hurt the people surrounding the deceiver and is morally unjust. We deny our own lies because we don't want to deal with the truth. We should not always trust what we read on the internet but be able to solidify our awareness of the lies being told. We are taught right and wrong as children this relied on how we kept the image in order to make the moral decision.