Workshop on The Ethics of Deception

Deception is a pervasive part of public and private life. Some deceptions seem innocuous, desirable, expected, or even demanded by, say, duties of gratitude, loyalty, or friendship. We tell our children that Santa Claus exists (!), assure our partners that we love their (frankly baffling) gift, promise interviewers that this is our absolute dream job, and insist that our friend’s signature dish is just terrific. We might think that certain state actors also have permissions and duties to deceive. Police officers use deception to entrap suspected criminals, manipulate suspects in interviews, and infiltrate criminal organisations. Spies deceptively obtain state secrets. And yet we also treat deception as a prima facie wrong: we teach our children not to lie, regard being deceitful as a vice and being honest as a virtue, and often feel wronged when we discover that someone has deceived or misled us.

This workshop will explore a range of conceptual, theoretical and applied ethical issues connected to deception, broadly construed.

Speakers:

• Chloe Kennedy (Edinburgh): ‘The Ethics (and Legality) of Deceptive Intimate Relationships’.
• Vladimir Krstic (United Arab Emirates): ‘A Prolegomenon to Any Theory of Deception’.
• Helen Frowe (Stockholm): ‘Systematic Deception as Covert Coercive Control’.
• Radu Bumbăcea (LMU Munich): ‘Personas and Deception’.
• Jeremy Page (Uppsala): ‘Honesty and Deception’.
• Shalom Chalson (Singapore): ‘Lying to Loved Ones: (Wrongful) Deception and Health Status’.
• Alex Barber and Sean Cordell (Open University UK): ‘Legislating against Political Lying’.
• Jörg Löschke (Stuttgart): ‘Love, Games, and Deception’.
• Maria Lucila Tuñón Corti (Würzburg): ‘Stealthing: Between Consent and Deception’.
• Pascal Mowla (Oxford): ‘Sentimentality and Generative AI: What’s Wrong with “Cheating”?’.
• Luke Hunt (Alabama): ‘The Legal and Moral Right (and Duty) to Deceive’.

To register, please visit https://stockholmcentre.org/event/workshop-on-the-ethics-of-deception/