George Costanza (from the TV series Seinfeld) once insisted: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” This seems both true and false. It’s certainly wrong to claim that someone lied accidentally, so intention, and therefore knowing what you are saying is not true, appears to be a necessary part of what it is to lie. Yet, the “if you believe it” part often operates like a “get out of jail free” card, and none of us can really know the intentions of another.

Kant famously argued that I have a duty to tell the truth in all cases, no matter the consequences… which leads one to wonder: if I’m aiding a friend by sheltering them from an abusive partner, when that partner knocks on the door and asks if my friend is inside, must I tell the truth? And what about a friend who asks you if you like their new tattoo?

Finally, what happens to lying in an age, arguably like ours, when the truth counts for so little? Might we be in the awkward position of hoping for an age in which we can actually lie again?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• Mike Birbiglia’s Broadway show “The Old Man and the Pool”
• Lee Mandelo, Feed the Silence (2023)
• Great “character” actors and actresses: Ben Mendelsohn, Delroy Lindo, Walton Goggins, Margo Martindale, Loretta Devine
• George Constanza, played by Jason Alexander on the television series Seinfeld
• intentionality
• Marjorie Taylor Greene’s history of conspiratorial claims
• Hotel Bar Sessions Season 2, Episode 21 on “Conspiracy Theories” 
• Spinoza’s epistemology
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness 
• Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives”
• Deontological ethics
• Consequentialist moral theory
• Roger Crisp, “Prudential and Moral Reasons”
• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 
• Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals
• The categorical imperative in Kant’s moral theory
• Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, Des Reactions Politiques
• The trolley problem
• Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers”
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Climate Change (2011)
• Robert N. Proctor and Londa Cheibinger (Eds.), Agnatology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008)
• affect theory
• Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics
• Hotel Bar Sessions Season 7, Episode 92 on “Lazy Relativism”
• Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979)

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