Lying and morals in general

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I'm often told I have some weird sense of right or wrong, people don't understand why I think it is absolutely ok to lie about something if it improves a situation.
I just had a discussion yesterday, and was asked if I would kill one innocent person to save 1000 others, and the obvious answer was yes. Of course it is still wrong, but 1000 dying would be worse. The 2-3 NT people at the table were completely outraged, because there is absolutely nothing that justifies killing another.
I might have told them hey are hypocrites - I mean seriously the world isn't that black and white and you can't always make completely ethical decisions. I mean that is the real world, there are wars with civilian casualties - at least some of these wars prevented something worse happening. And in a real life or death situation everybody at the table with me would have looked out for himself and his family first.

Same thing with lying really, everybody lies every day. Like if you really don't like the new haircut of your friend. Well ok, people with Aspergers might actually lie less in such cases. But why should I have told a friend, that her as*hole ex boyfriend had cheated on her with another mutual friend as well? I mean they broke up for good, she would have just felt worse about the whole thing and the friendship to the other girl might have suffered for nothing. Since I believed said girl really didn't mean to hurt her friend. And well if somebody should have told her, it was the girl who actually had sex with said ex boyfriend. So when it came all out, she was angry with me for withholding the information - even more than with her other friend who actually betrayd her and did not tell her either.

I am told I am not empathic enough. I just don't understand sometimes, bad things cannot be always be prevented. I cannot sit around and feel miserable all day because somewhere on this world people are dying. ( and I don't think that is something my outraged NT friends do, so therefore hypocrites) That does not mean I don't think it is wrong that people are tortured or killed. And I do feel bad about it, but I am just realistic.

It is hard for me to see where I am lacking empathy, I think I am just a lot more rational about things. And I don't contradict myself, lying cannot be always wrong if everbody does it all the time so I don't even pretend I am always truthful. Why should I? In the end I think I am more often telling the truth than the people who critizised me for lying in he first place.

I'm upset. I just don't know how to explain that to my friends. I think they are being irrational about it. Well I guess I could just wait till it blows over and not have such discussions with them anymore. I simply cannot admit that I was wrong, if I don't actually believe it just to calm them down.

I don't think it's wrong to lie if it helps the situation or if you have to lie to avoid hurting someone else's feelings, etc. I don't think its right to lie about a friend and throw them under the bus just to keep from getting in trouble for something you did too, (putting the blame on them) but would I do it if it came down to serious stuff? I don't know. I'd like to say no I wouldn't but it would depend on what the stakes are.

As for the kill one vs a thousand question, there is no simple answer to it. I'd just say "Nobody trusts my judgement enough to let me make that decision, so I don't care".

I change specific details of things that I post online. I do that so that people who I know who might read this wont know that I'm me, and also to protect the innocent and sometimes guilty parties involved. Also because it's habit. I was told never to give out the full details in truth on the internet in public. Only in private email etc. So, while the incidents are as I post them, I may change the names, sex, age, circumstances etc from time to time on a forum. My aunt may have breast cancer but I might say my cousin has colon cancer. Same situation, but not identifiable. It's not good to put out the details of your personal life in public for everyone to see. And if you do want to put the details you can change them enough to not be recognizable and keep them almost exactly the same as they actually are in real life.

I wish I remembered to do things like that...

Its a game of politics. You cant make everyone happy. You are forced to pick sides, emotions influence peoples decisions. Lying in favor of your friend is honourable. Lies are never discussed in public, unless someone is getting roasted for it.

You say you're just a bit more realistic and that's true, but the NT world doesn't want to hear the truth, that's why i sometimes call them dimwits. They close their eyes in order to ignore the mess they are causing.

It's a simple fact that empathy, sitting there and crying for others' problems, won't help them. Your suffering won't reduce another person's pain. And nobody's poverty will make another one wealthier.

When i was about 7 years old, it was very common to urge kids to eat up with a reference to the poor hungry children in Africa or India, and when i was asking how this should help, i was being punished. Although i had only been curious.

Throughout my life it has always been this way and meanwhile i accept it as a fact. Let's take just any discussion about environmental destruction and over population. At some point, someone will say something in the manner of "Oh, but it's all God's will and He is going to take care of it ..." you get the idea, and if i respond then that it's most unlikely that a God who may but as well may not exist, but howsoever never bothered to intervene for 2,000 years now, not even as the Germans used a large number of Jews as fuel, i.e., burned God's declared favorite team, so one can by no means expect something better right here and now, people attack me for this opinion.

I know we are outnumbered by people who follow their instincts without rhyme or reason and then call me a freak or emotional steamroller because i don't share their collective illusion. They don't want truth, they prefer to be lied at.

However, empathy is generally overrated. It has its downsides too, as each fraud, politician, and used cars reseller can confirm since they greatly benefit from people who value moods and feelings over reason.

the 1 or 1000 question is stupid. It's just a completely futile question. The next time you get asked that offer yourself to be the one, otherwise tell them to fo with their stupid questions. Seriously though, some questions just aren't worth bothering with. You get yourself in a mental twist and it's not even a real situation and it's not even something that prepares you for a real situation. It's like the threads you see on here regarding god and you have people arguing for pages and pages, i've considered posting but it's just so meh, what a waste of time, nothing gets resolved, you're just banging your head against the wall. It's just so futile, it doesn't change your day to day reality so who cares?

Hmm, on not telling your friend about her ex boyfriend moving on with someone else. No offense, but if it'd been me making the choice, i'd have told her. You don't help yourself in the slightest by telling her, her first reaction might even be to shoot the messenger (although even nts have a way at realising later on that you were right to tell them). You still could have helped her. You call her a friend but you think of your own personal comfort first. It's an act of personal sacrifice to tell the truth to a friend in that circumstance but you chose not to. You think of short term, a quiet life now and you'll deal with the future when it comes and that's not the way to approach life, otherwise you get situations when the truth comes back to bite you on the arse when for example your friend finds out you could have helped her but you chose not to. And no, the truth doesn't always come back to haunt you, but it sometimes does and do you really wanna risk it? Ah, i guess you do.

It's not hard to be empathic, you just sit there and work out how YOU would feel in the same circumstance. You don't have to know what the other people think to work that out. We might be different to nts but we're not that different. You'd have wanted to know right?

imo

Funny thing, I changed the details around too.
So here wasn't exactly an ex boyfriend cheating szenario, just something kind of similar with two friends where one did something to hurt the other but didn't mean to and I really didn't see the point on telling him, because it wouldn't help only cause more hurt. Was I now lying again? My friends would probably think so.

I guess I would also differentiate between outright lying and withholding certain information, which isn't the same at all in my opinion. But many seem to think it is.

I really don't remember how we ended up at the killing one person question. It was a whole discussion about morals and ethic beforehand, where I had a different opinion. The question is stupid I admit, but it was just the last point of the whole discussion.

I'm just really annoyed that everybody claims to be so morally and ethically pefect, and I just don't think anybody could live up to that standard.

Some people have said I was lying because I told them in private that I change the details. They weren't mad at me or upset or anything and we are friends still, and there wasn't an argument or anything, they just didn't see it the same way I did. So, depending on the person, they may think it is lying or that it's not lying.

Oddly enough, cops can legally lie to you all day long. They can make up anything and tell you, to get you to confess, pretty much within certain limits but if you lie to them they can charge you with it. Completely unfair and the playing field should be leveled. Either make it wrong for cops to lie to suspects or get rid of the charges when somebody is proved to be lying to the cops.

Your decision is completely ethical. Theirs isn't. By their action or lack thereof, they would have killed 1000 people. That is completely unethical.



I would have done the same things. It is none of your business. I don't consider it lying, since no one asked you. You can't go around telling everyone about what other people have or haven't done. In principle, I don't talk to acquaintances about people with both know, unless asked (and if ask, I will voice my discomfort at answering).

There are different moral matrices, yet most people aren't aware of it (and would deny it). Your friends have typical liberal values, they care a lot about harm and fairness, whereas you seem to have utilitarian morals.

You can't explain yourself to them unless they're open to acknowledge and accept that different people have different morals. But discussions like the ones you mentioned are more about social glue and about affirming that you're part of the same group, so a technical discussion will probably not get you very far. Read Jonathan Haidt for a more elaborate discussion of morals.

You say that as if it were an absolute truth, which it isn't. It depends on the rules which you accept as true.

Yeah, the OP's conversation seemed to be more about social glue and less about actual morality (as far as the others were concerned).

There's a whole chapter in "Look Me in the Eyes" or "Be Different" (I forget which) in which JER discusses empathy from an AS perspective.

In my experience; many "liberal" values while they work great in theory have trouble translating to real life due to various problems with Human Nature.

If let loose, I could write dozens of very lengthy paragraphs on this, so I will just say that I am certain that it is an absolute truth, given that the situation is hypothetical and that the results of action and inaction are both clear-cut and given as certain themselves; and that any global ethical theory (as opposed to precise sets of rules with clearly defined bounds, defined for practical purposes) concerned only with rules or principles, not evaluation of the results of one's action, is a very wrong theory.

I advise that we agree to disagree from the start. Otherwise, we will stray off-topic very quickly and very badly.

Even if you evaluate the results, there are more options than playing a numbers game of "humans alive" vs. "humans dead". The results of action and inaction are subject to interpretation based on your value system. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just saying that you're not universally right.

Take the perspective of a hypothetical extraterrestrial life form: is it ethical for him to kill one of his kind so that 1000 humans can survive? Or less exotic: make the one person a truly great person who serves humanity in many ways, someone who has saved many lives, and the 1000 who have to die all criminals who kill and steal.
To answer these kinds of questions, you need to evaluate the relative worth of things and situations, and the definition of worth is entirely subjective. I don't understand how you could pretend that there is one answer that is objectively true.

We could continue the discussion in another thread to avoid going off-topic.

Well my problem still is, that the normal kind of empathy and morals I am supposed to have don't make much sense to me. I get that others have a different way of thinking so I wouldn't berate them for their beliefs, but is it really so hard to understand how my mind works? I'm still thinking I am more rational about stuff..

Another example was my ex roommate, she fancied herself an environmental activist. So she lectured me constantly about stuff like I shouldn't buy tomatos in winter, since it is off season and they had to be grown in green houses or flown in from somewhere which obviously isn't good for the environment. ( I get hat, but I really can't abstain from any kind of fruit or vegetable which is not in season right now - what should I eat then? I eat mostly vegetarian, because I don't like meat much. Frozen stuff is for sure not very energy efficient either! )
I got a bit upset after a while because my roommate had a thing for tuna, so she ate 2-3 cans of tuna a week. I'm quite sure she ate other foods that were not entirely ecological, because unless (an probably not even then) you grow all your food yourself that is not possible. So I really didn't get her double standard on that issue.

I'm guessing it is an Asperger thing that I really fail to understand things like that, or isn't it?