This is

This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds

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I have a friend who once wrote a newspaper article and the byline gave a

plug to what was described as his latest book. I was amused because whilst a book they

mentioned was indeed his latest book, it was also his only book.

Using the phrase his latest book implied surely that he had written at least two.

The formulation of the byline wasn't exactly a lie, but it seemed a bit disingenuous, a bit misleading.

Was this as bad as lying?

To give us the unvarnished truth about the subtle moral grades of deception, here's Jonathan Weber.

Jonathan Weber, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hello.

The topic we're going to focus on is deception with words.

Now the most obvious way to deceive somebody with words is to tell

a lie. So just in simple terms what is a lie? A lie is when you say something which the literal meaning of the words that you say is something

that you believe not to be true and usually you have the intention that the other person

will end up believing that falsehood.

So we've got a window next to us. Let's imagine the window was broken and there's a boy outside

you say, did you break that window and the boy says no I didn't when he did

...