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No! That's the point it isn't cowardice, it is a rational choice as a negotiating strategy. If I am willing and able to pay 45,000 dollars cash, but would prefer to pay as little as possible (the position of most people buying a car, I would suggest). Then if I tell him that, that is what I will pay, he isn't going to drop the price because I am honest! But if am tell him, I can't go any higher than 40,000 and he counter-offers me at 43,000 I have materially benefitted. It isn't about being cheap, it is about getting the best deal you can.
I can pay 45,000 dollars but I would rather not. But as soon as I tell him, I can spend 45,000 dollars what rational reason does the salesman have to come down? He knows exactly what I am willing to pay. I have given away information in our adversarial transaction. We are opponents here, not friends. Likewise if he is honest and tells me, "Hey the sticker price is 48,000 but I will take 40,000" then I am going to offer 40,000, no more. I'm not going to pay more than I need to right?
The fact we hide information from each other, is because we do not have the same goals. We are opposed. I lie because saving 3000 dollars is good and he lies because earning an extra grand in commission is good.
And that is my point, Dishonest(buyer)/Dishonest(salesman) sets the price at 43. Honest/Dishonest gets 45, Dishonest/Honest gets 40, Honest/Honest gets 42,250 (as they honestly split the difference between their max and min prices). Do you see what happens there? We are socially evolved to lie. Not because it is good or bad, but because it seems once you are dealing with groups bigger than just family size (where iterated tit for tat trust rules), that it facilitates the social fabric and allows hundreds of thousands of people to work together, even when their individual goals are not aligned. Now I am happy because I paid less than I would have and he is happy because he got more than he would have taken. The social good is divided between us. Even when we did not trust each other!
Now if he was my uncle and the only car dealership in town so he knew I would be back next year, and would have to face me at Thanksgiving if he scammed me, then it would make sense for us to say end up at 42,250 by being honest and splitting the difference between what the max I was willing to pay, and the minimum he was willing to accept. But that is no longer the situation most people are in, once you scale beyond Dunbar numbers. Unlike in a prisoners dilemma both people choosing to be untrustworthy is very nearly the same as both being trustworthy where you cannot be certain of how trustworthy strangers are.
At scale, when you are no longer iterating with the same people over and over, and you don't know who to trust, both people being somewhat selfish and untrustworthy, paradoxically results in a good outcome. Because we do not have perfect information about each other. That is how capitalist societies have become so successful. It harnesses our inherent distrust, and greed and selfishness. Contrast with scenarios which assume utopian versions of humanity, like communism, and clearly one is more successful than the other at scale.
Now to be clear, it can still be true that lying and being dishonest can be morally wrong, even if they result in a better society overall. But that entirely depends on your moral framework. A utilitarian might judge it good based upon societal outcomes as above, while a rule utilitarian might not, a Kantian would definitely still see it as morally wrong, and a virtue ethicist would also see it as wrong, I would imagine.
Getting a good price does not require deception. You’ve got Costanza’s walkout gambit. That’s your main leverage, you don’t need to lie.
The main relationship of capitalism is not adversarial, but transactional. Communism tries to make all relationships familial, ends up hierarchical. It is particularly prone to lies and manipulation because two communists always have to figure out which one is the child and which one is the parent in that familial relationship, so which one should help the other, or exploit the other, while capitalists can just trade for mutual benefit, or walkout. Capitalism, far from requiring deception, barely requires language really. You just pick a number and the other monkey either nods or fucks off.
A) Disagree. Most people dislike it. You could similarly say we are socially evolved to screw over other people, murder them, which is kinda true and largely not true. B) Naturalistic fallacy. C) Both people lying and reaching a compromise price is not a socially beneficial outcome, all the scenarios are equal, just a zero-sum game between you and the salesman.
You conflate self-interest with selfishness and selfishness with dishonesty. Capitalism harnesses self-interest, not dishonesty or distrust. Those are not conductive to a functioning society.
History begs to differ. Every society has dishonesty and distrust. Whether individuals like or dislike it is besides the point. They do it. All the time. They lie about how much they drink, how much they eat, they lie about why they can't make it to work, why they have no money. Not everyone and not all the time of course, but enough that you simply cannot operate without taking into account if the other person is lying to you. And that is what our societies have evolved to function with.
Every society has murder too. That does not make murder conductive to a functioning society, or some kind of pillar of capitalism.
No, which is why some lies are anti-social. We call that fraud, or perjury and the like. Just like some killings are murder, and some are not. Notably we don't criminalize things like lying about how much you can afford, or white lies about whether your wife looks good in her new jeans, and so on. We recognize that not all lies are a problem.
Killing is conducive to a functioning society, whether that is killing in self-defence, execution, war, and so on. So too is lying. Depends on the types of lie and the reasons, just like with killing.
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