Lying to Make Friends

Abstract

It is intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming a false belief. It is especially intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming the false belief that you are their friend. Despite these intuitions, this article argues that in a surprising number of cases, deceiving people into believing you are their friend is not only permitted, but required. The article uses this result to make some important revisions and suggestions for the emergent social rights literature: (i) it shows that social rights are feasible in a wider range of cases than previously thought, and (ii) it casts doubt on whether grounding such rights on the impersonal value of genuine intimate relationships is their most fruitful grounding.