Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas

Abstract:In life-or-death situations, a benevolent lie may appear more moral than telling the truth. Yet such lies can backfire, producing unintended and sometimes fatal consequences. This tension, famously disputed by Kant and Constant in 1797, applies not only to lying but to assertive speech acts in general, raising the question of which utterance should be chosen when moral stakes are high. We present a logical framework for the ethical evaluation of speech-act utterances based on agents' beliefs. Implemented in Answer Set Programming (ASP), the framework assesses utterances under deontologism, consequentialism, and principialism, and is illustrated on Sartre's The Wall (1939), a reworking of that controversy in which lying leads alternately to rescue and to death. Our setting is general by design: as two variants show, accommodating a new moral situation amounts to adjusting parameters, not rules.

To appear in the Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2026). Kumamoto, Japan

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2610.04747 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.04747v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04747 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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