The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to _say_ something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies (...) have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of _N_ = 255 participants from Russia and _N_ = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent _saying_ something they believe to be false. (shrink)

In her seminal attack on modern moral philosophy, G. E. M. Anscombe claims that Kant's ‘rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it’. Although this so-called problem of relevant descriptions has received considerable attention in the literature, there is little agreement on how it should be understood or solved. My aim in this paper is, first, to clarify the problem (...) by clearing up several misunderstandings, and, second, to show that the problem is rooted in a standard assumption about Kant's stance on the scope of moral principles—an assumption that precludes its solution. I argue that the problem consists in the fact that Kant's formula of universal law seems to stand in need of an account of moral sensibility that does not render the formula superfluous. But, as my discussion of existing solutions reveals, there can be no such account. Instead, I propose a dissolution: we should think of the formula of universal law itself as Kant's account of moral sensibility. In order to do so, we must reject the standard assumption that a principle is universal if and only if it holds for all instances of the action type that it specifies. (shrink)