OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We normally value honesty and typically think it is morally wrong to lie. There might be some exceptions to this – if the consequences of truth-telling are likely to be very harmful, if it the lie is particularly trivial, for instance.
The ‘Santa Claus lie’ is, however, often thought to be harmless and even positively valuable. People are actively encouraged to repeat this lie to their children and might be admonished for revealing the lie.
In this session we will discuss the ethics of lying, specifically to children. We will consider the difference between paradigmatic lies and other ways of misleading without lying. We will then discuss the special case of the Santa Claus lie: what value it brings and whether this justifies its telling.
