If your friends are mature adults, they can handle being told that someone doesn't want to hang out with them sometimes, without taking it personally. If they can't handle that, that's a problem that needs to be addressed--it's not a kind or empathetic thing to walk around on eggshells and let that problem fester and grow. This isn't a "kind lie" even if such a thing exists. What you're describing isn't empathy for your friends, it's fear/anxiety that your friends won't react well, and if your friends are quality friends at all, it's not a rational fear.
To be clear, moral failure has nothing to do with my argument: I don't even believe in morality in an absolute sense. My argument is that, assuming people want to have cooperative, enjoyable interactions with friends, the best way to achieve that is to tell the truth about what you want and expect the same from your friends.
You are seriously overthinking this. Empathetic people can still communicate.
I'm not sure who the "you" are addressing here, I'm talking about this problem from a game theoretic perspective which abstracts over all people.
It some situations there will be no lack of clarity - for example, if two people prefer honesty over empathy (shorthand for "will people be more honest even if they are concerned it will not maximize utility between the parties, or they are aware such utility is not at risk"), there will be no source of moral confusion. It's when there's unrevealed information about value judgements this problem manifests.
It seems like this is a reasonable response to andrewzah, but to be clear, my argument has nothing to do with virtue--I don't even believe in virtue ethics.
I also know people who don't express preferences directly when they think those preferences will harm me. We can call this empathy or we can call it fear, but what it comes down to is that it's irrational: the end result is that they don't get what they want from the relationships in their life, and that comes out in negative behaviors.
This isn't a moral judgment of these people, it's just not something I want to deal with: I'll try to help these people work through their social anxiety, but if that doesn't work, that's going to limit how close we can be, because I can't trust them to be honest with me.
It's not kindness/empathy to coddle these people, either: that's just enabling them in a behavior that is going to limit them in many aspects of their life.
It has to do with the health of the relationship, whether people can really be connected with each other. A good chunk of drama that happens among people happen unnecessarily, often because they don't feel they can be honest with each other. They cannot be who they really feel.
Are there times people going to have white lies? Yes. Or how about withohlding information out of concern for them? Sure.
Figuring out whether you want to go the bar is one thing. It's when these things really matter, where people are not aligned in what they want out of the relationship that trying to keep things from each other makes things fall apart quickly.
Even simple things like, a friend who keeps asking you to go hangout with him, would borrow money from you and never return it. You feel used. But you also feel you cannot say anything for whatever reason. How can you tell this person, this behavior is not OK while keeping him as a friend? (Do you even want him to remain a friend?)
A married couple with kids. One of them is offered a promotion, but it requires moving overseas. It is a big opportunity, potentially career-defining. The other partner would have to leave a job and it would be highly disruptive to the kids, and does not want to move. Do you think putting this into a communication escrow app will help with talking this out? I don't think so.
Labeling things like "ignorance" and "poor social skills" as "disparaging" isn't particularly useful. When I say someone is ignorant or has poor social skills, that's not a statement that they're a bad person, it's an identification of a problem they have (which is correctable).
> I don't consider this category of dishonesty to be one that a person necessarily needs to correct
It sounds like this may be the core of our disagreement.
I won't say that a person "needs" to correct it--instead I would say that the person, and my friendship with that person, will be significantly limited by not correcting this problem.
I'm not suggesting it's something they need to correct. The problem tends to solve itself through selection. Flaky people hang out with other flaky people. Dishonest people have dishonest friends. Mercenary and opportunistic people have friends who are likewise.
Why bother with these elaborate rationalizations to justify dishonesty?
I disagree that avoiding the trade-off makes things better off.
But at least you've made your views known and so have I.
This is one of the exact things addressed in Crucial Conversations:
(1) The authors recognize that a lot of people feel this way. That they are either brutally honest or they don't talk about it.
(2) That people often feels this way because they don't know how to talk about difficult things. It does not have to be this way.
The authors lay out the steps for being able to communicate difficult conversations with anyone. Is it still going to be unpleasant? Yes. But it does not involve an either-or choice of being "brutally honest" and being "empathetic".
These are especially important in conversations these authors call "crucial conversations": important conversations that people have a lot of stake in its outcome, when opinions differ, and emotions run high. These are literally the underpinning of every relationship I know, be them romantic partnerships, to relationship with friends, with bosses, with people who work for you.
The key thing to getting out of that seeming either-or trap, is to understand that you can talk to anyone about anything if they trust you. They trust you because you sincerely want something that includes them. That you are not out to get them or trap them into things. That perhaps, you both want the same things though you might not see it. That you both are sharing in some shared meaning together.
It is a very practical book. It lays things out in ways that are catchy and easy to remember.
It's the book I gave to a friend of mine for a wedding present after I have been married for three years, something I wished I had known about when I got married.
Lets say you have plans with someone. But then, you decide fundamentally: if the other person would still like to do this, I am happy to. But if not, I'd prefer not to. This is the game theoretic situation this app attempts to solve.
Now lets figure out a way to solve this problem through direct communication. The problem with trying to do so, is often when someone expresses a change to preferences, if you assume that person is empathetic, they will likely be diluting the degree to their change insofar as that change could negatively affect the recipient of the news. Why?
It's because there's a catch-22 in this situation between empathy and honesty. Empathy dictates we try to maximize utility between the parties. When expressing this new preference, if one is empathetic, one expresses it in a way to try to maximize the likelihood that the other party interprets it in a way they can still act selfishly to the maximally acceptable degree. However, the recipient of the information, if empathetic, can anticipate this, and hence may interpret the person's statement as pre-diluted, so in order to maximize utility from their perspective (out of empathy) they in turn may yield due to the imperfect information and assume the preference expressed is stronger than implied by the statement directly. In other words, if I hear this from someone, I put even odds that the person is being completely honest (out of valuing honesty), or, that they actually would really want to skip this plan if it would not cause me emotional pain, and have chosen to continue to express it in a way that leaves the option open (out of valuing empathy.) I know people who would do one or the other, and I don't consider either approach a sign of a moral failure.
In reality, both sides of the communication wrangle with the conflict between empathy + utility maximization in framing their expression, and honesty, which (despite its virtue) runs the risk of being misinterpreted given the other party may assume it is being diluted to maximize utility out of their empathy. Diluting the statement or being direct about it are both rational, depending on how important maximizing utility is due to empathy vs expressing honest preferences.
This app neatly solves this problem. It's not about reducing social awkwardness, it's about preventing the need for mutually-empathetic individuals to have to make trade-offs between the competing desires for objective communication (out of the value of honesty) and trying to maximize utility (out of the value of empathy and selflessness.) If one could be certain another party is being honest, this kind of technique would not be necessary, but since dishonesty in this situation falls out of empathy, its potentially virtuous and comes down to a preference of one's values in how to deal with the situation.