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.
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Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Icard, B., Bourgne, G., Bonnaventure, J., & Ganascia, J. G. (2026). Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/formalizing-the-moral-evaluation-of-speech-acts-truthfulness-lies-and-ethical-dilemmas
MLA 9
Icard, Benjamin, et al. "Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/formalizing-the-moral-evaluation-of-speech-acts-truthfulness-lies-and-ethical-dilemmas.
Chicago (author–date)
Icard, Benjamin, Gauvain Bourgne, Jeanne Bonnaventure, and Jean-Gabriel Ganascia. 2026. "Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/formalizing-the-moral-evaluation-of-speech-acts-truthfulness-lies-and-ethical-dilemmas.
Harvard
Icard, B., Bourgne, G., Bonnaventure, J. and Ganascia, J. G. (2026) 'Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/formalizing-the-moral-evaluation-of-speech-acts-truthfulness-lies-and-ethical-dilemmas.
Vancouver
Icard B, Bourgne G, Bonnaventure J, Ganascia JG. Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/formalizing-the-moral-evaluation-of-speech-acts-truthfulness-lies-and-ethical-dilemmas
IEEE
B. Icard, G. Bourgne, J. Bonnaventure, and J. G. Ganascia, "Formalizing the Moral Evaluation of Speech Acts: Truthfulness, Lies and Ethical Dilemmas," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/formalizing-the-moral-evaluation-of-speech-acts-truthfulness-lies-and-ethical-dilemmas.