A lie needs to be intentional. If they meant to fulfill the promise, it wasn’t a lie.
Lies don’t need to be intentional. You may not have been lying in the moment, but (especially if it’s by your own actions) you have made yourself a liar after the fact if you don’t keep to your promise. Your logic sounds like a narcissist’s rhetoric. Your intent in the moment is worthless without follow through and does not relieve you of responsibility.
Calling me a narcissist for having a different definition of a lie than you is… interesting. I never said it would relieve them of responsibility. You are still responsible for your mistakes and need to stand up for them. But that wasn’t the question. Most definitions of “lie” I can find, such as Merriam Webster’s do explicitly include intent to deceive.
I didn’t call you anything, but it is interesting that you lept to that conclusion. Dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive, so not sure how that’s relevant in this discussion.
What if they intended to fulfill the promise but never actually did? Does that not make it a lie all the same?
Am I lying if I try to answer a question to the best of my knowledge and end up being wrong?
I don’t think you can make something a lie retroactively if it was supposed to be true at the time.
There is still a bit of a gray area there, though, which is that if you know you are not a subject matter expert, you should try to disclose that.
Hence why “IANAL” is so recurring on any online discussion about legal advice, because you want to offer what insight you can but you definitely don’t want to mislead anyone into believing your potentially dangerous legal advice is authoritative.
If I promise to drive you to the airport but moments before I’m to pick you up my mom has a stroke and winds up in the emergency room, and I call you and tell you get a cab my mom just had a stroke. Did I lie? Answer : no I didn’t.
It’s only a lie if I had no intention of picking you up to begin with.
It’s not a lie the first time. But if you promise to do the dishes and then go to bed without doing them several times, the next time you promise it, it’s a lie.
Still not a lie if you intended to do them. It turns out to be misleading, false and a failure but thats not lying.
No, its only a lie if they say they were going to do it without ever intending to do so. If they intended to do it and something happened that prevented them from doing it, it wasn’t a lie. If you’re looking for a reason to be pissed at someone for not fulfilling a promise you still can be justified depending on the rest of the context.
