A world without deception is better than a world with deception

Right, here goes nothing.I would also like to notify my opponent, the audience, and the judges that I shall almost certainly have to forfeit Round 2, since I have recently been notified that Lily’s War shall be running June 7-13, and my family may go. I apologize for this. At the very least, this gives my opponent the conduct point if I am forced to forfeit a round. However, at the discretion of the judges it may end up with the full forfeit of the debate; while in my own defense I would point out that the rules do not specifically specify that forfeit of a single round is forfeit of the debate, it is up to the judges and the moderator to decide. Regardless of the decision, I will post in every round I can.A Note Upon the Subject of Utilitarianism OR No, I Have Not Become a DeontologistUtilitarianism is, among other things, known for promoting acts that are themselves unethical to prevent things that are even more unethical from happening: For instance, the utilitarian answer to the trolley problem is to push the person into the path of the trolley. I do hold true a form of act-preference utilitarianism where the consequences of our actions are expressed as probabilities. Nevertheless, advocating for a world without deception is not against my ethical system. To show why, I’ll have to show what a world without deception would look like.FraudA world without deception would, obviously, have no fraud, but this extends to more than just a Ponzi scheme. When I discuss fraud in this debate, I mean the practice of misleading, either by omission, carefully constructed claims, or outright lies.Deceptive advertising would, of course, cease. The famous example of bottled water, where the water is bottled at municipal water plants despite having names evocative of glaciers and mountains, would not longer apply, which would likely save a lot of plastic bottles, which take up space in landfills, are discarded and become litter, or take energy to recycle. Corporate greenwashing would no longer exist, and companies wouldn’t be able to pass themselves off as ecological friendly when they were not. Moreover, if the default assumption was that companies were ecologically responsible, they would have to explicitly say that they were not, or they would be misleading people.These things aren’t exactly lies, but they are examples of deception. And countering such misinformation has proved to be difficult for environmentalists—as an example, I give “clean coal,” which is really not all that clean; to offset the cost and energy requirements of technologies that lower emissions more coal must be mined, often by mountaintop removal. This is not clean[1]. If my opponent takes issue with this example, I can provide others.CrimeThe default assumption in a civilized society is that someone is not a criminal. When a criminal takes part in public life, and appears to be a typical citizen, they are misleading others. Therefore, in a world without deception, criminals would not be able to continue to commit crimes after their first crime, since continuing to act as if they were normal citizens would mislead others into the assumption that they were not criminals. Furthermore, they would have to confess or otherwise make it obvious who was responsible for their crime, since covering up their involvement, even by the lack of making it obvious, would be an effort to mislead people into thinking they had not done it.The ramifications are this are enormous. While an individual killer may not be severely affected, organized crime would vanish. They would have to confess the moment they committed a crime in the first place. Being placed in prison would obviously hinder their ability to have successful operations, as well as having to perform everything out in the open.One of the more important areas where lying and deception is justified is where it is a way to prevent a crime or help solve one. By eliminating repeat criminals (or severely limiting them, at any rate, since they would immediately be put on trial and imprisoned or otherwise dealt with) and eliminating the need for investigations, crime rates are slashed, and valuable time, effort, manpower, and lives are saved.CorruptionCorruption is greatly aided by deception—even in the event of total ignorance being unachievable, plausible deniability still helps. Even if we take a more narrow definition of deception, simply asking a politician or public figure if they had committed a given act of corruption—or, indeed, any corruption at all—would force them either to refuse to answer or to admit their guilt; if we work with a more expansive definition of deception, which is to hide and conceal matters from others knowledge, they must admit.1. http://www.scientificamerican.com...