Defining deceit

A plausible definition of deceit is an action aiming to get someone to believe something one takes to be false.

But I wonder if that’s right. Here are two possible counterexamples.

1. Socratic conversation: One of my students believes some proposition p that I take to be false. Through Socratic questioning, I attempt to get the student to draw the natural conclusion q from p. Even if I take q to be false, it doesn’t seem I am deceiving my student.

2. Mitigation of error: Suppose that Alice believes Bob to be culpable for some enormity. You know that Bob never committed the enormity, but you also know it’s hopeless to try to convince Alice of this. But you think you have some hope showing Alice that instead of her evidence supporting the claim that Bob is culpable for the enormity, it only supports the claim that Bob has inculpably committed enormity. You show this to Alice, in the hope that she will come to believe Bob to have innocently committed the enormity, even though that is also false.

In both cases, one is working along with the evidence available to one’s interlocutor. It seems that deception requires one to get someone to believe something true by means of hiding or masking the truth. And here there is no such thing going on. There is nothing underhanded. In both cases, for instance, it would be quite possible for the other party to know what one is really thinking about the case. I need not hide from the student that I disagree with q and you need not hide from Alice that you don’t think Bob committed the enormity at all.

We can add an underhandedness condition to the account of deceit, but I don’t exactly know what underhandedness is.

It is well-known that defining lying is tricky. It looks like defining deceit is also tricky.

Deceit and Double Effect

Suppose you inform me of something true, p, and as a result I come to believe it. Then very likely you’ve deceived me about something!

For there is surely some falsehood q that I believed previously with a high confidence. But presumably I did not believe the conjunction p&q before I got your information, since I didn’t believe p. But now that you’ve informed me of p, I am likely to believe p&q, and yet that is a falsehood.

Sometimes this argument doesn’t work (maybe sometimes I believed p&q when I didn’t believe q, and maybe sometimes my belief in p is sufficiently marginal that I still don’t believe p&q), but most of the time it does.

This means that we are typically deceiving people all the time in conversation! This sounds bad, unless we make a distinction between foreseeing and intending. You can foresee (now that you saw the above argument) that whenever you inform me of something this is likely to deceive me about something else. But merely foreseen deceit counts for very little morally as long as you don’t intend the deceit.

Fake assertions

Suppose Bob faked a letter of recommendation from his dissertation director Alice, in which letter lots of stuff was said which Bob knew to be false, and then posted the letter to Carl.

Bob clearly deceived Carl, or tried to. But did he lie to Carl? Let’s consider three representative example sentences from the letter:

1. I am Bob’s dissertation director.

2. I think the world of Bob.

3. Bob is impeccably honest.

I will also take that Bob knows that Alice is his dissertation director, that Alice thinks poorly of him (which is why he faked the letter) and that he’s dishonest, and I will also assume that Bob thinks the world of himself.

If Bob lied, which of these sentences did he lie in?

One important question is who “I” refers to in the letter. If it refers to Bob, then (1) and (3) are false and (2) is true. If it refers to Alice, then (2) and (3) are false and (1) is true. Basically, we need to decide which of (1) and (2) is true.

It seems clear that by (2), Bob intended to communicate that Alice thinks the world of him, and he had no intention at all to communicate that Bob thinks the world of himself (indeed, perhaps another sentence in the letter is “I have never met a humbler person”). So it seems that “I” refers to Alice, and hence (2) and (3) are false, but (1) is true.

On this reading, Bob has knowingly written two false things: (2) and (3), and one truth: (1). Has Bob lied in the false things he wrote? I have some doubts. The reason is this. What makes lying be lying is that one is betraying a trust that one has solicited in speaking. But Bob has not solicited Carl’s trust in Bob: rather, he is relying on Carl’s trust in Alice. But one can only betray trust in oneself. So Bob cannot betray Carl’s trust in Alice, and hence Bob is not lying when Alice is the object of Carl’s trust. Here’s another way to think about this: To lie is to stand behind a falsehood. But Bob isn’t standing behind the falsehood—he is, instead, putting Alice in front of it, as is clear from the fact that “I” refers to Alice.

In asserting something one implicates that one believes it. But Bob isn’t implicating that he believes it, only that Alice does. And it’s not, it seems, that Bob has canceled the implicature of belief (as one sometimes can, pace Moore). I think Bob not only isn’t lying, but he isn’t asserting anything.

This seems paradoxical. But consider this. Suppose Drew, who is dishonest but not a racist, fakes an open letter from Adolf Hitler, hoping to sell it off to the Holocaust Museum.. The letter contains all sorts of false statements, such as that various minority groups are subhuman. Drew is clearly committing fraud. But is he making racist statements? I don’t think so. Rather, he is faking racist statements by Hitler. Similarly, the falsehoods in the letter are not lies by Drew, for if Drew were lying in the letter, he would be making racist statements. But he is faking, not making, racist statements.

I think the same may be true of Bob: he is faking, not making, various assertions in the letter. There is a difference between Bob and Drew, of course. Drew is not trying to get the audience to believe the fake assertions, but only to believe that they were made. Bob is trying to get the audience to believe the fake assertions. But this difference aside, I still suspect that Bob is deceiving, not lying.

Of course, this difference doesn’t let Bob or Drew off the hook. They have engaged in a massive failure of integrity, indeed in fraud.

But the difference between deceiving and lying could still be relevant. I think a challenge for those of us who think lying is always wrong is to articulate some sort of a theory of clandestine military and police operations that allows for non-lying deceit. If lies require that the liar be taken to be the author, then this opens up the way for various things like Operation Mincemeat being deceit but not lies.

I fear, however, that at this point I am engaging in the kind of casuistry that gives casuistry a bad name. Here is one way of highlighting this. Surely one can’t just write a letter with falsehoods putatively from oneself and claim that one faked one’s own letter, and hence one didn’t lie in it. But now imagine that Alice and Bob conspire to each write a fake letter purporting to be from the other. Surely that shouldn’t escape the moral prohibitions against lying. Maybe, though, it depends on the details of the conspiracy. If Bob is just writing in the letter putatively from Alice things that Alice asked him to write, then the letter is no fake, and Bob is just Alice’s secretary.

Threats

Here is something I've sometimes wondered about. If I have a gun, and someone is attempting to steal something (either belonging to me or another), am I permitted to point the gun at her and command her, at gunpoint, to refrain from stealing. To fill out this case, suppose that I know the thief is not a physical danger to any person: I know the thief is unarmed and gentle. I am not interested in the legal question—that differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and depends on what official role one plays. But can I morally use a threat of lethal force to prevent theft, assuming the law permits me to?

I assume that generally it is wrong to use lethal force to prevent mere theft (there are exceptions, such as cases where what is being stolen is something necessary to someone's survival). Now, pulling out the gun is offering a threat of force. Is it permissible to offer a threat that it would be immoral to carry out?

If one thinks deception is always wrong, the threatener is in the wrong. If she intends to carry out the threat, she is in the wrong since it is a threat that it is wrong to carry out. If she does not intend to carry out the threat, the threat is deceitful. However, while lying is always wrong, deceit is not. (There is nothing wrong with hanging a hat on a stick behind a bush to draw enemy fire.)

If deception is not always wrong, then one might think that with good reason it is permissible to make the threat. However, there is another consideration. It is wrong to blacken a person's reputation. But by making a threat it would be immoral to carry out, one is blackening a person's reputation—one is blackening one's own reputation, by making the other person think that one is the kind of immoral person that would use lethal force to protect property.

Still, the blackening of reputation is, perhaps, not intentional. (One may not be intending that the other person believe that one would carry out the threat, but only that the other person take herself to have reason to believe it.) So by Double Effect, the threat could, perhaps, be permitted in some cases.

If so, then it could in principle be permissible for a country to point nuclear weapons at enemy civilian centers as a deterrent, as long as the country could be sure that those weapons would not in fact be used against civilians. On the other hand, how could one be sure of that? Actually, even in the theft case, a similar danger exists: by making the threat, one creates a temptation in oneself to carry it out, and one should avoid temptation to do something immoral.