I thought I posted this argument, but can’t find it, so I’m writing it up again.
If honesty is a virtue, dishonesty is a vice.
If dishonesty is a vice, then acting dishonestly is always vicious.
Acting viciously is always wrong.
Lying is always acting dishonestly.
So, lying is always acting viciously. (1, 2, 4)
So, lying is always wrong. (3, 5)
It is widely accepted that you cannot force someone to make a valid promise. If a robber after finding that I have no valuables with me puts a gun to my head and says: “I will shoot you unless you promise to go home and bring me all of the jewelry there”, and I say “I promise”, my promise seems to be null and void.
But suppose I am a cavalry officer captured by an enemy officer. The enemy officer is in a hurry to complete a mission, and it is crucial to his military ends that I not ride straight back to my headquarters and report what I saw him doing. He does not, however, have the time to tie me up, and hence he prepares to kill me. I yell: “I give you my word of honor as an officer that I will stay in this location for 24 hours.” He trusts me and rides on his way. (The setting for this is more than a hundred years ago.)
However, if promises made under duress are invalid, then the enemy officer should not trust me. One can only trust someone to do something when in some way a good feature of the person impels them to do that thing. (I can predict that a thief will steal my money if I leave it unprotected, but I don’t trust the thief to do that.) But there is no virtue in keeping void promises, since such promises do not generate moral reasons. In fact, if the promise is void, then I might even have a moral duty to ride back and report what I have seen. One shouldn’t trust someone to do something contrary to moral duty.
Perhaps, though, there is a relevant difference between the case of an officer giving parole to another, and the case of the robber. The enemy officer is not compelling me to make the promise. It’s my own idea to make the promise. Of course, if I don’t make the promise, I will die. But that fact doesn’t make for promise-canceling duress. Say, I am dying of thirst, and the only drink available is the diet gingerale that a greedy merchant is selling and which she would never give away for free. So I say: “I promise to pay you back tomorrow as I don’t have any cash with me.” I have made the promise in order to save my life. If the merchant gives me the gingerale, the promise is surely valid, and I must pay the merchant back tomorrow.
Is the relevant difference, perhaps, that I originate the idea of the promise in the officer case, but not in the robber case? But in the merchant case, I would be no less obligated to pay the merchant back if we had a little dialogue: “Could you give me a drink, as I’m dying of thirst and I don’t have any cash?” – “Only if you promise to pay me back tomorrow.”
Likewise, in the officer case, it really shouldn’t matter who originates the idea. Imagine that it never occurred to me to make the promise, but a bystander suggests it. Surely that doesn’t affect the binding force of the promise. But suppose that the bystander makes the suggestion in a language I don’t understand, and I ask the enemy officer what the bystander says, and he says: “The bystander suggests you give your word of honor as an officer to stay put for 24 hours.” Surely it also makes no moral difference that the enemy officer acts as an interpreter, and hence is the proximate origin of the idea. Would it make a difference if there were no helpful bystander and the enemy officer said of his own accord: “In these circumstances, officers often make promises on their honor to stay put”? I don’t think so.
I think that there is still a difference between the robber case and that of the enemy officer who helpfully suggests that one make the promise. But I have a really hard time pinning down the difference. Note that the enemy officer might be engaged in an unjust war, much as the robber is engaged in unjust robbery. So neither has a moral right to demand things of me.
There is a subtle difference between the robber and officer cases. The robber is threatening your life in order to get you to make the promise. The promise is something that the robber is pursuing as the means to her end, namely the obtaining of jewelry. My being killed will not achieve the robber’s purpose at all. If the robber knew that I wouldn’t make the promise, she wouldn’t kill me, at least as far as the ends involved in the promise (namely, the obtaining of my valuables) go. But the enemy officer’s end, namely the safety of his mission, would be even more effectively achieved by killing me. The enemy officer’s suggestion that I make my promise is a mercy. The robber’s suggestion that I make my promise isn’t a mercy.
Does this matter? Maybe it does, and for at least two reasons. First, the robber is threatening my life primarily in order to force a promise. The enemy officer isn’t threatening my life primarily in order to force a promise: the threat would be there even if I were unable to make promises (or were untrustworthy, etc.). So there is a sense in which the robber is more fully forcing a promise out of me.
Second, it is good for human beings to have a practice of giving and keeping promises in the officer types of circumstances, since such a practice saves lives. But a practice of giving and keeping promises in the robber types of circumstances, since such a practice only encourages robbers to force promises out of people. Perhaps the fact that one kind of practice is beneficial and the other is harmful is evidence that the one kind of practice is normative to human beings and the other is not. (This will likely be the case given natural law, divine command, rule-utilitarianism, and maybe some other moral theories.)
Third, the case of the officer is much more like the case of the merchant. There is a circumstance in both cases that threaten my life independently of any considerations of promises—dehydration and an enemy officer whom I’ve seen on his secret mission. In both cases, it turns out that the making of a promise can get me out of these circumstances, but the circumstances weren’t engineered in order to get me to make the promise. But the case of the robber is very different from that of the merchant. (Interesting test case: the merchant drained the oases in the desert so as to sell drinks to dehydrated travelers. This seems to me to be rather closer to the robber case, but I am not completely sure.)
Maybe, though, I’m wrong about the robber case. I have to say that I am uncomfortable with voidly promising the robber that I will get the valuables when I don’t expect to do so—there seems to be a lie involved, and lying is wrong even to save one’s life. Or at least a kind of dishonesty. But this suggests that if I were planning on bringing the valuables, I would be acting more honestly in saying it. And that makes the situation resemble a valid promise. Maybe not, though. Maybe it’s wrong to say “I will bring the valuables” when one isn’t planning on doing so, but once one says it, one has no obligation to bring them. I don’t know. (This is related to this sort of a case. Suppose I don’t expect that there will be any yellow car parked on your street tonight, but I assert dishonestly in the morning that there will be a yellow car parked on your street in the evening. In the early afternoon, I am filled with contrition for my dishonesty to you. Normally, I should try to undo the effect of dishonesty by coming clean to the person I was dishonest to. But suppose I cannot get in touch with you. However, what I can do is go to the car rental place, rent a yellow car and park it on your street. Do I have any moral reason to do so? I don’t know. Not in general, I think. But if you were depending on the presence of the yellow car—maybe you made a large bet about it wit a neighbor—then maybe I should do it.)
Magda is a spy. Her handler gives her a spiel consisting of ten statements that she is to make to her enemy contact. Magda has no personal knowledge of whether the statements are true or false, and with a smile asks her handler: "I take it these are mostly false, but there is probably a truth or two tucked in just to mislead them even more?" Her very reliable and honest (she lets Magda do all the lying) handler responds: "Actually, this time it's the other way around. Eight of these statements are true, and two are false."
When Magda tells the spiel to her enemy contact, each of the ten assertions that she makes is an assertion that she thinks is likely, indeed 80% likely, to be true.
Does Magda lie to her enemy contact?
No one of the ten statements on its own seems to be a lie. When I think something is 80% likely to be true and I assert it, I may not be entirely sincere, but surely I am not lying.
Are the ten statements put together, into a spiel, a lie? After all, Magda knows that the conjunction of the ten propositions is false. But a series of statements does not become a lie just because one knows that one of them is false. Just about any non-fiction author of a decent level of humility knows that at least one of the statements in her book is false. So one doesn't utter a lie just because one utters a series of statements at least one of which one knows to be false. For exactly the same reason, the fact that the ten statements make up a single literary unit, a spiel, does not make them a lie, since typical books make a single literary unit and yet are not lies.
At this point, one might react as follows: Who cares whether Magda is lying? Whether she is lying or not, she is clearly dishonest, and her dishonesty is of the same sort as lying.
Here's another case. Magda is one of ten spies, each of whom is given a statement to convey to the enemy. They all know exactly two of the ten statements is false. Is Magda lying? I feel that she's not. She's simply saying something that she thinks is 80% likely to be true, in support of a deceptive plan by her organization.
If Magda isn't lying in the case where the statements are spread out between the spies, I think she isn't lying in the case where she makes all the statements. I do feel that in the case where the statements are spread out, Magda's dishonesty is less. But she is, nonetheless, being dishonest by supporting a deceptive communicative plan.
And maybe that is all we can say about the original case. Magda isn't lying. She is engaging in a dishonest communicative plan that is roughly morally on par with lying. Surely it makes little moral difference that unlike the ordinary liar, Magda doesn't know which of her statements is false. After all, ceteris paribus, there is little moral difference between the person who sets up a trap to kill one particular person and the person who sets up a trap to kill a random person.
But what makes her communicative plan be morally on par with lying? What moral norm applies equally to Magda's activity in the original case and to a variant where she knows which two of the ten statements are false?
I am inclined to think that the basic rough-and-ready moral rule behind the prohibition of lying is something like:
Not every violation of the rule to strive to assert only truths has the same moral weight. Lying is, perhaps, morally graver than BS—speaking with no regard for truth or falsity. And both of them are definitely morally graver than putting some effort into asserting only truths but not enough, say because one isn't being sufficiently careful to follow the evidence.
My intuition that lying is significantly different from some other forms of deception is driven by an intuition I have about speech being special vis-à-vis the virtue of honesty.
Consider: "She told us she is going to go to Cracow, and she is an utterly honest person, so even though we are her enemies, we can rely on her going to some city named Cracow at least at some point in the future." This seems a reasonable thing to say.
But consider: "Her footprints at this intersection lead to Cracow. She is an utterly honest person, so she must be going to Cracow." That is surely mistaken reasoning. It is not a sign of dishonesty that one lays a false trail, unless one has promised (implicitly or explicitly) not to do so.
The tie with promises seems significant to me. An honest person only makes promises that she intends to keep.
Now, let us suppose that George prefaces every assertion with: "I promise that I will now only say something sincere." That would be dreadfully annoying (there are characters in fiction who do this kind of thing). Part of the reason for the annoyance is that it is quite unnecessary. The commitment to speak only sincerely is already there in the assertion that follows the preface.
As our Savior told us, our yeas should be yeas, and our nays, nays. Nothing more is needed, because our yeas and nays already include a commitment to speak sincerely. This commitment is part and parcel of making an assertion rather than musing out-loud, asking a question, making a promise, quoting a line of poetry, etc. Indeed, much or even all of what distinguishes an assertion from other speech acts is precisely this commitment to speak only the truth. (Actors on stage do not make assertions or promises.)
Granted, sometimes we emphatically do promise to speak the truth in some matter. I think that is not a sign that we ordinarily have no such commitment. Rather, the promise is a moral-gravity booster, in the way in which making an oath is a legal-gravity booster (if one speaks falsely under oath, one commits perjury, instead of merely hampering an investigation, etc.) One could similarly boost the moral gravity of ordinary promises by promising to keep the promise. To boost the moral gravity of an obligation is simply to bring it about that it would be a greater offense to go against the obligation.
If I am right that asserting p is normatively equivalent to promising to say only the truth or maybe to say only something one believes and then saying a sentence that expresses p, and if I am right that an honest person does not make promises she does not intend to keep, then an honest person does not lie. But various non-linguistic kinds of deceit involve no commitment, explicit or implicit, for the deceiver to be breaking, and hence under some circumstances will be compatible with honesty.
