Lying and epistemic utility

Epistemic utility is the value of one’s beliefs or credences matching the truth.

Suppose your and my credences differ. Then I am going to think that my credences better match the truth. This is automatic if I am measuring epistemic utilities using a proper scoring rule. But that means that benevolence with respect to epistemic utilities gives me a reason to shift your credences to be closer to mine.

At this point, there are honest and dishonest ways to proceed. The honest way is to share all my relevant evidence with you. Suppose I have done that. And you’ve reciprocated. And we still differ in credences. If we’re rational Bayesian agents, that’s presumably due to a difference in prior probabilities. What can I do, then, if the honest ways are exhausted?

I can lie! Suppose your credence that there was once life on Mars is 0.4 and mine is 0.5. So I tell you that I read that a recent experiment provided a little bit of evidence in favor of there once having been life on Mars, even though I read no such thing. That boosts your credence that there was once life on Mars. (Granted, it also boosts your credence in the falsehood that there was such a recent experiment. But, plausibly, getting right whether there was once life on Mars gets much more weight in a reasonable person’s epistemic utilities than getting right what recent experiments have found.)

We often think of lying as an offense against truth. But in these kinds of cases, the lies are aimed precisely at moving the other towards truth. And they’re still wrong.

Thus, it seems that striving to maximize others’ epistemic utility is the wrong way to think of our shared epistemic life.

Maximizing others’ epistemic utility seems to lead to a really bad picture of our shared epistemic life. Should we, then, think of striving to maximize our own epistemic utility as the right approach to one’s individual epistemic life? Perhaps. For maybe what is apt to go wrong in maximizing others’ epistemic utility is paternalism, and paternalism is rarely a problem in one’s own case.

A curious poker variant

In some games like Mafia, uttering falsehoods is a part of the game mechanic. These falsehoods are no more lies than falsehoods uttered by an actor in a performance are lies.

Now consider a variant of poker where a player is permitted to utter falsehoods when and only when they have a Joker in hand. In this case when the player utters a falsehood with Joker in hand, there is no lie. The basic communicative effect of uttering s is equivalent to asserting “s or I have a Joker in hand (or both)”, though there may be additional information conveyed by bodily expression, tone of voice, or context.

If this analysis of poker variant is correct, then the following seems to follow by analogy. Suppose, as many people think, that it is morally permissible to utter falsehoods in “assertoric contexts” to save innocent lives. (An assertoric context is roughly one where the speaker is appropriately taken to be asserting.) Given that we are always playing the “morality game”, by analogy this would mean that in paradigm instances when we utter a declarative sentence s, we are actually communicating something like “s or I am speaking to save innocent lives.” If this is right, then it is impossible to lie to save innocent lives, just as in my poker variant it is impossible to lie when one knows one has the Joker in hand (unless maybe one is really bad at logic).

The above argument supports this premise:

1. If it is morally permissible to utter falsehoods in assertoric contexts to save innocent lives, it is not possible to lie to save innocent lives.

But:

2. It is possible to lie to save innocent lives.

I conclude:

3. It is not morally permissible to utter falsehoods in assertoric contexts to save innocent lives.

In short: lying is wrong, even to save innocent lives.

Epistemically paternalistic lies

Suppose Alice and Bob are students and co-religionists. Alice is struggling with a subject and asks Bob to pray that she might do fine on the exam. She gets 91%. Alice also knows that Bob’s credence in their religion is a bit lower than her own. When Bob asks her how she did, she lies that she got 94%, in order to boost Bob’s credence in their religion a bit more.

Whether a religion is correct is very epistemically important to Bob. But whether Alice got 91% or 94% is not at all epistemically important to Bob except as evidence for whether the religion is correct. The case can be so set up that by Alice’s lights—remember, she is more confident that the religion is correct than Bob is—Bob can be expected to be better off epistemically for boosting his credence in the religion. Moreover, we can suppose that there is no plausible way for Bob to find out that Alice lied. Thus, this is an epistemically paternalistic lie expected to make Bob be better off epistemically.

And this lie is clearly morally wrong. Thus, our communicative behavior is not merely governed by maximization of epistemic utility.

Two more counterexamples to utilitarianism

It’s an innocent and pleasant pastime to multiply counterexamples to utilitarianism even if they don’t add much to what others have said. Thus, if utilitarianism is true, I have to do so. :-)

Suppose you capture Hitler. Torturing him to death would appal many but, given fallen human nature, likely significantly please hundreds of millions more. This pleasure to hundreds of millions could far outweigh the pain to one. Moreover, even of those appalled by the torture, primarily only Nazis and a handful of moral saints would actually feel significant displeasure at the torture. For being appalled by an immoral action is not always unpleasant except to someone with saintly compassion—indeed there is a kind of pleasure one takes in being appalled. Normally in the case of counterexamples to utilitarianism one worries about making people more callous, the breakdown of law and order, giving a bad example to others, and so on. But the case of Hitler is so exceptional that likely the negative effects from a utilitarian point of view would be minimal if any.

One might think that an even better thing to do from the utilitarian point of view would be to kill Hitler painlessly, and then mark up his body so it looks like he was tortured to death, and publically lie about it.

Yet it is wrong to torture even Hitler, and it is wrong to lie that one has done so (especially if only for public pleasure).

Assertion, lying, promises and social contract

Suppose you have inherited a heavily-automated house with a DIY voice control system made by an eccentric relative who programmed various functions to be commanded by a variety of political statements, all of which you disagree with.

Thus, to open a living room window you need to say: “A donkey would make a better president than X”, where X is someone who you know would be significantly better at the job than any donkey.

You have a guest at home, and the air is getting very stuffy, and you feel a little nauseous. You utter “A donkey would make a better president than X” just to open a window. Did you lie to your guest? You knowingly said something that you knew would be taken as an assertion by any reasonable person. But, let us suppose, you intended your words solely as
a command to the house.

Normally, you’d clarify to your guest, ideally before issuing the voice command, that you’re not making an assertion. And if you failed to clarify, we would likely say that you lied. So simply intending the words to be a command to the house rather than an assertion to the guest may not be enough to make them be that.

Maybe we should say this:

1. You assert to Y providing (a) you utter words that you know would be taken to be an assertion to Y by a reasonable person and by Y, (b) you intend to utter these words, and (c) you failed to put reasonable effort into finding a way to clarify that you are not asserting to Y.

The conjunctive condition in (a) is a bit surprising, but i think both conjuncts need to be there. Suppose that your guest has the unreasonable belief that people typically program their home automation systems to run on political statements and rarely make political statements except to operate such systems, and hence would not take your words as an assertion. Then you don’t need to issue a clarification, even though you would be deceiving a reasonable person. Similarly, you’re not lying if you tell your home automation system “Please open the window” and your paranoid guest has the unreasonable belief that this is code for some political statement that you know to be false.

One might initially think that (c) should say that you actually failed to issue the clarification. But I think that’s not quite right. Perhaps you are feeling faint and only have strength for one sentence. You tell the home automation system to open the window, and you just don’t have the strength to to clarify to your guest that you’re not making a political statement. Then I think you haven’t lied or asserted—you made a reasonable effort by thinking about how you might clarify things, and finding no solution.

It’s interesting that condition (c) is rather morally loaded: it makes reference to reasonable effort.

Here is an interesting consequence of this loading. Similar things have to be said about promising as about asserting.

2. You promise to Y providing (a) you utter words that you know would be taken to be a promise to Y by a reasonable person and by Y, (b) you intend to utter these words, and (c) you failed to put reasonable effort into finding a way to clarify that you are not promising to Y.

If this is right, then the practice of promising might be dependent on prior moral concepts, namely the concept of reasonable effort. And if that’s right, then contract-based theories of morality are viciously circular: we cannot explain what promises are without making reference to moral concepts.

Blurting

It is commonly thought that to engage in a speech of a particular sort—assertion, request, etc.—one needs to intend to do so.

But suppose you ask me a question, and I unintentionally blurt out an answer, even though the matter is confidential. Can you correctly tell people that I answered your question, that I asserted whatever it was that I blurted out?

If yes, then one does not need to intend to engage in a speech act of a particular sort in order for that speech act to occur.

But I suspect the that in unintentionally blurting one does not answer or assert. One reason is that if one was answering or asserting, then it seems that one could also unintentionally blurt out a lie. (Imagine that you have a habit of answering a certain question with a falsehood, and you blurt out a falsehood purely out of habit.) But I don’t think a lie can be unintentional.

Moreover, if someone asserts, then what they say is presented for trust. But what is said unintentionally is not presented for trust.

I am not very confident of the above.

Lying in politics

Consider this reductio ad absurdum argument:

1. It is permissible to lie to achieve what one reasonably thinks to be practically necessary to save multiple innocent lives. (Assumption for reductio)

2. In typical elections to the highest political offices in a country, at least one candidate reasonably thinks that their winning the election is practically necessary to save multiple innocent lives.

3. In typical elections to the highest political offices in a country, at least one candidate is such that it would be permissible for them to lie to win the election.

4. But it would not be permissible for candidates for the highest political offices in a country to lie to win the election, except perhaps in atypical cases.

5. Contradiction!

6. So, it is false that it is permissible to lie to achieve what one reasonably takes to save innocent lives.

The thought behind (2) is that serious candidates tend to reasonably think that their policies would make a significant positive difference to the well-being of people. Given the tens of millions of people in a typical country, a fairly intelligent candidate will realize that this positive difference saves lives, by such factors as improving medical care, and decreasing stress, suicide and drug-abuse rates. And typical serious candidates are at least fairly intelligent. Additionally, in many countries abortion is relevant at election time, and these countries will often have candidates who reasonably think that abortion kills innocent people.

The “except perhaps in atypical cases” qualifier in (4) is to take care of the intuition that some people will have that lying is permitted to defeat someone with literally genocidal policies (which is fortunately an atypical case).

The above argument gives one reason to be dubious of the idea that it is permissible to lie to save lives. But I can also see an interesting answer. The most relevant kinds of lies of politicians would be lies to the public. But you might have this view: While it is permissible to lie once to save a life, it is not permissible to lie once in order to have a 0.1% chance of saving a life, nor to lie a thousand times to have a certainty of saving one life. For a lie is pretty bad, and too much lying outweighs the value of saving a life. Now, when you lie to a large group of people, you count as lying once to each member of the group. Thus, it would be wrong to lie to all the members of a population in order to save 0.1% of them or less. And in typical electoral cases, one would be unlikely to save more than 0.1% of the population!

I am not sure about this line of response. I am not sure the wickedness of a lie linearly multiplies with the number of people lied to. Imagine this. You are on the phone trying to dissuade a friend who has a large YouTube following from lying to their million followers. You see that you have a consideration they will think decisive, and are about to offer the consideration, but then you see a child drowning. If you jump in the water to save the child, you’ve lost your moment of influence and your friend will lie to a million. You should, typically, go and save the child. (Unless your friend’s lie would influence someone to commit murder.) So the disvalue of lying does not increase linearly with the size of the victim audience.

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.

A near lie

Alice knows that her friend Bob has no pets and no experience with birds. While recommending Bob for a birdkeeping job at a zoo and having discovered or to be surprisingly ignorant about birds, she says:

1. Bob has a fine collection of Southern yellow-beaked triggles.

It seems that Alice is lying. Yet it seems that to lie one must assert, and to assert one must express a proposition. But Alice’s sentence does not express a proposition since “triggle” is meaningless.

Sentence (1) seems to entail the falsehood:

2. Bob owns some birds.

But entailment is a relation between propositions, and (1) neither is nor expresses a proposition. We might want to say that if it did express a proposition, it would express a proposition entailing (2). But even that isn’t so clear. After all, maybe a world where “triggle” denotes a science-fictional beaked reptile is closer than a world where it denotes a kind of bird (imagine that some science-fiction writer almost wrote Southern yellow-beaked triggles as reptiles into a story but stopped themselves at the last moment).

Here is what I think I want to say about what Alice did. According to Jorge Garcia, what makes lying bad one linguistically solicits trust that what one is saying is true, while at the same time betraying that trust. Alice did exactly that, but without asserting. So, while Alice did not lie, she did something that is wrong for the same reason that lying is.

Evils that are evidence for theism

It’s mildly interesting to note, when evaluating the evidential impact of evil, that there can be evil events that would be evidence for the existence of God. For instance, suppose that three Roman soldiers who witnessed Christ’s resurrection conspired to lie that he didn’t see Christ get resurrected. That they lied that they didn’t see Christ get resurrected entails that they thought they witnessed the resurrection, and that would be strong evidence for the existence of God, even after factoring in the counterevidence coming from the evil of the lie. (After all, we already knew that there are lots of lies in the world, so learning of one more won’t make much of a difference.)

In fact, this is true even for horrendous and apparently gratuitous evils. We could imagine that the three soldiers’ lies crush someone’s hopes for the coming of the Messiah, and that could be a horrendous evil. And it could also be the case that we can’t see any possible good from the lie, and hence the lie is apparently gratuitous.

Can one lie without asserting a proposition?

I am starting to think that one can lie without asserting a proposition.

Let’s say that a counterintelligence agent tells an enemy spy that a new weapons technology has just been deployed, in order to dissuade the enemy from invading. The description of the technology contains nonsensical technobabble. This seems to be a lie. If it is, my argument is complete, because nonsense does not express a proposition.

But suppose we say it’s mere BS. Let’s now complicate the case. The counterintelligence agent passes to the enemy spy a fake classified document saying “We have just built a weapon that shoots three simultaneous hyperquark beams.” The spy is taken in by the BS, but also wishes to deter war. And thus the spy reports to her government: “The enemy has just built a weapon that shoots ten simultaneous hyperquark beams.” It is clear that the spy is not merely engaging in BS. The spy sure seems to be lying. But the spy is no more asserting a proposition than the counterintelligence agent did.

If we say that the counterintelligence agent is lying, then we have to allow that one can lie without even taking oneself to assert a proposition.

If we think that the counterintelligence agent is only BSing, but that in my more complicated case the enemy spy is lying to her government, then we should say that to lie one needs to take oneself to be asserting a false proposition, but one need not be actually asserting a proposition, true or false.

In either case, one can lie without asserting a proposition.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps what the spy does in the more complicated case is neither BS nor a lie, but engaging in a verbal deceit we don’t have a good name for.

The Grotius view of lying

Grotius had a weird view: it is never permissible to lie, but “for purposes of natural law”, only assertions to people who had a right to the truth were lies. Nazis at the door, he would have said, have no right to the truth, so one isn’t lying when one asserts known falsehoods to them. This view has always seemed clearly wrong.

But I just realized that there is actually an interesting argument for a very similar view. Start with these three principles:

1. Every lie is an assertion.

2. A defining feature of an assertion is that it is the sort of speech act that the sincerity norm (e.g., “Don’t say what you think is false!”) applies to.

3. No norm applies in contravention of unequivocal moral norms.

Premise (1) is clearly true. Premise (2) is part and parcel of normative accounts of assertion (there is room for variance on what the sincerity norm exactly is, but that variance will not affect our main argument).

Premise (3) is highly controversial. It is a generalization of Aquinas’ principle that immoral “laws” are not really laws. The general idea is that morality not only overrides other norms that contradict it, but as it were sucks all the power out of them. When one knows that ϕing is morally forbidden, responses like “But the law of the land requires it” or “I’d be breaking the rules of the game if I ϕed” make no sense. For there is no normative force against morality. Here are two reasons to accept premise (3). The first is the controversial claim that all norms of action are a species of moral norms. (Here is a theistic argument for this: Norms are appropriately action-guiding; the only thing that can appropriately guide our action is what the love of God requires (we are to love God with all our heart); but to be guided by the love of God and to be guided by morality is the same thing.) The second is that if there are norms other than moral norms, they are created by our normative powers, but it is not plausible that we have the normative power to create norms that stand against the norms of morality (that is, for instance, why immoral promises are null and void).

Then:

4. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not an assertion. (By 2 and 3)

5. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not a lie. (By 1 and 4)

Now here is one way to fill out the rest of the argument:

6. In Nazi at the door cases, we are morally required to say what we disbelieve (i.e., go against what the sincerity norm would require).

7. So, in Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is not a lie. (By 5 an 6)

And that gives us a version of the Grotius view.

My own view is to flip the last two steps of the argument, replacing 6 and 7 with:

8. In Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is a lie.

9. So, in Nazi at the door cases it is still false that we are morally required to say what we disbelieve. (By 5 and 8)

10. In Nazi at the door cases, if it is morally permissible to say what we disbelieve, it is morally required.

11. So, in Nazi at the door cases, it is not morally permissible to say what we disbelieve. (By 9 and 10)

But a lot of people balk at 9. And they then have reason to accept the Grotius-like thesis 7.

So, all in all, if one accepts the normative view of assertion and one accepts the contravention principle 3, one has a choice between Kantian absolutism about lying and a Grotius-like view.

Bostock v. Clayton County

In Bostock, the Supreme Court ruled that hiring discrimination against a gay person is discrimination on the basis of sex, and hence forbidden, because one wouldn’t refuse to, say, hire a woman who is attracted to men, and hence to refuse to hire a man who has the same “trait”, namely being attracted to men, is discrimination on the grounds of his sex.

Here is a clear counterexample to this line of reasoning. Consider an employer who refuses to hire a man who claims in a job application to be a woman on the grounds that this man is a liar. (Suppose this is a man in every socially accepted sense of the word: he is biologically male, he socially identifies as a man in every context other than this interview, etc.) Such an employer would not refuse to hire a woman with the same “trait”, namely claiming to be a woman. Hence by the Bostock reasoning, the employer discriminates on the basis of sex. But this is absurd: the basis for the discrimination is not the sex of the prospective employee, but lying about one’s sex. Similarly, discrimination against a white person who claims to be African American on the grounds of a mismatch between their claims and reality is not discrimination against white people.

In other words, the basis for the discrimination is not the sex of the candidate but the relationships between the candidate’s actual sex and the candidate’s claimed sex.

And logically speaking, this is all very much like the gay case, where the basis for the discrimination is not the sex of the candidate but the relationship between the candidate’s sex and the sex of the persons the candidate is attracted to.

I am not claiming that it is morally wrong to be attracted to persons of the same sex in the way in which it is wrong to lie (or in any any other way, for that matter). Nor am I claiming that it is reasonable or legal for an employer to discriminate on the basis of such attraction. All I am claiming is that such discrimination is not discrimination on the basis of the candidate’s sex.

Objection: There is an important difference between the trait of being attracted to men and the trait of claiming to be a man. Being attracted to men is essentially the same trait whether it is found in a man or a woman, while claiming to be a man is radically different when it is found in a man and in a woman, since it is truth-telling in the one case and lying in the other.

Response: This response would require the court to settle the question whether indeed the trait of being attracted to men is basically the same trait when found in men and when found in women, in a way in which the trait of claiming to be a man is not the same trait when found in men and when found in women. That is perhaps the real philosophical question here, and it is presumably precisely what the employer in question would dispute. The court cites the example of how discriminating on the grounds of interracial marriage is racial discrimination. Now, here I would say that the trait of marrying a person of race R is the same trait whether found in a person of race R or not. But clarifying exactly what it means to be basically the same trait is very difficult.

Disclaimer: I am no lawyer or legal scholar, just a philosopher with an eye for counterexamples.

Humdrum cases of double effect reasoning

While the Principle of Double Effect is mostly discussed in the literature in connection with very bad effects, typically death, that trigger deontic concerns, lately philosophers (e.g., Masek) have been noting that double effect reasoning can be important in much more humdrum situations.

For instance, I cause suffering to my students in many ways: stress over assignments, awkwardness over small group discussions, boredom, etc. I hope that this suffering is normally of a sort that doesn’t trigger deontic concerns. If an evildoer told me that I must bore my students or else he’d kill someone, intentionally boring my students would be the right thing to do. However, under normal circumstances, it would be wicked of me to intend my students to be bored or stressed, but it is not wicked for me to adopt pedagogical techniques that, unfortunately, foreseeably result in unintended boredom or stress (reviewing material that some students know is apt to be boring to them; tests are unavoidably stressful to most).

Another interesting and fairly humdrum case is this. You are speaking to a large group, and you realize that some people in the audience will misunderstand a sentence you are about to say as asserting something false. However, the issue is not important, time is limited, and the misunderstanding is not egregious as the falsehood is not far from the truth. So you reasonably choose not to waste time over the sentence. But if you intended the misunderstanding, you would be lying or at least deceiving.

Lying to save lives

I’m imagining a conversation between Alice, who thinks it is permissible to lie to Nazis to protect innocents, and a Nazi. Alice has just lied to the Nazi to protect innocents hiding in her house. The Nazi then asks her: “Do you think it is permissible to lie to protect innocents from people like me?” If Alice says “Yes”, the Nazi will discount her statement, search her house and find innocents. So, she has to say “No.” But then the Nazi goes on to ask: “Why not? Isn’t life more important than truth? And I know that you think me an unjust aggressor (no, don’t deny it, I know you know it, but I’m not going to get you just for that).” And now Alice has to either cave and say that she does think it permissible to lie to unjust aggressors, in which case the game is up, and the innocents will die, or she has to exercise her philosophical mind to find the best arguments she can for a moral conclusion that she believes to be perverse. The latter seems really bad.

Or imagine that Alice thinks that the only way she will convince the Nazi that she is telling the truth in her initial lie is by adding lies about how much she appreciates the Nazi’s fearless work against Jews. That also seems really wrong to me.

Or imagine that Alice’s non-Nazi friend Bob can’t keep secrets and asks her if she is hiding any Jews. Moreover, Alice knows that Bob knows that Alice fearlessly does what she thinks is right. And so Bob will conclude that Alice is hiding Jews unless he thinks Alice believes Jews deserve death. And if Bob comes to believe that Alice is hiding Jews, the game will be up through no fault of Bob’s, since Bob can’t keep secrets. Now it looks like the only way Alice can keep the innocents she is hiding safe is by advocating genocide to Bob.

It is very intuitive that a Nazi at the door doesn’t deserve the truth about who is living in that house. And yet at the same time, it seems like everyone deserves the truth about what is right and wrong. But at the same time, it is difficult to limit a permission of lying to the former kinds of cases. There is a slippery slope here, with two stable positions: an absolutist prohibition on lying and a consequentialist calculus. An in-between position will be difficult to specify and defend.

Lying is dishonest

I thought I posted this argument, but can’t find it, so I’m writing it up again.

1. If honesty is a virtue, dishonesty is a vice.

2. If dishonesty is a vice, then acting dishonestly is always vicious.

3. Acting viciously is always wrong.

4. Lying is always acting dishonestly.

5. So, lying is always acting viciously. (1, 2, 4)

6. So, lying is always wrong. (3, 5)

Lying and the right to the truth

Some people say that a lie is an assertion contrary to one’s mind to someone who has a right to the truth. Grotius introduced this, but Grotius was clear on the fact that this is not an account of what the word “lie” means in ordinary language. Rather, this was introduced as a technical sense of “lie” for purposes of “natural law”, in order to save an absolute prohibition on lying.

I can see two kinds of accounts of what that is means for x to have a right to the truth regarding p:

1. it is wrong to assert about p contrary to one’s mind to x

2. x has a right to correctly believe, or to know, or to be correctly informed regarding p.

Both options lead to an unsatisfactory saving of the absolute prohibition on lying. On (1), we get the trivial account that it is always wrong to assert about p contrary to one’s mind when it is wrong to do so.

On (2), we get a deficient account that doesn’t cover all the cases of lying. Most of the time when we have ordinary conversations, the other person doesn’t have a right to correctly believe, know or be informed about the matter. If a stranger asks you on the street what time it is, and your phone is buried at the bottom of your backpack, you have no moral obligation to pull out your phone and inform them, as you would if they had a right to be correctly informed. But it would be wrong to deliberately give them your time. It is only in the rare case of special relationships relevant to the conversation that a right to be correctly informed comes up: patients have a right to know about their medical condition; the court has a right to know what the witness saw; etc. If the prohibition on lying is restricted to such cases, then the prohibition fails to cover the vast majority of what we ordinarily take to be lies.

Lying and normative views of assertion

I find some version of the following normative partial analysis of assertion very plausible:

1. At least a part of what makes a speech act an assertion of p is that it is the kind of speech act that should not be made if one believes p to be false.

But now:

2. If it is sometimes permissible to lie, it is sometimes obligatory to lie.

Why? Well, people’s main intuitions that it is sometimes permissible to lie are driven by cases—such as the murderer at the door—where they think it is obligatory to lie. Moreover, if an action is permissible, then typically it becomes obligatory when there is enough at stake. Thus, if it’s permissible to eat meat, it’s obligatory to eat meat when doing so is necessary to save an innocent life (e.g., an evildoer says: “Eat this burger or this innocent dies”).

Thus, to argue that lying is never permissible I just need to argue that it is never obligatory.

Now here is a flatfooted argument against lying ever being obligatory. If lying is ever obligatory, then sometimes one should assert that p when one believes p to be false. But that contradicts (1).

Of course, this is a bad argument, for two reasons. The first is that perhaps all the argument shows is that there is a real dilemma sometimes: one should lie and one shouldn’t lie. The second, and more serious, is that the norms in (1) and (2) are different: the norm in (1) is a social norm of assertion, while that in (2) is a moral norm.

However, the argument can be fixed to get around both problems. For morality is overriding in the following strong way:

3. A non-moral norm is null and void insofar as it requires what is morally forbidden.

E.g., a law requiring an immoral action is just a piece of paper with no normative force. But this means that a norm of assertion that forbids one from a speech act under circumstances in which in which that speech act is morally required is null and void under those circumstances. But a null and void norm is no norm at all and generates no “should” of the action-guiding sort. And the “should” in (1) is of the action-guiding sort. And hence the idea that sometimes lying is morally obligatory contradicts (1) precisely when we understand the “should” in (1) as expressive of an action-guiding non-moral norm.

Here’s another way to show the intuition behind the argument. The normative picture of language nicely fits with the following modified Wittgensteinian picture of language: The meaning of language comes from its normative use. But if lying is permissible, then a norm-abiding speaker of English will say “Bob is not at home” when asked by someone at the door who wants to murder Bob. Thus, the norm-abiding use of “Bob is not at home” will fail to distinguish between two candidate norms:

4. Say “Bob is not at home” only when you believe Bob is not at home.

5. Say “Bob is not at home” only when you believe that either Bob is not at home or the interlocutor wants to murder Bob.

And hence it will not be possible to read the meaning of “Bob is not at home” from its norm-abiding usage.

The argument works with minor modifications if we replace the belief norm by a truth norm, a knowledge norm or a justified belief norm.

I do, however, have a serious objection to the argument. The argument as it stands only works when the norm of assertion is of an action-guiding sort. But norms of assertion could be a different critter altogether: they could be Aristotelian teleological norms. These aren’t norms that say, at least directly, what is or is not to be done. Rather, they are norms that say what is or is not defective. Thus, a broken leg is defective, but it is, of course, a category mistake to say that a broken leg is something not to be done (and it’s a moral mistake to say that a broken leg is something not to be produced: there are times when it is obligatory to break a leg, say in the defense of the innocent). Thus, it could be that what (1) says is that a part of what makes a speech act be an assertion of p is that it is a speech act that would be defective should p turn out to be false.

I do not know how satisfactory this reading of (1) is. It seems to me that we think of the norms of assertion as something that persons are criticizable for failing to meet in a way in which no one is criticizable for having a broken leg (though one might be criticizable for breaking one’s leg).

Pacifism and casuistry

Pacficists who think that all lethal violence is wrong have a moral imperative to think creatively about ways in which the innocent can be protected from assault without recourse to lethal violence. These creative ways will be both preventative and reactive, and may be technological, physical (e.g., martial arts training), verbal, spiritual, self-sacrificial (e.g., hunger strikes), etc. Moreover, the pacifist needs to engage in careful philosophical discrimination to determine the boundaries of the concept of lethal violence (e.g., does it allow the use of Double Effect to engage in violent acts that are foreseen but not intended to cause death?) in order to figure out which actions of defending the innocent are permissible. The duty to engage in such thought comes from our duty to protect the vulnerable and to provide moral guidance for our neighbor.

I am not a pacifist about lethal violence. But I am, to coin a phrase, a pacifist about lying: I think lying is always wrong. Nor am I alone: pacifism about lying is the predominant Catholic position. Those of us who are pacifists about lying need to do the same thing as the pacifists about lethal violence: we need to think creatively about ways in which the innocent can be protected from assault without recourse to lying. This will involve both preventative and reactive approach, and will be of a broad variety of kinds. And we need to engage in careful philosophical discrimination. Our duty to do all this comes from our duties to the vulnerable and to our neighbor.

The tradition of casuistry about speech involving such concepts as mental reservation has been much maligned. But whatever one may think about the detailed ideas from that tradition, one has to remember that this tradition is an outgrowth of the duty to protect the vulnerable, while remaining within the confines of pacifism about lying. One should see engagement in this tradition as akin to a pacifist about lethal violence studying non-lethal martial arts.

Signatures, translations and lies

Suppose I am hired to be an interpreter for a diplomatic meeting. When I translate claims that I know to be lies, am I lying or deceiving?

Of course, I’m not. I am being relied on for the accuracy of the translation, not the accuracy of the claims. The point is clear if I am being paid by the side that is lied to, but whether I am lying or deceiving surely does not depend on who pays me. By the same token, the typist who takes down and posts his boss’s lying letter is not lying or deceiving.

But that one is not lying or deceiving does not mean that one is off the hook. The interpreter and typist, while neither lying nor deceiving, are cooperating in another’s lies. Whether such cooperation is morally permissible will probably depend on further details. (A fairly clear case of permissibility: One knows that the other party will see through the lies.)

But what if instead the boss asks the typist to take down a lying letter purporting to be from the competing company’s boss, which the boss plans to post on social media in order to discredit the other company? Now I think the case is different. Suppose, for simplicity, that the typist’s boss is Natalie Nixon and the other company’s boss is Cathryn Cato. When the typist signs a letter “Natalie Nixon”, he is himself purporting to the reader that the letter comes from Nixon, and if the typist signs the letter “Cathryn Cato”, he is purporting to the reader that letter is from Cato, and that’s a deceit—maybe even a lie—from the typist.

Similary, if the interpreter says “We strongly believe in freedom of speech”, she is purporting that this is what her principal said the equivalent of. If her principal said that, the interpreter is off the hook for deceit even if the claim is a lie, but if the interpreter made that up, the interpreter is deceiving.

It looks to me like the interpreter’s speech acts are equivalent to prefacing every sentence with: “X says that…”, and the typist’s speech act is equivalent to prefacing the letter with: “X claims that…”.

If this is right, then in my earlier post, Bob is actually lying. But he’s not lying in the content of the letter of recommendation, but in his secretarial claim that the letter is Alice’s.

But I am far from confident about any of this.