Randal Marlin

by Propaganda

  we have a duty of circumspection regarding what we believe as well as what we do.10

  Augustine distinguished different kinds of lies, from those that cause harm for

  no good reason to those that harm no one and have certain benefits, such as avoiding

  harm and injustice. Lying to cause harm or lying for the love of doing so and being

  reckless about ensuing harms are both obviously wrong.

  Perhaps the most influential ethical idea attributed to Augustine (although it

  would be rash to credit him with complete originality, especially as he himself appeals

  to Judaic texts) is what has come to be known as the principle that the end does not

  justify the means. In this, Augustine combats the view that it is all right to lie for the

  purpose of discovering heretics and bringing them to account. The whole purpose

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  of bringing heretics to account, he says, is to free the world from error. But how can one suitably proceed against lies by lying? The weight of direct scriptural injunctions goes against lying in any form: “Thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie” (Psalm

  5:7); “Thou shalt not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:16); “The mouth that belieth,

  killeth the soul” (Wisdom—“The Book of Wisdom” or “The Wisdom of Solomon,

  Apocrypha”—1:11); and St. Paul’s “Wherefore put away lying, and speak the truth”

  (Ephesians 4:25). But various narratives appear to give tacit approval to some decep-

  tions, notably when it comes to saving one’s people from destruction by an enemy.

  Besides this appeal to authority, Augustine gives a version of the slippery slope argu-

  ment: once you start to do evil to avoid evil, then evil wil no longer be measured by

  the norm of truth but according to one’s own desire and habit.11

  Augustine teaches that a dogmatic, doctrinal defence of lying to do good cannot be

  sustained. It can never be right to lie, but it is right to be motivated to avoid harm, so that lies designed to avoid suffering, injustice, and death deserve less censure. For teachers

  especially, the unreserved championing of lies in special circumstances has a tendency to

  taint their own profession: “This much I know, that even he who teaches that we ought

  to lie wants to appear to be teaching the truth.”12 Appealing to 1 John 2:21, “The truth

  cannot give birth to a lie,” Augustine claims that the teacher will be wrong to teach that

  it is sometimes right to lie. Augustine implies, although this is not spelled out, that if the teacher shows any compromising attitude to a lie, anything the teacher says becomes

  suspect. How can one be sure that the teacher does not see himself or herself in one of

  those situations where a lie is called for in the name of some public greater good?

  St. Thomas Aquinas

  Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) does not add much, in terms of fundamentals, to the

  position of Augustine. Schoolboys of an earlier generation were taught Aquinas’s

  distinction between lies that are officious (in the older sense meaning “eager to serve

  or please others”), that is to say, done for a good purpose; those that are jocose, where

  the lack of intention to deceive removes an essential component of a lie properly

  considered; and those that are malicious. Like Augustine, Aquinas holds that the

  greater the good intended, the more the sinfulness of lying is diminished. He locates

  the wrongfulness of the most serious lies in their violation of obligations to God and

  of charity towards our neighbour. Teaching people falsehoods about science or moral

  conduct is injurious to them, but telling falsehoods about things not affecting them

  is not a serious (mortal) sin.13

  Immanuel Kant

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) shares with Augustine an uncompromising view about

  the wrongfulness of lying, although he locates the wrongness formally in the violation

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  of the principle of universalizability. If you lie, and take as a maxim that lying is all right to get out of a tough spot, then universalizing this maxim implies that anyone in

  a tough spot can lie to get out of it. If this were the practice, lies would no longer be

  believed, and the lying enterprise would in that way be self-defeating.14Truth-telling is

  a formal duty, for Kant, and so admits of no exceptions. Like Augustine, he considers

  the case of lying to save the life of an innocent person and refuses to be moved by the

  fact that death will follow the truth-telling. If you tell the truth and misfortune comes

  through another’s act, the other person is responsible, not you, because you are fulfilling

  the duty to tell the truth. On the other hand, if you lie and unexpected misfortune

  follows, you bear some of the responsibility, because the causal chain will have gone

  through your wrongful act. Kant says (though not very convincingly to many people):

  After you have honestly answered the murderer’s question as to whether his intended

  victim is at home, it may be that he has slipped out so that he does not come in the

  way of the murderer, and thus that the murder may not be committed. But if you had

  lied and said he was not at home when he had really gone out without your knowing

  it, and if the murderer had then met him as he went away and murdered him, you

  might justly be accused as the cause of his death. For if you had told the truth as far as

  you knew it, perhaps the murderer might have been apprehended by the neighbours

  while he searched the house and thus the deed might have been prevented.15

  Here some belief in providence—the idea that an all-powerful God governs hap-

  penings in the world and can work things to punish wrongdoing—seems to be

  presupposed.

  We can approach the morality of lying from the point of view of Kant’s other ver-

  sion of his categorical imperative, the imperative that tells you what ought to be done

  categorically, not merely hypothetically—“do this if you want to obtain that.” In this

  case, we ask whether lying is a violation of the principle cal ing for respect of others as

  ends in themselves. Kant does not see any difference resulting, but one might argue

  that, if another person is bent on taking the life of an innocent person and the lie, and

  only the lie, would deflect him from his intention, then telling the lie would be more

  respecting of others as ends in themselves than would be truth-telling. The reason for

  this is twofold. First, we respect others as ends in themselves when we help to deflect

  them from a path of wickedness and do not contribute anything to help them along

  such a path. Second, we respect the potential victim as an end in herself if we act so as

  to prevent her demise.

  grotius

  Moving from absolutists against lying to those who allow exceptions, we now consider

  the Dutch jurisprudential thinker, Hugo the Great, known from his Latinized surname

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  as Grotius (1583–1645). Grotius grounded the wrongness of lying in the violation of the right of another to the truth. This right stems from liberty of judgment. If I do not

  know the truth about some matter, and if I am fed falsehoods, my
judgment will not be

  sound. However, that right can be removed under three sets of circumstances. First, the

  person with whom we speak may expressly waive the right. (We sometimes play games

  in which lies are an accepted part.) Second, the right may be waived by tacit consent or

  consent assumed on reasonable grounds. Third, it might be outweighed by another more

  compelling right.16

  In so grounding the wrongness of lying, Grotius explicitly condones the tell-

  ing of fictions to children or insane persons when this is for their own good because

  they don’t have the same liberty of judgment as sane adults. He also argues that the

  intended audience in any conversation has a right to the truth, but eavesdroppers do

  not. If I make use of fictional devices that do not deceive my intended audience, I do

  not have to accept blame for misleading those who have no right to be listening.17 A

  wartime ruse, in which a false message is sent to an ally in order to deceive an enemy,

  is not considered wrong for the same reason. The enemy is not owed the obligation

  of truth-telling.

  Grotius also allows for tacit consent to justify passing on a false report that will

  help a wavering person win a battle. After winning, the person lied-to can be presumed

  to approve of this form of deception. Grotius sides with those who place good results

  above the value of truth in itself. He notes, though, that in the case of the wartime

  “salutary lie,” the infringement on liberty of judgment does not last long, and the truth

  emerges soon after.

  Grotius conceives of the state as having rights superior to individuals within the

  state, and so he supported Plato’s use of the “noble lie” as set out in the Republic.18 The rulers of the state are justified in lying to the public in such a way as to encourage a harmonious state, it being assumed that a strong and well-functioning state will benefit

  the general public. In short, lying in the interests of the lied-to, by leaders who know

  the best interests of the public better than they do themselves, is acceptable and right,

  in Plato’s and Grotius’s accounts. It is this view that is strongly resisted by democratic

  defenders of an open society, such as Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky.

  Kant replies forcefully to the view that the morality of lying is grounded in the

  right of another to the truth. Rights can be waived, but the demands of truth are

  not subject to such easy dismissal, the exception of game contexts notwithstanding.

  He points out that, by lying, one contributes to the erosion of trust and thereby of

  law generally and, thus, commits a wrong to mankind generally.19 Kant is not arguing

  consequentially, as if the empirical likelihood of anarchy were the deciding factor. He

  insists that truthfulness is an unconditional duty. Here there comes into play his idea

  that morality involves more than duties to individuals; social policies must also respect

  all persons in a “kingdom of ends.” The duty to tell the truth is linked to the funda-

  mental demands of reason, which all share alike. To depart from truth, for whatever

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  reason, involves jeopardy to the whole enterprise of reason itself and so cannot be condoned.

  Kant, Aquinas, and Augustine view truth as something so fundamental that it

  cannot be bartered for some good. As a constituent of reason, a fundamental aspect

  of what it is to be human, it cannot be treated as some bargaining chip subject to

  negotiation. We can talk about the value of camping, sailing, gold, music, etc., without

  those values affecting the discourse within which we discuss these matters. But when

  it comes to arguing about the value of truth and the disvalue (or otherwise) of lying

  or a cavalier disregard for truth, our attitude towards truth has implications for the

  very discourse in which we express this attitude. If you subordinate truth, as a matter

  of principle, to the aim of achieving some good objective, you affect the credibility of

  what you say. Instead of the presumption in discourse that a person intends to speak

  the truth, we have a different presumption. The speaker will speak the truth only if

  there is not some greater good to be achieved by a lie or by reckless disregard of the

  truth. But part of the reason for wanting to engage in this increasingly complex discus-

  sion about lying and truth is that we want to know what exactly is the related truth

  about the ethics of truth-telling and lying. Are we not in danger of unhinging our-

  selves from the dogged determination to find the truth about these and other moral

  questions if we have reached the conclusion that truth is negotiable along with other

  competing values in our grab-bag? Truth has a special fundamentality in this respect,

  one not shared by the other values and that affects both our own projects and our rela-

  tion through discourse with others.

  Having said all that, the outcome of the view that would apparently require

  revealing the location of the innocent hunted person knowing that the victim would

  be murdered seems contrary to decent feeling and simply wrong. Even though truth

  has its own particular, very fundamental value in our thought systems, so does the

  principle of not cooperating in evil. There is a truth in speech and another truth in

  action, as Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have pointed out, the latter giving us

  the expression “doing the truth.”20 It is also helpful to recall an insight of Swiss theo-

  logian Hans Urs von Balthasar: there is a unity in Beauty, Truth, and Goodness such

  that neglect of one is bound to undermine the others. He specifically spoke of the

  neglect of beauty, but it seems to be true of each of the others as well.21

  Ethical Thought in Late nineteenth-Century Britain

  The question of the ethics of lying fascinated a circle of thinkers in Britain during the

  late nineteenth century. The circle included Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, his cousin

  Edward Dicey (older brother of Albert Venn Dicey), and Mark Pattison, the Master of

  Lincoln Col ege, Oxford. These were thinkers who combined philosophical thinking

  at a fairly high level with journalistic, legal, and political concerns. Dicey’s “The Ethics

  of Political Lying,”22 while clearly politically motivated against Charles Stewart Parnell,

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  the Irish MP and Home Rule advocate, contains some interesting philosophical ideas, which are in close proximity to commonsense thinking and acting and to the demands

  of everyday administration.

  Dicey begins with Dr. Johnson’s definition of a lie as a criminal falsehood, which has

  the intention to deceive. He then observes, “we are all agreed that as a general rule it is an honest man’s duty to tell the truth.” He does not claim that this is an axiom that brooks

  no exceptions; indeed, he allows that we all at times have said “the thing that is not”

  with a view to deceiving and would do it again under the same circumstances without

  compunction. But our code does regard falsity as a thing to be condemned. For whatever

  reason, Dicey says, the business world has adopted a standard of veracity according to

  which “to tell a direct lie is r
ecognized as an offence against the ordinary standard of

  commercial behaviour.” The same is true of lawyers, who may hold briefs for a client,

  arguing strenuously even when convinced of the client’s guilt, but counsel is forbidden

  to “express his own personal conviction, to pledge his own personal belief, as to his cli-

  ent’s innocence.” By the code of the medical profession, a doctor is not bound to tell the

  whole truth to his patients, “but he is not justified in making statements on the strength

  of his professional knowledge and experience which he knows to be untrue.” Diplomats

  may make false statements, but they are not “entitled according to our British standard

  to strengthen their force by giving [their] personal guarantee of their being made in good

  faith.” In various card games, you can play a false card to deceive an opponent, but you

  are not allowed to score points you have not earned or refuse to follow suit.

  Having made these commonsense observations about the code of veracity, Dicey

  considers the view that in politics one is not expected to speak the truth or, at any rate,

  that lying in political matters is more venial than elsewhere. If the justification for this

  view is the principle that good can come from evil, his answer is that this is casuistry

  and “a dogma against which all Protestant divines and moralists have steadily set their

  face.” If the justification is that lying is common practice in politics, this is false in fact.

  The code of party politics may be lax, but it “does not sanction the employment of the

  lie direct” (emphasis added).

  This is a most interesting idea and deserves to be compared with modern view-

  points. There are some who claim that the public does not mind politicians lying as

  long as the lies are not contrary to their own particular interests. Here we have the

  claim that the code in politics allows for all kinds of obfuscations and evasions, but

  that the direct lie is unacceptable. Dicey elaborates:

  In all other things, as I have endeavoured to show, the line is drawn at a distinct mis-

  statement of fact, to which the utterer demands credence, in virtue of his hearers’ belief

  in his own good faith and loyalty. In politics, as I contend, a like rule holds good also.