by Ian Leslie
Cardinal Connell felt compelled to emphasise that he did not lie to the media about the use of diocesan funds for the compensation of clerical child sexual abuse victims. According to the report, this is how the Cardinal explained away his misleading statements to the press:
. . . that diocesan funds ARE [report’s emphasis] not used for such a purpose; that he had not said that diocesan funds WERE not used for such a purpose. By using the present tense he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past . . . Cardinal Connell considered that there was an enormous difference between the two.
One can imagine Augustine shaking his head in sorrow and fury at this. The trouble with exceptions, he might say, is that once you allow for any at all, other people get to choose which ones are permissible and why.
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If Augustine wrote the moral rulebook for lying, Immanuel Kant translated it for a secular age – an age in which an idea of a universal human morality took the place of a God-given one, and the rights of the individual became the anchor point for discussions of right and wrong. Kant was the philosophers’ Robinson Crusoe, constructing sturdy moral dwellings out of earthly materials, hacking out paths through the ethical jungle of modern life. When it came to lying, Kant essentially agreed with Augustine: it was wrong, always and everywhere, with no exceptions.
The bedrock of Kant’s argument was the dignity of the individual. We have to tell the truth to the man who wants to kill our friend because every person – even a murderer – has a right to the truth. (Kant didn’t get into the question of whether, if our friend survived, he’d want to be friends with us any more.) Deny someone truth, and you deny their humanity, a quality even the worst of us must be accorded. Not only that, but the liar besmirches his own humanity:
The greatest violation of a human being’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being (the humanity in his own person) is the contrary of truthfulness, lying . . . For the dishonour that accompanies a lie also accompanies a liar like a shadow. By an external lie a human being makes himself an object of contempt in the eyes of others; by an internal lie he does what is still worse: he makes himself contemptible in his own eyes and violates the dignity in his own person. By a lie a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being.
Kant’s ideas on lying formed part of his first contribution to moral philosophy, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It was published in 1785, when he was sixty-one. The treatise was well-received by his contemporaries, who regarded Kant with respect verging on awe; he had already established himself as the most important living philosopher. Not everyone accepted the book’s arguments, however. In 1796 a young writer in Paris was bold enough to question them in public.
Benjamin Constant was a Swiss-born nobleman, the descendant of Huguenots who had fled France in the sixteenth century to avoid oppression. Born in 1767, he was a man of the world, educated in Germany, France and Scotland, and one of the first self-consciously liberal thinkers, arguing passionately for the rule of law, the rights of man, and the abolition of slavery. He was dash-ing and handsome, a gambler and a womaniser who frequently fought duels with cuckolded husbands and was usually juggling the romantic attentions of more than one lady at a time. The great love of his life, however, was Madame De Staël, the brilliant writer, socialite and grande dame of European society. The two pursued a tempestuous, intellectually vibrant affair for ten years. After meeting Constant in Switzerland, Mme De Staël took her young lover to Paris in 1795 and introduced him to salon society. He threw himself into the city’s intellectual and political life.
Constant published an article that posed the ‘murderer at the door’ question to Kant. For Constant, this was not just a hypothetical question. Paris was still reeling from the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, which saw thousands of men lose their lives on an arbitrary basis. Although the city was peaceful by the time of Constant’s arrival, most households were familiar with the fear of a murderer coming to visit; many had been encouraged to give up their friends to those who would harm them. Living in what Professor Stephen Holmes, a biographer of Constant, describes as an ‘hysterical environment’, Constant was acutely aware of why a man might lie to protect himself, his family or friends (he may or may not also have been thinking about his rather complicated love life).
For Constant, says Holmes, ‘the idea that one could just pronounce all lying to be immoral seemed absurd’. In Constant’s own words, ‘The moral principle stating that it is a duty to tell the truth would make any society impossible if that principle were taken singly and unconditionally.’ Constant accepted that sometimes lying is necessary, and he also knew that a man might be put to death on the basis of a lie. But to focus on the morality of lying as if it existed in a vacuum was dangerous. Unsurprisingly, Constant felt strongly that all moral arguments needed to be grounded in reality. He was living in a city that was recovering from a period in which abstract principles were taken to extremes; the result had been a murderous terror. Lying was a fact of life; the real imperative was to strengthen society’s institutions – the rule of law, parliament – thus ensuring that people weren’t thrown into jail or relieved of their heads on the basis of malicious untruths.
Kant replied to Constant in 1797, in an essay called ‘On the Supposed Right to Lie From Philanthropy’. He stuck rigidly to his position, arguing that it is always wrong to lie, even when the murderer is at your door and asking after your friend. Kant was contemptuous of the idea that there should or could be exceptions to the universal moral law of truth-telling. Exceptions are self-defeating: if everybody agrees it’s okay to lie to murderers, then murderers won’t believe a word anyone says. You’ve got to hold the line, and preserve the sacredness of truth. Some principles are more important than your friend’s life.
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Two hundred years after this debate, Professor Kang Lee became intrigued by Western attitudes to lying. A Canadian citizen, Lee has lived in Toronto for over twenty years, though he was raised in China and retains an outsider’s perspective on the mores of his adoptive culture. Lee was struck by the vigour with which people in the West denounced deceit. The media screamed ‘liar’ at politicians. Preachers fulminated against deceit from the pulpit. Teachers lectured students and parents warned children against lying. Yet it seemed plain to Lee that every member of those groups, and indeed everyone else, lied as a matter of course, and even endorsed a category of lies known as white lies that seemed to expand and contract according to no obvious logic.33 What, he wondered, was at the root of this strange example of collective hypocrisy?
Lee had grown up with a rather different attitude to lying. ‘In China and in the East generally,’ he says, ‘it’s just much more accepted that there are all sorts of situations in which lying is appropriate.’ There is no self-torturing debate over this, he says; legitimate lying is just an unremarkable fact of life. Telling the truth can also be considered wrong – especially if it involves trumpeting one’s achievements. This last insight helped Lee to form a hypothesis: that the Western prohibition on lying was based on its elevation of the individual; whereas the Chinese attitude to lying was formed around its reverence for the coherence and harmony of the group.
In 2001 and again in 2007, Lee carried out experiments on the attitudes to lying among children from China and Canada. The North American children had been raised in a society that places great emphasis on individual achievement, self-esteem and ambition, and on individual rights and freedoms: the culture of Descartes, Crusoe, Thomas Jefferson and Michael Jordan. The Chinese children, by contrast, had been raised in a culture that celebrated the superiority of Da Wo (the big me – the collective) over Xiao Wo (the small me – the self), an outlook that drew not just on communist ideology but on a deep well of religious and cultural tradition.
In Lee’s first study, Chinese (and Taiwanese) children, and C
anadian children, all aged between seven and eleven, were read four brief stories. Two stories involved a child carrying out a good deed, while the other two showed a child carrying out a bad deed. When the story character is questioned by a teacher, he answers with either a truthful or an untruthful statement. Sometimes the child is shown lying about his bad deed; other times he’s shown lying about his good deed. After hearing the stories, the children were asked if what the character told the teacher was a lie, and then they were asked whether what the character had done was good or bad. All the children, regardless of nationality, demonstrated a basic understanding of what it means to tell a lie, and all the children judged lying about the bad deed as wrong. But when the children were asked to evaluate the story in which the child carried out a good deed and lied about it, a significant difference opened up between the two groups.
The Canadian children were overwhelmingly likely to judge the child’s lie as a bad thing, simply because it was a lie; that was enough to condemn it in their eyes. The Chinese children were much more likely to deem the child’s lie about his good deed as a morally positive act. When they were asked to explain, they commented that the character ‘did not seek praise . . . is not bragging’ and is telling a ‘well-intentioned lie’. They also gave a relatively negative assessment of the character who tells the truth about his good deed, criticising him for seeking praise. The Canadians, raised in a culture of self-confidence and self-esteem, rated this character’s truth-telling positively.
Lee believes this ‘modesty effect’ derives from Confucianism, which encourages self-effacement in the name of the greater good (as do Buddhism and Taoism). In that philosophy, the good life depends on the health of our key social relations, starting with the family and extending outwards. One of the Analects of Confucius makes it clear that honesty is never a matter for the individual alone:
The Governor of She declared to Confucius: ‘Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his father stole a sheep, he denounced him.’ Confucius replied, ‘Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for his son, and a son covers up for his father – and there is integrity in what they do.’
According to the scholar Daniel Bell, the key questions with which Confucianism is concerned are about the roles we occupy and the obligations we have in those roles. When it comes to the moral evaluation of a lie, concern for an abstract idea of truth or for individual rights are less important than the effect of the lie on those to whom we’re obliged – that’s to say on the harmony and integrity of the group. This is rather different from Kant’s starting point.
Lee had included Taiwanese children so that he could check for the effects of communist ideology. Communism emphasises the collective over the individual, but it is a relatively recent import, grafted on to a Confucian culture. Chinese children in Taiwan have grown up in a capitalist society with superficially different values. But unlike in China, where Confucianism was officially abandoned following the Cultural Revolution, Confucian ideas and values are openly followed and deeply entrenched in Taiwanese society. The evaluations of the Taiwanese children were broadly the same as those of the Chinese; indeed they showed an even bigger contrast with the Canadian children. This indicated to Lee that values of modesty and self-effacement were not derived from the recent political past, but from the deep structures of Chinese culture, transmitted via many generations of parents and teachers.
In a second study, Lee presented Canadian and Chinese children with four different scenarios, based on events with which they would be familiar. In each one, the child protagonist of the story faces a dilemma over whether to tell the truth that helps a friend but harms the group, or harms a friend and helps the group. For instance:
Here is Susan. Susan’s class had to choose some of their classmates to represent the class in a spelling competition at their school. Susan’s friend Mike couldn’t spell very well, but he really wanted to be in the competition, so he asked Susan to pick him. Susan thought to herself ‘If I pick Mike, our class will not do as well at the spelling competition, but Mike is my friend, and if I don’t pick him, he will be very upset.’ When Susan’s teacher asked her who she was going to pick . . .
Children were then asked, ‘If you were Susan, what would you do?’ In another example, Kelly’s friend Jimmy, the best runner in the class, tells her, on school track and field day, that he doesn’t feel like running today, and that he’s off to the library to read a book. He asks her not to tell anyone. But Kelly knows that if Jimmy isn’t on the team then her class don’t stand a chance of winning. When the teacher asks Kelly if she knows where Jimmy is, should she tell the truth to help her class or lie to help her friend?
As with Lee’s earlier study, the way that the children reacted to these questions was influenced by the culture in which they’d been raised. A Canadian child would be more likely to tell the teacher he was picking Mike because he was good at spelling and that he didn’t have a clue where Jimmy had gone. A Chinese child would be more likely to leave Mike out of the spelling team and have Jimmy dragooned into the track and field team. The divergence grew more pronounced as the children grew older, which Lee takes as evidence of the children becoming more attuned to the norms of their respective cultures.
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Nobody has yet discovered a culture in which all lying is acceptable, or in which no lying is allowed. Some types of lie are always regarded as acceptable, others as reprehensible. Where cultures differ is over what constitutes acceptable lying. It’s here that cross-cultural misunderstandings can occur. In 1960, anthropologists who spent time with the islanders of Manam in Papua New Guinea noted that European visitors tended to think of the Manam as liars who said one thing and did another, whilst the islanders thought the same of their white visitors. As the researchers put it, ‘The difficulty is that the situations which call for a conventional hypocrisy among Manam islanders are not those which call for precisely the same technique in any one kind of European.’ Both sides thought they were lying appropriately, neither understood the other’s lying etiquette.
In 1991 the British anthropologist Frederick Bailey noted that when he first carried out research in India he was puzzled and annoyed by the number of times polite young Indians responded to his requests for assistance by assuring him that they would ‘do the necessary’, without, it later turned out, having had any intention of doing anything of the kind. Eventually he came to see that their idea of what constituted an acceptable lie was different from his own. Janet Suskind, who studied the Sharanahua people of Peru, reported that the meat of wild animals was highly valued as food, and people liked to display generosity with it. It was also scarce, however, and more often than not there wasn’t enough to share. Direct refusals were perceived as insulting, but it was not an insult to be called a liar. People openly lied about their supplies of meat – indeed such lying was considered ‘an essential social grace’. For the Sharanahua, lying solved a conflict between the small amount of game and their social obligations. White lies are the sticking plaster we put over everyday social problems. This suggests a fruitful line of anthropological enquiry: if you want a shortcut to understanding the tensions within a particular social system, find out what kinds of lies it deems legitimate.
The economist Timur Kuran argues that minor private deceptions can have larger public implications. Most of us have, at some point, perhaps in the back of a cab or around the office canteen table, found ourselves faced with a choice between pretending to agree to a political statement in which we don’t believe or risking an unpleasant argument or, worse, inviting social ostracism. In Kuran’s terms, we all have to deal with conflicts between our ‘expressive utility’ – our desire to be truthful – and our ‘reputational utility’ – our standing in the community. We often choose to do so by lying.
If everyone was completely honest about their beliefs all the time millions more arguments and fights would st
art and society would splinter. But a seemingly harmless lie can have ramifications beyond your own conscience. The lie you tell to maintain your reputation might have a knock-on effect if it reaffirms the belief of others in the room – who may privately think the same thing as you – that the ‘correct’ social behaviour is to say otherwise. An accumulation of these small lies can lead to large public lies, enabling the perpetuation of outmoded traditions or social practices long after people cease believing in them. Kuran uses communism in Eastern Europe as an example of when the majority thought differently than their public personas led others to believe; as soon as the regimes started to crumble, public support for them abruptly collapsed. ‘Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideas hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different,’ said Martin Luther King.
The human capacity for deception was born from the need of our ancestors to navigate relationships with others in the African savannah. To put it mildly, things haven’t got any simpler since then. Our intensely social nature is at once the best reason to tell the truth and the reason we can’t do without lying.
Lying resists moral rule-making and rule-following because, of all the sins, it’s the one we need most in order to get along with each other. At every turn, life undermines any strict adherence to truth-telling because life, if it’s any good at least, involves other people, and as Henry Garnet suggested, our obligations to other people will inevitably come into conflict with our desire to be perfectly truthful. Kant argued that lying was always wrong because it fatally undermined our relationships with others. That is surely true, and Browne’s Law reminds us that truth-telling is the only possible default in a functioning society. But it’s also true that those same relationships require us to lie from time to time. A theologian or a philosopher of metaphysics can propose universal moral imperatives; the rest of us want to maintain good relations with our mother-in-law – or save a friend from harm.