LYING AROUND

by Gerald Dworkin
PART I
I have been thinking recently about lying. I don't mean I have been thinking of telling a lie.
Many of the lies I tell do not need to be thought about very much. "I am fine." "Not at all. I
think that color is quite flattering." "Let me pay. My university will reimburse me." "Yes, Dr.
Phillips, I floss every day." I mean I have been thinking about what is a lie and is it ever okay
to tell one and why, if we think lying is wrong, so many of us are liars.
This thinking is not occasioned by some personal crisis of character, or being faced with a
difficult decision to tell the truth. I am a philosopher and have just finished teaching a
graduate seminar called "The Truth about Lying." That seemed a cool title last year when I
had to propose one for the catalog. It seems to me now, well not quite a lie, but more like
false advertising. If I really knew the truth about this difficult subject I would, as they say, be
rich.
I wanted to think about this topic because it seemed to me to have a number of features not
shared by other moral concepts-- such as murder, cruelty, theft, or promise-breaking. First,
while almost all of us would refrain from these acts, most of us lie on a daily basis. (As do
doctors-- at least if you think prescribing placebos is lying. In a recent survey 45-58% ,
depending on how the question was phrased, prescribe them on a regular basis. If it's any
consolation, the sugar pill seems to have been replaced by vitamins.) Second, if any of us
were to act cruelly when this was pointed out to us we would either deny that was an
appropriate description of our action or admit we were cruel and, at least, feel guilt or
remorse. Whereas many of us are prepared to defend our lies--indeed, to glory in them
sometimes ("Boy, did I have you going! Gotcha.") Third, there seem to be contexts in which
not only does the fact that something is a lie not count in any way against what we are doing,
but seems to count in favor--poker, spying, lying contests, getting someone to a surprise
party, lying to the murderer at the door about where his victim is hiding.
There seem to be very large differences between people as to what they regard as a lie. A ,
who makes a mistake about the day of the week, says, " Damn. I lied. It's Tuesday not
Wednesday." But many people distinguish between being wrong and lying. B, who believes
that today is Tuesday ( it is actually Wednesday) says to C, "Today is Wednesday". Some
people think that B lied; others that he tried to lie but failed. Some people think that gross
exaggeration-- "I haven't eaten for over a year"-- is a lie; others do not. Now most ethical
concepts have borderline cases-- is not returning the lost wallet theft? is failing to rescue the
drowning child murder?-- but with lying it sometimes seems that the borderline is the whole
territory.
Another interesting feature is that some people make a sharp moral distinction between lying
and other ways of misleading by what one says. If you ask me what happened to your mail,
and I say "Someone stole it from your box"without mentioning that the someone was me,
some people will say "Well, at least you didn't lie" as if that somehow makes what I did less
serious. The medieval Catholic Church elevated the idea of equivocation-- saying something

true but meaning it one way rather than another, as in the Saint found who reported to
would-be persecutors "That Saint is not far from here,"-- to Clintonian heights. Many
peoplemyself includedsee a difference between lying to someone and failing to tell
them something that they have an interest in being told.
Finally, I find striking the variety of views as to what makes lying wrong when it is wrong.
Here are some of them.
1. Because it is intrinsically wrong. This is philosophyspeak for its just wrong, wrong
because of what it is, wrong by its very nature.
2. Because it produces bad effects, i.e. harms social trust, damages various kinds of
relationshipspersonal, professional, political--- leads people to harm based on false
information, etc.
3. Because lying cannot be something that we all do. If we all did it, nobody would
believe me when I lie and so it would be pointless to lie. But if we all cannot do it,
why am I allowed to do it and not you and you and you But then we are all doing
it.
4. Because it is an assertion of what you believe to be false and this violates a
convention of language.
5. Because of the intention behind the lie, i.e. to deceive another person.
6. Because telling a lie is a violation of the autonomy of the hearer. It is an exercise of
power over another rational individualall the more insidious because it sometimes
is undetected.
7. Because telling a lie treats another person as a means to some end. This is true even
of lies told to benefit the hearer. In such case he is treated as a means to his own
good.
8. Because telling lie is a violation of a duty to yourself to be truthful.
9. Because a principle forbidding lying would be agreed to by all of us if we were trying
to find a principle to regulate our common behavior that we could all agree to.
Now some of these differences simply reflect the variety of moral theories that philosophers
have come up with over the years. (Product differentiation is a feature of the academy.) But
the issue of lying seems to have what economists call a multiplier effect. A unit of thought
produces more than an additional unit of explanations of what is wrong with lying.
LYING AROUND -- PART II
Everybody wants to go to heaven
But nobody wants to die
Everyone wants to hear the truth
But they all want to tell lies.
Having tried the readers patience in the first part of this essay with the task of defining what
it is to lie, I propose to examine some of the moral issues raised by lying. For my purposes it
will be sufficient to define a lie as a false statement made by a speaker who believes it to be
false with the intent to get the hearer to believe the statement. This will not handle all cases

but my view is that one starts with a problem one wants to think about and then adopts a
definition which is relevant and helpful to the problem.
I will also assume that the statement is made in a context where it is understood by speaker
and hearer that one should not say what one believes to be false. So I am assuming that the
speaker is not an actor on stage, does not wink when he makes his statement, is not playing
poker, not trying to conceal the surprise party for his wife, and so forth.
The logic of lying is easy: 1) never lie or 2) always lie or 3) sometimes lie. To my knowledge
nobody has ever argued for policy 2. For one reason it doesn't seem possible to carry it
out. There are puzzles that begin: A missionary arrives on an island where there are two
tribes; one always lies and the other always tell the truth. I always wonder how the members
of the first tribe learned their language. So the only possibilities are 1 and 3.
The strange thing about the view that one should never lie is so many of us pay lip service to
its truth while almost nobody adheres to it. I do not believe it to be true and this is
consistent with believing that almost all lies are either unnecessary or wrong or
useless. Having just experienced eight years of a regime which regarded the truth as
something to be either concealed, manipulated or forgotten, need not lead us to embrace a
thesis that replaces this attitude with one that could lead us to participate in evil (not lying
when the
Gestapo asks whether there are any Jews in the house) or bring injury to others out of
proportion to the harm done by lying (telling your child that her first attempt at a portrait is
terrible).
Let us start with the great philosopher who seems to defend the absolutist view about lying-Kant. In his little essay, "On a Supposed Right to Tell lies from Benevolent Motives," Kant
says, "To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command
of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency." And the French philosopher Constant
draws out what he sees as an implication of Kant's theory "that to tell a falsehood to a
murderer who asked us whether our friend, of whom he was in pursuit, had not taken refuge
in our house, would be a crime. Much ink and some blood has been spilled on figuring out
1) what Kant meant and 2) could it possibly be correct.
If I tried to say more about this in detail you might feel like the little girl who watched a
documentary on penguins and, when asked by her parents how it was, responded "I learned
more about penguins than I wanted to know." So let me make just two important
points. When Kant uses the word "declarations" he is not using that as a word for anything
we might, as it were, declare. He is using it in a legal sense of a statement made in a context
that warrants others to rely on the truth of what we say. When the witness at a trial promises
to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,what he says thereafter is a
declaration. So for Kant a LIE is an intentionally untruthful statement that is contrary to a
duty to tell the truth (a declaration) and. therefore. is necessarily wrong. But not all
intentionally false statements are LIES. So if a murderer comes to the door, and had no
right to demand the truth, and you have not warranted that what you say is true, if you say
what you believe to be false then it is not a LIE.

This certainly does something to explain what seems to be an insane view but it still leaves
open the question whether one should ever lie-- as opposed to LIE. If the bad guy at the
door is not someone who we have warranted to tell the truth to can we lie to him? Well still
no for Kant--because here the Categorical Imperative kicks in. You are not permitted to lie
(in these circumstances) unless everyone is entitled to lie. And if everyone is entitled to lie,
and everybody knows this, then what you say will not be believed. And if you are not
believed, your lie will not save your friend. So universalising your act of lying makes what
you are trying to accomplish impossible, i.e. self-defeating. So we should never lie .
What I want to do now is to give you an idea of what a plausible theory of when we are
allowed to lie might look like. A theory of permissible lying would be more elegant and
simpler if the same features that explained why lying was (almost always) wrong also
accounted for the exceptions. Such a theory would show that the assumptions which
underlie the reasoning for what is wrong with lying do not hold in the cases of the
exceptions. Now there is a family of theories -- consequentialisms -- which meet this
condition because they hold (roughly) that one ought not to (usually) lie because it has
harmful consequences to do so. But, of course, there will be come occasions where the
consequences of lying will be better than those of telling the truth, and consequentialists say
that those are the conditions under which one may lie.
There are many problems with these theories (as there are with all the other theories-- ethical
theory is always a comparative matter to determine which theories have the least serious
problems) but the only one I want to mention here is that it seems to many people that lying
is wrong in virtue of characteristics of what it is to be a lie. Lying is something that is wrong
in itself. And, at least, the more popular consequentialist views --such as utilitarianism-have no room for such an idea. For the good or bad consequences of lying are always
something that lies produce, something external to the nature of lying itself.
So, the question for theories which claim that what makes a lie wrong is intrinsic to the
nature of lying is how to account for permissible lies--assuming there are such. My
suggestion is that the solution take the form of determining what is being assumed in the
standard case where honesty is required, and seeing how the failure of those assumptions to
hold can allow us to act counter to honesty.
To see how such a theory might work let us look at two kinds of cases where it has been
supposed that lies may be permissible -- paternalistic and defensive lies. Paternalistic lies are
motivated by a concern for the welfare of the person we are lying to. Doctors are notorious
for invoking this kind of justification. I have always been very suspicious of this type of
justification and in my contact with various physicians have challenged them to present a
case where they think it was justifiable to have lied to a patient. For many years I was
satisfied in each case that the lie was not justified. Either the doctor was in no position to
know the facts he was relying on -- Smith will try and commit suicide if I tell him he has
cancer -- or the doctor was making decisions (what kind of life was best for the patient)
which he had neither the competence nor the right to make.

Then, the following case was presented to me. A woman's husband had died in a car
accident when the car plunged off a bridge into a body of water. He died from drowning but
it was clear from the physical evidence that he desperately tried to get out of the car and died
a dreadful death. At the hospital where his body was brought his wife asked the physician in
attendance what kind of death her husband suffered. He replied, "He died immediately from
the impact of the crash. He did not suffer." When I present this case almost everyone
judges that the doctor acted correctly -- telling the wife the truth would have no point and
she would suffer greatly to no good purpose. Now there is a lot that I would want to know
before agreeing with this verdict. Was she actually asking for the truth or did she indicate in
subtle ways that she was looking for reassurance? Was the doctor her family physician -with whom she might have an ongoing relationship -- or just someone who happened be
there that night? Was this a woman who preferred painful truths to a false picture of
reality? Was she in a particularly fragile emotional state at the moment but someone who
could handle the truth better in a few days? One of my more cynical colleagues suggested
that if we really wanted to do good we should know whether what the woman wanted to
hear was that her husband -- whom she may have despised -- suffered mightily.
I am inclined to believe that the lie might be justifiable if I have reason to think that the
woman is in a very fragile emotional state. I am also inclined to think that the relevance of
her fragile state is that the normal assumption that we are dealing with a fully autonomous
individual who is capable of determining her actions in accordance with the truth about the
world is not true in this case. If the woman is not autonomous at the moment, the lie cannot
interfere with her autonomy. This doesn't, of course, allow us to lie to her in order to exploit
her lack of autonomy for our gain. But it may allow us to lie to her now-- with the possibility
of revealing the truth at a later time.
It does not matter for my purposes whether or not you agree with me in the particular case.
What is important is whether you think the structure of the explanation is a plausible
one. The structure is one which allows us to deviate from the norm of honesty when one of
the points of being honest--protection of autonomy-- cannot be achieved.
How does such a theory handle the case of defensive lies? These are occasions when
someone intends to act unjustly, with the result that serious harm will be done to another,
and needs information from us to accomplish his plan. It is also an occasion when we
cannot simply remain silent. Perhaps the person seeking to do evil already suspects he knows
the information he needs, and it is indeed the information he needs, but asks us to confirm.
By lying we can divert him at least temporarily and foil his plan.
Here are some things we know when constructing a theory of when it is permissible to tell
defensive lies:
1) Occasions for defensive lying are rare. Perhaps I have been lucky but I have never
encountered one.
2) Like any exception to a general prohibition, the door is opened to expansion beyond what
is legitimate. People will be tempted to interpret injustice and harm too broadly. It is not a
case of defensive lying to cover-up the adultery of your friend when his wife asks whether he
was with you last night.
3) If an exception is allowed this raises the question of whether there are others. One has to
have a theory which explains why this exception is permissible whereas others are not.

The first thing to note is that the same line of reasoning used for paternalistic cases does not
work here. The person who is proposing to act unjustly may be fully autonomous. Hitler
may have been evil but there is no reason to suppose he could not set ends for himself and
rationally integrate true information into determining the means to his ends. What
condition(s) presupposed by the value of honesty and the wrongness of lying fails here?
Tamar Shapiro ( "Kantian Rigorism and Mitigating Circumstances," ETHICS, October
2006) has suggested that we owe honesty only to those who are prepared to engage with us
in a relationship of reciprocity. The unjust person shows by his proposed action that he is no
longer prepared to interact with his fellow creatures in a spirit of reciprocity. Being honest in
this context no longer means or expresses what it does in the normal case where we provide
the truth to one another so that we may reason together as equals.
So we have two background assumptions which can fail. When those whom we propose to
lie to either cannot act autonomously (the fragile wife) or will not engage in reciprocity with
us (the unjust aggressor) the conditions which make honesty the value it is no longer hold.
This failure of the background conditions is what explains why we may lie.
Again, you do not have to agree that this particular theory has it right. What is important is
that you understand a distinct way of arguing for the permissibility of lying.
Since I do not want to turn into the Lying King, I will not continue with a Part III. But were
I to do so I would concentrate on the many little lies we tell. It is often a mistake to
concentrate on the momentous cases--as I have been doing. As J. L. Austin said with respect
to aesthetics, "if only we could forget for a while the beautiful and get down instead to the
dainty and the dumpy." Lies to avoid invasion of one's privacy, to avoid conversation when
one is in a hurry, to encourage those who need a ray of hope, to spare someone the fact that
you think he is an idiot, are more common and, perhaps, may occupy a rather different part
of moral space.