1. A Brief Introduction to the Morality of Deception



These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:

A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,

An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

-Proverbs 6:16-19

Everything is deception: the question is whether to seek the least amount of deception, or the mean, or to seek out the highest.

-Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

THE PREVALENCE OF DECEIT

The younger a child is when she starts to lie, the more likely she is to succeed and the more intelligent she is likely to be. In studies in which children have been observed in social interactions, four-year-olds lied at least once every two hours, while six-year-olds lied at least once every ninety minutes. Children who lie frequently are generally more intelligent than their peers, and the capacity to lie convincingly is a reliable predictor of social and financial success among adults. More intelligent adults lie more often and more skillfully. Conservative estimates show that people lie at least once a day. Other recent psychological studies have shown that Ivy League university students (perhaps not the most truthful sample of the population) lie as many as forty times per day, and the most successful college students lie about their GPAs more often than their less successful peers-despite the fact that the liars consistently have higher GPAs than the truth tellers. When confronted with their deception, the high GPA liars reported that they did not consider themselves to be lying so much as "reporting a future truth." (When asked about their current GPAs, apparently they tended to reply with the GPA they expected themselves to have in the not-too-distant future.) In yet another study, two strangers were asked to have a conversation for ten minutes; on average, each person in the conversation told three lies in that much time. To make things messier still, other recent research has shown that most times we are telling a lie we don't realize that we are doing so, probably because it is to our evolutionary advantage if we think we are telling the truth when lying (think how much more successful you are at bluffing if you don't know that you're bluffing).

Nevertheless, most of us have been taught since we were children that it is always wrong to lie. We mistakenly think that "Lying is always wrong" is written in the Ten Commandments. Honesty is in fact addressed in the ninth commandment, but it only recommends the much more modest and reasonable claim that we "do not bear false witness against our neighbors." If we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that we all tell lies-probably more often than we'd like to admit-and that, more interestingly, often we do so for good reasons.

First we should notice that there is a difference between what we actually do and what we ought to do. Suppose that most of us do eat oysters. It doesn't follow from that fact that we ought to eat oysters. This is the difference, often insisted upon in moral philosophy (but also as often attacked) between facts and values. In Aristotle's time, nearly all Athenian citizens owned slaves; again, it does not follow from that fact that they ought to have owned slaves.

So even if we agree that it is true that most of us do lie quite frequently, it doesn't follow from that fact that we ought to lie as often as we do. Contemporary psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology have collectively destroyed the old Judeo-Christian cultural conviction that most of us don't lie most of the time. But whether or not deception is morally wrong remains a compelling question.

It's interesting that we lie so often and easily, because as a rule other moral prohibitions are not so commonly, comfortably, and recognizably flouted. We all agree that it's usually wrong to steal, and most of us follow this moral rule; stealing is an exceptional event in the average human life. We all agree that it's wrong to take another human life, except, perhaps, under extraordinary conditions like war or self-defense, and most of us happily never have and never will kill another human being.

So one question is: Given the general consensus that lying is wrong, why is it so commonly practiced? Another question is: Are there circumstances in which it is appropriate to lie? Because if there are, then we might be operating under a kind of collective hypocrisy about deception in everyday life, and collective hypocrisies are at least worth examining more closely. Indeed, as a rule, we think that collective hypocrisies are morally dangerous and should be vigorously exposed.

It is with this cognitive dissonance in mind-the conflict between how commonly we lie and the fact that we generally profess that it is wrong to do so-that I often ask my students: "Is there anyone in here who has never told a lie?" With younger students, there are usually several hands, and I let the other students do the work of showing the ways in which their fellow students must have lied-to such questions as, for example, How are you today? Or, Do you like my new haircut? Or, Did you make it to all your classes today? Or, Why was your paper late? But I was particularly fascinated when on one occasion I asked mid-career business professionals in an MBA class the same question. Usually my adult students won't take the bait. In this instance a fifty-something man raised his hand and said: "In all my life I've never told a single lie." Another student about the same age immediately replied: "Well, congratulations, you just told one." Nevertheless, the first student, who was an accountant, insisted that he had never told a lie, even for the sake of politeness, not even as a child to his parents. He was happy to admit that everyone else lied quite often. He just happened to be the exception to the rule.

For all I or anyone else in the classroom knew, he was telling the truth. But I think we all suspected the same thing: that this was a man who was particularly deeply entrenched in a self-deceptive self-image that, for whatever complex psychological reasons, simply couldn't accept the possibility that he had ever told a lie. The reason I mention this case is that it struck me, as it clearly struck many other people in the room, as disturbing. The dogmatic insistence that one has never told a lie in his or her life is obviously false. As Mark Twain remarked, "A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself as a liar." But the fact that this particular statement, "I've never told a lie," is blatantly false, indeed, self-contradictory-so much so that we suspect it might even be a sign of a kind of mental or psychological imbalance in the person who protests it-shows that we are more realistic about ourselves as liars than we pretend to be. This fact about us as liars-that we know we lie, but we don't like to admit it-will be important for our thinking in the pages ahead.

We should also remember the importance of truthfulness. In the movie Liar, Liar, the character played by Jim Carrey, an incorrigible liar, who lies for a living, finds himself suddenly incapable of lying, and we all quickly realize that it is impossible to engage in everyday life without lying, at least now and then. At the same time, over the course of the movie, the hero realizes that there are certain goods, like trust and intimacy, that are available only if we try to be honest most of the time.

In the ethics of our everyday lives, most absolute moral prohibitions-such as "Never kill a human being"-don't come up, because we don't find ourselves in those kinds of situations. But an absolute moral prohibition such as "Never tell a lie," whether it's offered by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the insect philosopher Jiminy Cricket, or the young George Washington after he (fictionally) chopped down the cherry tree is the sort of claim we need to examine more closely, because we want to do the right thing, for the right reasons, as often as we can.

So I want to take a closer look at the popular notion that lying is wrong. In this chapter, before we get to the tough subject of lying and love, I'll first discuss several philosophers who argue that it is okay to lie at least some of the time. Then I will turn to several philosophers who argue that it is always wrong, or almost always wrong, ever to lie. Finally, I will discuss a few philosophers who argue that when and why it is right or wrong to lie depends upon a variety of considerations and careful thinking about the kinds of situations we find ourselves in.

SOMETIMES WE OUGHT TO LIE

Plato was the first philosopher in the Western tradition who argued that sometimes we must tell lies, and for good reasons. He argues in his book on the ideal society Republic that the leader must tell "a noble lie" (gennaion pseudos in the Greek; sometimes loosely translated as "noble and generous fiction") to the populace so that citizens will be content with their roles in life. Plato's idea that sometimes the government must lie to the populace for its own well-being has since become a relatively standard view in political theory, even in democracies where transparency and truthfulness in government are prized. It is obvious that the government cannot always tell the citizenry "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" when at war (because strategy would be compromised-"Loose lips sink ships") or during terrorist threats (because then it could be very difficult to observe and catch terrorists). We can easily think of many similar examples.

Plato's "noble lie" is justified on the philosophical principle known as paternalism, from the Latin word pater, "father." The familiar idea is that just as in the case of seat belt laws, sometimes a government, ruler, or parent may know what is better for us than we ourselves know. Sometimes if we knew the truth, this line goes, we would be made miserable by it, frightened by it, discouraged by it or would act in ways destructive to ourselves or others or both.

In the example given by Plato, citizens of his imaginary ideal state will be told that they were originally made of different metals-bronze, silver, gold-which suit them for different roles within the society. Tradesmen will be happy as tradesmen because they will believe the lie that they were naturally made for that role; similarly, warriors will believe that they were made to be warriors. A caste system that benefits the entire society can be harmoniously established on the basis of a simple lie that puts the minds of the citizenry at ease.

Plato's ideal state sounds a bit too much like Aldous Huxley's dystopian brave new world for our contemporary, democratic, class-conscious ears. But paternalistic defenses of lying are nonetheless vigorous and familiar. One of the most common and plausible justifications of a paternalist defense for lying comes from the lies we tell to children. We lie about Santa Claus in order to make Christmas a happier time for children and to teach them about the spirit of giving (also, perhaps, to control their behavior; how many times have I lied: "Santa's watching! Now get to bed!"); think about how many billions of dollars are spent every year in supporting this lie. Many people, both inside and outside the medical community, think that a lie to a dying child-such as "No, honey, we don't know for certain that you are going to die"-is generally justified (the medical profession is all over the map on this question, I should add; there is good evidence both for telling the truth to dying children and for lying to them). Many doctors argue that the right to lie to their patients is necessary to the best practice of the profession. And most of us who are parents have lied to our own children many, many times in order to preserve their peace of mind, either about family matters or about the way things are in the world. If a five-year-old asks a penetrating question about a matter she is not yet ready to understand, such as rape or murder or war or whether a plane is more likely to crash during heavy turbulence, most parents will not tell the unvarnished truth. We may not always out and out lie, but we will certainly say something that is not entirely honest and accurate.

Deceiving, prevaricating, exaggerating, storytelling, lying by omission: there are many different ways to lie, but all of them involve the desire to convince the person who is listening to the liar that she, the listener, believes something different from what the liar believes to be true. This is why Montaigne, who was generally opposed to lying, said: "The truth has only one face, but a lie has a hundred thousand." The liar can invent so many things that are different from the truth he knows, especially when speaking to a child, or someone with less knowledge than the liar.

Here's an interesting philosophical puzzle: For something to be a lie, must it be false? Normally we assume that a lie is not true. But consider this case: a man who always lies stands at a crossroads. You approach him and ask him for directions. He tells you to take the road to the left, lying to you about which road to take, as he always does. But it turns out that this man who always lies is also very bad at directions, and so, while lying, he sends you down the right road. Has he lied to you or not?

One solution to this puzzle is to argue that all that is required to lie is the intention to deceive. This is an appealing view because it frees the liar from the large epistemological burden she would otherwise bear to know the truth before lying. If I must know the truth before lying to you because to lie to you, I must tell you something that is false, then I may often be required to do an awful lot of work to discover what the truth actually is. Often we think we know the truth when we do not. Take the example of an ancient Greek astronomer who sincerely believed that the sun revolves around the earth. If we required that the astronomer know the truth about solar and planetary motion before having the capacity to lie about it, we see that he would find himself incapable of lying. But surely he has the capacity-within his particular context-both to report the truth as best he understands it and, consequently, to mislead.

But just to illustrate how vexing this puzzle actually is, if all that is required to deceive is the intention to deceive, then in some sense one can never fail to deceive, because we are completely in control of our intentions. To fail to deceive would, on this account, simply mean that the liar was not believed. However, if you approached the liar at the crossroads, and he intended to deceive you but, because he is bad at directions, pointed you down the right road, and yet you did not believe him, you would find yourself going down the wrong road ... and perversely, the intention of the liar at the crossroads to mislead you would be successful. These philosophical tangles of what exactly constitutes a lie are not trivial for our purposes because part of the reason we deceive so commonly and with such a clean conscience about it is precisely the fact that deception, as Montaigne points out, is so complex and difficult to understand, even for the practiced liar. As we proceed, we shall also find-I gestured at this with my discussion of truth and subjectivity in the prologue-that contra Montaigne, truthful communication is also much more complex than it initially appears to be.

Here's another quick, personal example of how complicated it is to sort out what counts as a lie. I was recently driving to Iowa City, where my wife is a graduate student, when a friend called and asked if I could drive him to the store (his car was in the shop, and he was stuck at home). I said, "I wish I could, but I'm driving to Iowa City." Now, as it happens, I was on the outskirts of Kansas City, where I live, and only a dozen or so miles from my friend's house. I had spoken the literal truth-I was indeed driving to Iowa City-but when I asked my wife what she thought of the statement, she said: "Well, I think you did the right thing, but you should also admit to yourself that you lied to him." Her point was that the naked truth would have hurt his feelings ("I'm in a hurry, and I'm not going to make you a priority"), so yes, the deception was well intended, but my "literal truth" was nonetheless an example of deception. But the same sword cuts the opposite way: sometimes a literal falsehood may disguise a deeper truth.

Let's return to the phenomenon of paternalism as a justification for lying. The English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that it is permissible to lie when the good consequences of lying outweigh the bad consequences of lying, but we must always remember that one of the bad consequences of lying is that it tends to corrode our trust in communication and each other over time. As a general rule of thumb, therefore, lying does more harm than good, but in particular circumstances a lie might generate more good than harm. Mill appeals to what we call soft paternalism, which in the context of deception is the idea that if you had all the facts and were in a position to make the decision on the basis of the truth, you would decide to do what the lie encouraged you to do.

Let's say I'm guarding a bridge that will collapse if more than a dozen or so people try to cross it at once, and because of an emergency a huge crowd of people are in a hurry to cross. I know that if I say, "Only a few people can cross this bridge at a time, or it will collapse," many people will rush the bridge, trying to be the first to cross, and the bridge will in fact collapse. If, however, I lie and say, "Only one person can cross this bridge at a time, or it will definitely collapse," I know that only one person at a time will dare try to cross the bridge, and everyone will be able to cross safely.

Now, because of the noise, the urgency, the smoke, the chaos, I am unable to explain to everyone the whole situation, so I tell the lie. This is justified, Mill argues, because if you were in a position to understand the truth, you would act according to the lie. You would say, "Yes, I see the wisdom of one person's crossing the bridge at a time," and wait your turn in line. It is only the circumstances that require the lie-circumstances that constrain what you and others can be told. This is different from Plato's "noble lie," because, according to Plato, we should be told the lie specifically because we cannot handle the truth-and if we knew the truth, we might act very differently than Plato's ruler wants us to act.

The difference in Plato's and Mill's approaches in part reflects a suspicion that emerged in the intervening two thousand years that we don't know ourselves as well as we suppose we do. Plato's citizens have to be told a bald-faced lie, because if they knew the truth, they would want something that did not benefit the populace as a whole (even if it might help them personally). For Mill, by contrast, we must at times be lied to because we often simply aren't in a position to judge what is in our own particular best interest. Plato imagines that the citizens of his fictional Republic are more rational and self-aware than Mill recognizes actual people to be. This is not to say that Plato thinks people are so rational that they need not be lied to at all; the perfectly rational citizen, in Plato's view, would not need to be deceived because he or she would understand that society requires different people to occupy different roles within society. Plato insists that the people must be lied to for their own good. But the qualification Mill puts on his paternalism is interesting, for our purposes, because it incorporates the modern suspicion, already widespread in the nineteenth century, that we are often irrational, and so we may need to hold and be told false beliefs in order to promote our own flourishing.

Another philosopher who argues that it is sometimes permissible to lie is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi concentration camp for, among other things, refusing to lie about his beliefs. Bonhoeffer argued for a concept he called "the living truth." According to Bonhoeffer, we often mean something different from the literal truth of what we say, and we are often understood to mean something different from the literal truth of what we say.

So, for example, if I ask my wife, "Do you think I'm getting fat?" and she says, "No, honey, you haven't gained a pound," we both know that literally she's telling a lie: it's January, and I always gain about five or ten pounds over the holidays. But "the living truth" of what she's telling me is that she thinks I look fine, and I don't need to worry about my weight. This is also, she knows, the real reason I'm asking the question: I am in fact asking her to lie to me, though I wouldn't want her to lie even more and say, "You look too thin! You need to put on a few pounds! Let's order pizza tonight!"

Many of the stories we tell each other, or the stories in the Bible, Bonhoeffer argues, are not literally true; they are often in fact literally false. Nevertheless, they may communicate a "living truth" that could not be communicated in a better way.

To return to the story of Santa Claus: explaining that giving is a good, virtuous, kind thing is going to make only so much headway with a four-year-old. But telling a story about a good-natured, funny fellow who picks one day a year to give gifts to everyone, after spending the whole year making them-that falsehood teaches the four-year-old a living truth about generosity that the child otherwise might not understand. Bonhoeffer's notion of the living truth introduces the idea that sometimes the successful communication of a particular way of understanding the world or interpreting a situation-of communicating, to refer to our earlier discussion, a subjective truth or meaning-may require that we use fictional or false discourse.

The connection between the difficulty of communicating subjective truth and Bonhoeffer's notion of the living truth is not coincidental: Kierkegaard, who introduced the notion of subjective truth into our discussion, was Bonhoeffer's single most important philosophical influence. Bonhoeffer's idea of the living truth derives from Kierkegaard's notion of indirect communication, and though we don't want to be distracted by the intricate philosophical nuances of Kierkegaard's view, the basic idea is that an underlying truth can sometimes be conveyed only by a literal falsehood. This is why, both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer thought, so many of our most important truths are communicated in myths, fables, stories, and other forms of discourse that are strictly speaking false.

Bonhoeffer expands the idea of "the living truth" into realms of discourse and meaning where the truth is at best unknown. For example, when we make our marital vows-to love each other "until death do us part"-we are not really in a position to make any such promise. Half of all marriages end in divorce; many other marriages that last until death are unhappy ones. And yet the vow contains a "living truth" about the nature of love, the intensity of our particular love for each other, and our intention to try our best to maintain that love. When I say, "I will love you until I die," I may well have a nagging question in my mind about whether or not that is likely or even possible. Some cynic might reasonably protest: "Come on! You're in no position to make a promise like that!" But the point, Bonhoeffer would insist, is that I am communicating a living truth about my intentions and about what I hope will be the case, as well as about how I am feeling at that particular time. The literal truth of my words may be suspect, but the living truth of what I am saying, Bonhoeffer argues, is secure.

Of course we can readily see that a notion like "the living truth" can also get us into all sorts of trouble. It's all too easy to tell a lie and then protest, "But what I was really trying to say was that I loved you!" If a nine-year-old is suddenly embarrassed by a friend in the schoolyard when she protests that Santa Claus is real and all her friends mock her for continuing to believe that childhood lie, she won't be easily consoled by her parents' long-winded explanation of Bonhoeffer's idea of the living truth or Kierkegaard's notion of indirect communication. The living truth may be used to manipulate the beliefs of others-in fact that's what it is designed to do-and we generally worry, and for good reasons, that the manipulation of the beliefs of others is at least morally suspect, if not simply morally blameworthy. Paternalism of this kind-if we assume that we know what's best for someone else to believe-is sometimes presumptuous and always risky (when and why does paternalism end?).

Now we'll turn to some arguments that it is always (or almost always) wrong to lie.

ONE SHOULD NEVER LIE

There's a ferocious knocking on your door. It's past midnight. You stumble downstairs, open it a crack, and a bloody man screams: "She's after me! Please save me! She's going to kill me!" He's large and strong but young, and you can see he's in terrible trouble. You open the door and tell him to hide in the closet upstairs. A few minutes later, while you try to explain the situation to your spouse, who is already calling the police, you hear a polite rapping. Back to the door. An old woman stands on the porch, an ax in her hands, and she asks: "Excuse me, is there a man hiding in your house? Because I plan to murder him."

Do you lie?

No, you cannot, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant says. It is always wrong to lie, even to the murderer at your door, even in the attempt to save a human life. There may well be other things that, morally speaking, you ought to do: close the door; resist the murderer; try to help the poor man escape through a window. But absolutely under no circumstances can you lie to the murderer.

This is one of the most famously controversial and contested claims in the history of the literature on deception-indeed, in the history of moral philosophy. How on earth does Kant defend it? And why would he want to do so?

We don't want to attempt to learn the intricacies of Kant's moral philosophy-he is probably the most influential, and the most complicated, of all the moral philosophers-but we have to learn a little bit about Kant's ethics before we can understand why he is so strict in his prohibition of lying.

For Kant, to act morally requires that one act freely. He summarizes this in one of the great slogans of moral philosophy: "Ought implies can." That is, if we say that a person ought to do something-that she is morally required to do something-it follows from this that she is free to do it (or not do it). If I duct-tape you to a lawn chair and start to throw house cats into your swimming pool-sorry, there are lots of odd examples when you begin with the problem of the murderer at the door-it doesn't make sense for me or anyone else to insist that you ought to save the drowning cats. Why not? Because you are in fact incapable of doing so; it's silly to say you ought to do it when you can't do it. If, however, you are simply lounging by the pool with a margarita in your hand when I start my cat-tossing act, then we will say, "Hey, you ought to do something about it," whether by stopping me or by saving the cats.

So to be moral, we must be free. But to be free is to make choices based on our beliefs. We don't think freedom is merely acting out randomly; we think freedom is fundamentally the ability to choose. Furthermore, for my choices to be free, they must be based on reasons that I have arrived at freely. If you have coerced me into believing something, through controlling my thoughts with drugs or some kind of diabolical technology, we would not say that I am acting freely on the basis of those beliefs.

An example: I freely get out of bed most mornings to go to the office to write and lecture. Why? Because I correctly believe it is something I both enjoy and need to do. But let's suppose you gave me a drug that made me believe that my kitchen was in fact my office, and my living room my classroom. Then, when I get up in the morning to type at my sink and lecture to my bookshelves, I am not really freely doing what I would choose to be doing. You are controlling my beliefs and interfering with my freedom. You are making me do what you want me to do and manipulating what I can do, no more and no less than when I duct-taped you to your lawn chair.

But what is it that I do when I lie to you? I control your beliefs, or attempt to control your beliefs, in precisely the same way as you controlled mine when you gave me the drug that kept me in my apartment. And insofar as you are controlling me, you are preventing me from being free. But if I am not free, I can no longer do what I ought to do. I can no longer exercise the power of morality. When you lie to me, no matter what you lie to me about, you enslave me.

In arguing against the laws permitting slavery in the European colonies, as well as against forced prostitution and other immoral practices, Kant writes: "Always treat every human being, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never merely as a means, but also always as an end in themselves." When you treat someone as a means, you are using that person, you are controlling him or her, and so you are preventing that person from participating in the moral sphere. There is nothing worse we can do, Kant argues, than prevent a person from exercising his or her morality. (Indeed, what could be more immoral than denying someone else the right to morality?) When we treat others as "ends in themselves," we are respecting them as free human beings, moral creatures like us.

Accordingly, when you tell the ax-wielding old lady on your doorstep that there is no man hiding in your house, you are preventing her from even having the choice to do the right thing. True, you might send her away, but she wouldn't leave freely. And suppose, Kant says, that as you send her away, she sees the burly young man who has been hiding in your attic climbing down the gutters outside? Now you have been a cause of her discovering him, because you controlled her beliefs. You cannot control the world, Kant argues-it is full of surprises-but you can control your own intentions and make your own choices, and you can respect the right of every other human being to do the same. When you lie to the old woman, you interfere with the very possibility of her making the right choice. Now this does not prevent you, should she make the wrong choice, of trying to stop her. Kant is not suggesting that we all should be allowed to do whatever we like or whatever we choose. He is simply pointing out that to control someone else's beliefs by lying to that person is to immorally interfere with the very possibility of that person's making a moral choice.

There's another reason it's always wrong to lie, according to Kant. To act morally, he thinks, is to act rationally; reason inclines us toward the good, in the most ordinary, commonplace sense. This is an idea Kant found in Socrates, and it was further developed by Plato and Aristotle, but the simple idea is that when we act reasonably, we will naturally choose what is good for us rather than what is bad for us. A moral life, at the end of the day, will on this account be the culmination of a whole series of rational choices about what is good for you and those around you.

These good choices need not be about abstract ethical problems but can include very ordinary, everyday decisions. A reasonable person will choose a bed that suits his needs over one that does not; that bed is the bed that is "good" for him. If you go into Home Depot and reasonably ask for a hammer that is excellent at pounding and pulling nails, you will wind up buying a good hammer, the right hammer for you. If, however, you irrationally ask for a hammer that is made of cheap plastic and will break at the first whack, you will wind up buying a lousy (though perhaps very cheap) hammer. Similarly, to find the good action, Kant thinks, we will use reason to seek the best beliefs and principles to guide us in that action.

Now, bear with me. To be rational is to be consistent. The basic principle of logic is noncontradiction: our basic ideas, if true, must not contradict one another. A thing must be either a hammer or not a hammer; it can never be both a hammer and not a hammer. Think about lying, Kant says: Is it a consistent and rational thing to do or an inconsistent and irrational thing to do?

Well, to lie is to pretend that one is telling the truth. If I said to you, "Now I'm going to lie to you," and then told a lie, it wouldn't work. In order successfully to lie, I must feign truthfulness. But that's self-contradictory; lying works only if you suppose that I am speaking truthfully. If we always told the truth, we would not contradict ourselves (though the world might be a bit difficult to get along in); if, however, we always lied, it would be impossible to communicate at all-and thus impossible to lie. Lying contradicts itself; it is therefore irrational and, Kant argues, contrary to the good.

We can never lie, therefore, not even to the murderous old woman at the door, because we are coercing her out of her very morality, and we are acting in a fundamentally irrational-and thus immoral-way. We are coercing her and contradicting ourselves.

Kant's odd but powerful arguments can be traced back to another, much older philosopher who also believed it was (at least almost) always wrong to lie: Socrates, the fourth-century ancient Greek. The ancient Greeks consulted oracles when they were confused about the right thing to do, and on an archway above the oracle at Delphi, the most renowned of the ancient Greek oracles, were carved the words gnothi seauton, "know thyself." Socrates understood this maxim as not merely an epistemological but also, and more important, as a moral imperative. Socrates advocated the famous, controversial thesis that "Knowledge is virtue, and vice is ignorance." No human being, he thought, would willingly choose to do harm to himself, and so long as we are free to choose the good, it is only through a deficiency of thinking about it that we would do the wrong or harmful thing.

Socrates argued that a rational person will easily see, if he thinks it through, what will be in his best interest: cultivating friends; eating simple, healthy foods; having enough money, but not too much; acting in a pious and law-abiding fashion; treating others with respect. All these things are simple truths that are recognizable to a sound reason, which is also willing to inspect itself and recognize where it has defects (thus, "Know thyself"). But given this way of thinking, one can see that among the worst things would be bad information-falsehood-and worse even than bad information is the deliberate spreading of falsehood, or lying. Because no one person can know everything, we have to rely upon one another for the truth: on carpenters for the truth about good shelves and beds; on sailors for good information about ships; on butchers and farmers for good information about food; on priests for good information about the wants and needs of the gods. So long as we report the truth to one another, and we all consult people who we believe have reason to know the truth-if we stick to the experts-we shall ourselves be able to live good, happy lives. But if those people should lie to us or if we lie to the people who rely upon us, we are undermining our collective ability to live good lives. (Socrates was notorious for exposing the ignorance of self-proclaimed experts.)

For the ancient Greeks and Socrates, to live a good life is to live a moral life, to be a moral person. They did not separate the good life of a person from the good or bad actions of a person in the way that we sometimes tend to do today. So to lie to someone is to interfere with the possibility of that person's being happy. And it's just as important not to lie to ourselves. We must not pretend to know things we don't or fail to investigate our own beliefs in order to make certain that we have the right sorts of beliefs that will lead to good, rational lives. To lie is not merely to interfere with goodness: it will also undermine the very possibility of happiness.

One final, quick note on another thinker who argues that it is almost always wrong to lie, the feminist and poet Adrienne Rich. Rich argues that it is wrong to lie, especially in contexts of trust, because we build our entire worldviews around the beliefs that we suppose are truly reported to us by the people we love. To find out that one has been lied to by an intimate, Rich says, is to feel as if we were going crazy. She also says that lying is terrible for the liar because "the liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness": by hiding her beliefs, her mind from the people around her, the liar makes it difficult or impossible for intimacy to be established between her and others. In a breathtaking statement of why we should at least try to tell the truth to each other, Rich writes:

It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative, groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

Socrates was never quite this earnest; he preferred a good ironical joke to strong statements of emotional feeling. But I think he nevertheless would have agreed. To love one another is to trust one another, and to trust one another is to try, at least most of the time, not to lie.

THE MORAL COMPLEXITY OF TRUTHFULNESS AND DECEPTION

The Tibetan Buddhist lama, philosopher, and filmmaker Dzongsar Jamyong Khyentse Rinpoche was once asked by a student: "Is it ever right to lie?" The Rinpoche said: "Well, suppose a murderer comes to your door, searching for his victim. Which would do less harm: to lie to the murderer and send him away, or to tell him the truth and help him accomplish his bloody goal?"

A principle of Buddhism is the practice of right speech, and in general right speech means truthfulness. But there are many circumstances, the Buddha teaches, in which right speech, which also means skillful speech, requires something other than the truth, including an out-and-out lie. For the Buddhist, there is a greater moral principle at stake-the principle of avoiding doing harm-that informs and even trumps the general moral virtue of telling the truth.

Similarly, in Confucianism the virtues of harmony and filial piety may require the moral person to tell a lie or at least to avoid speaking the truth. To maintain harmony among many members of a group or even to maintain harmony among two friends, one cannot answer every question honestly. If a husband asks his wife, "Honey, does my butt look fat in these jeans?" the naked truth-so to speak-could certainly destroy harmony between the husband and the wife. Similarly, if a mother were to ask her son-in-law, "Do you want me to move out of the house and leave the two of you alone?" filial piety-respect for one's elders, especially when those elders are parents-requires the son-in-law to give the answer the mother-in-law is seeking, regardless of whether or not he is speaking the truth.

In the Western tradition the fourth-century ancient Greek Aristotle, the student of Plato, who was the student of Socrates, first introduces the idea that truthfulness is a virtue that depends upon circumstances. According to Aristotle, it is permissible for Socrates, the famous ironist, to dissemble by pretending to know less than he really does. Aristotle is the first among the Greek philosophers to call Socrates a liar, though many philosophers after him make the same surprising claim. The reason Socrates could ironically dissemble without doing something morally blameworthy, Aristotle argues, is that Socrates was dissembling with an educational purpose. (In the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard used the same example to illustrate his idea of indirect communication, and in the twentieth century, writing under the influence of Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer used it to illustrate the idea of the living truth.) According to Aristotle, if Socrates admitted that he in fact had a lot of knowledge-rather than, as Aristotle says, lying by claiming he had none-then the persons around Socrates would not recognize that like Socrates, they too had to search for the truth. By pretending not to know, Aristotle says, Socrates encourages us to recognize that we too don't know what we think we know, and we have some work to do before claiming that we understand the truth. Truthfulness is almost always to be preferred, Aristotle insists, but sometimes lying is the only way you can get through to people. Aristotle also notes that at least certain kinds of lying, such as boasting, may be relatively harmless or even entertaining.

Most of us think of the fifteenth-century Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli as one of the few figures in the history of Western thought who actually advocates lying. When we say Machiavellian, we almost think "deceptive" and rarely mean it as a compliment. But the fact of the matter was that Machiavelli believed that all modes of speech, and especially truth and deception, were entirely pragmatic in nature. A person-and especially a ruler-should consider the circumstances before deciding whether or not to tell the truth. In most circumstances, Machiavelli observes, the truth is the quickest and easiest way to deal with a problem. The truth is easy to remember, and lies often are not. The truth does not require creative energy; lies can be exhausting to invent and to maintain. The truth often "speaks for itself"; sometimes people can simply see that what you say is true, and no further argument is required. A lie, by contrast, often requires some salesmanship.

In fact Machiavelli warns leaders that if they want to hear the truth, which he thinks is invaluable for a successful leader to hear, he must make the people around him understand that they will not benefit from lying to him or suffer for being honest with him. He advises: "There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you."

All that said, Machiavelli is quick to add that should circumstances require it, there is nothing morally blameworthy about a lie, so long as it is the most practical and effective way to achieve the practical goals a person has given him or herself. For a leader, that goal is the maintenance of power and the welfare of the state, so he will lie to the populace-and even to his own advisers-whenever he needs to do so in order to guarantee both his own and the state's security. When the leader does in fact need to deceive, Machiavelli writes, "Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived."

Machiavelli gives the discussion an interesting twist because he takes the moral content out of statements and places it on the uses and consequences of statements. What we say is in itself morally neutral, according to Machiavelli. Being true does not make a statement good; being false does not make a statement bad. What will determine the value of a statement and, therefore, whether or not it is moral to make that statement will depend upon its effects. In this way, Machiavelli is like John Stuart Mill, whom we discussed in the first section of this chapter: he is concerned about the good or bad consequences of what we say, rather than the statement or even the intention behind the statement. It is right to lie when it helps your cause, wrong to lie when it harms it. When in doubt, tell the truth, because it requires less effort and is less likely to cause you trouble down the road.

Like Machiavelli, popular culture has given the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche a bit of a bad reputation, and here again we might expect that Nietzsche advocated lying. But in fact Nietzsche was a vigorous champion for the truth; he thought, like Socrates, that the most dangerous force in culture is our collective tendency to close our eyes to the truth. Nietzsche feared the coming effects of the increasingly anti-Semitic politics of Germany and the Aryan movement that came with it (Nietzsche's sister was married to a famous anti-Semite, and Nietzsche despised the man for it). The most dangerous lies, Nietzsche argues, are what he called blue-eyed lies (a jab against the Aryan movement), lies that we tell ourselves before we tell them to other people. Nietzsche argues that we all learn to lie by first lying to ourselves; he argues (and contemporary scientific research on the subject agrees) that we lie much more often to ourselves than we lie to other people. But the worst process, according to Nietzsche, is when we want something to be true that we know is false, convince ourselves of the truth of it so that we feel comfortable with the falsehood, and then proceed to tell that lie to other people.

So, for example, when the fervor over weapons of mass destruction was at its worst during the Second Iraq War,The Economist magazine ran a cover showing George W. Bush and Tony Blair, smiling, arm in arm, with the caption "Sincere Deceivers." What the editors of the magazine meant to convey was that Bush and Blair were not consciously lying because they had already convinced themselves of the truth of what they wanted to believe, even though all the evidence suggested that the truth was something else.

This is not to say that Nietzsche thought self-deception was blameworthy; on the contrary, he was a vigorous advocate for the strategic value of self-deception. What he argues against is what we might call naive self-deception-self-deception practiced by people who do not understand the trick they are playing on themselves; self-deception of the variety that simply selects beliefs unreflectively. Sophisticated self-deception, on Nietzsche's account, will require that the self-deceiver actually uses her manipulation of her own beliefs strategically to accomplish goals that would otherwise, with the wrong set of beliefs, be unattainable (this sounds complicated or even impossible, but we will look more carefully at how this works in the pages to come).

Despite the fact that he is suspicious of many kinds of lies, Nietzsche agrees with Machiavelli that many good things can be achieved only through deception. According to Nietzsche, one of the primary ways that life acquires meaning is through the power of art, and art relies heavily on deception in order to achieve its effects. "Art is the least dishonest lie," Gustave Flaubert observes, and Nietzsche, who early in his career claimed that only art could justify human existence, is entirely in agreement. Novels are literally false, but they can offer us great consolation during difficult times, make us feel less alone, and even teach us "truths" about human psychology and ourselves. Movies depend entirely upon illusion, but how many of us have learned about compassion for the less fortunate-and other forms of empathy-through film?

A difference between most forms of art and, say, the living truth communicated in the story about Santa Claus is that art can achieve its effects despite the fact that we recognize its falsehood. For Nietzsche, this is crucial to what makes art a model for the kind of truthfulness he finds most compelling: we can both recognize that a novel is literally false or fictional and nonetheless find a great deal of meaning in it. In fact, if you consider the intellectual works that have most influenced your own way of looking at the world-at least this is certainly true for me and many people I know-I suspect you'll find that novels, movies, and plays (all of them literally false) have had a far greater impact on your general attitude about life than the nonfiction works you have read and experienced. This fascinating kind of mental experience-when we know something to be false and yet experience it to be truthful or meaningful-will prove to be the model for the account of love I give throughout the book. In my account, as we shall see, marriage is like a terrific novel a couple is writing together; Nietzsche himself saw all human existence this way, understanding life as literature.

For Nietzsche, Odysseus is the exemplar of the character who understands lying, in both its bad and its good aspects. Odysseus lies very often (some say constantly), though he does it mostly for the entertainment of others. But he is also perfectly happy to deceive in order to get himself out of a jam by causing as little harm to others as he can. He often lies merely to give someone else a good surprise, as when he lies to his father, pretending to be someone other than his son, so that he can give him all the more pleasure when he reveals himself and his father realizes that after all those years, his son has at last returned safely home. We should note that according to the ancient Greeks, to lie to one's parents was the very worst kind of lie you could tell, so when Homer has Odysseus lie even to his own father, Homer is strongly endorsing the idea that a clever lie told with good intentions is not a morally blameworthy thing. Importantly, according to Nietzsche, Odysseus always lies with his eyes open-that is, he does not lie to himself when he lies to others. Odysseus is a master deceiver, but he is not self-deceptive.

In a famous scene from the film Lawrence of Arabia, T. E. Lawrence accuses the diplomat Mr. Dryden of telling lies to the Arabs because he led them to believe that they were fighting for a free Arabia. Dryden responds strongly to Lawrence: "If we've been telling lies, you've been telling half-lies. A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it."

Lies, other kinds of deception, and self-deception, Nietzsche thinks, all may often be necessary to achieve good ends; like Machiavelli, he did not think that either truthful statements or falsehoods have a morality attached to them. They are as good or as bad as the circumstances and the outcomes make them. Replying to an accusation he makes against himself that he may tell lies, even to himself, in his own philosophical work, Nietzsche writes:

But even if this all were true and I were accused of it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know about the amount of self-preserving cunning, or reason and higher protection that is contained in such self-deception-and how much falseness I still require so that I may keep permitting myself the luxury of mytruthfulness? Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception.

Nietzsche is intellectually refreshing in a way so few thinkers are precisely because he refuses to oversimplify and because he is honest-honest enough to admit that he has to lie in order to create a truthfulness that captures the world as he understands it.

What Nietzsche did fear, however, were the psychological, political, and social consequences of what Dryden calls half-lies, the kinds of lies told by a person who refuses to honestly examine the truth before deciding whether or not a lie is appropriate. These, according to Nietzsche, are both the most common and the most blameworthy sorts of lies.

THE PARADOX OF SELF-DECEPTION

Not only do we lie to one another, but as we've already observed, we are enormously accomplished at lying to ourselves. Evolutionary biologists speculate that even nonhuman animals self-deceive because it is easier to frighten off a potential predator or intimidate a competitor if the member of a species "believes" the deceptive appearance that creature is trying to create. All species bluff more successfully when the bluffing species "believes" its own bluff.

Self-deception has often been described as a paradox because it doesn't seem possible both to know that something is true and to persuade oneself of the opposite (or vice versa). I can lie to someone else because I can hide the truth of my belief from that person, but to lie to myself, I have to hide from myself what I know myself to believe. I have to know some proposition p and yet convince myself of the untruth of p, or of some other proposition that is at odds with p. If we didn't do it all the time, we'd be certain that it simply wasn't possible.

The so-called paradox of self-deception has not been solved, but among philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists something like a consensus has emerged that depends primarily on the notion that the mind has many parts, and you can hold one belief in one part of your mind while holding a different belief in another part of your mind. We can experience cognitive dissonance, or the experience of holding two contradictory beliefs as true, even at the same time. It looks as if there are many different ways we can lie to ourselves: with selective attention; in the manner we describe our beliefs to ourselves; in the way we remember and misremember events or "facts"; through the kinds of narratives we use to make sense of ourselves and our beliefs. We rationalize-that is, we use reason to select the facts that will provide for us the conclusion we already know we want to arrive at, and we ignore those facts that might tend to contradict that conclusion.

Often we suppose that self-deception is straightforwardly bad. The self-deceived alcoholic who tells himself that he will stop drinking tomorrow is not doing himself any favors. But the same example cuts the other way: one of the maxims in Alcoholics Anonymous is "I will take a drink tomorrow," a consciously chosen self-deception that works because, as the old saying goes, tomorrow never comes. We all self-select false beliefs; whether the process is good or bad depends upon the ends that those self-deceptions serve. What is particularly fascinating about human psychology and self-deception is that even when we know the belief we are choosing is false, the false belief may still help us achieve goals we otherwise couldn't accomplish. The alcoholic "knows" he won't really be taking a drink tomorrow, but the fact that he tells himself he will take that drink tomorrow is enormously helpful in enabling him to avoid taking the drink today.

William James explains how self-deception works, and why it is so powerful, with the story of a hiker contemplating the daunting task of leaping a mountain crevasse. The truth is that the hiker doesn't know whether or not he can make it; it looks like too great a jump. If forced to confess "the truth" of what he believes, James suggests, the hiker would have to admit that the leap is simply farther than he can possibly jump. But because he has no realistic choice other than to venture it, he lies to himself and tells himself that it can be done. If he tells himself he'll never make it, we all know what will happen. But if he insists, despite his justified doubts, that he can leap farther than he's ever leaped before, he at least-we all know this from personal experience-has a better chance of making the jump than he otherwise would.

Some self-deceptions are consciously chosen; many others are not. Much of what we suppose we know to be true may be self-serving lies we are telling ourselves: consider how adept we all are at rewriting our own pasts in order to make them more palatable. And this fact of course considerably complicates our ability to tell the truth to others. I can be completely sincere-in some sense, utterly truthful-while reporting a falsehood that part of me knows to be false. The better we are at thoughtless self-deception, the easier it becomes for us to think of ourselves as completely truthful people. By contrast, if we cultivate the habit of carefully scrutinizing our beliefs, we may find that being a truth teller is much harder than we previously supposed, as many of the beliefs we really want to believe are true are exposed as false.

William James tells another story to explain how self-deception works. He asks us to consider how many young men have convinced women to fall in love with them by protesting over and over: "But you simply must love me!" The self-deception here is complex: it requires that the young lover believe that the beloved can love him, and also that his protests can persuade her to love him; it perhaps even requires that he self-deceptively believe that she already does love him but has not yet recognized the fact. In any event, James argues, it works: through self-deceptively insisting that what is not the case must be the case, the young lover manages to transform his false belief into a true one. Suddenly the sought-after beloved does in fact return his love.

As with the hiker example, James is relying on two deep psychological forces to accomplish the successful self-deceptive act: the need to believe and the resources provided by the belief. This combination of need and resourcefulness in the operation of self-deception is useful for our purposes, because these are the same powers, according to Plato, that give birth to erotic love. In closing this discussion of what several philosophers have had to say about deception and self-deception, allow me to anticipate our subject in the chapters to come by briefly looking at the parallel between one of Plato's accounts of erotic love and William James's account of self-deception.

In Symposium, probably Western literature's most celebrated work on love-the Kama Sutra is the most celebrated work from Eastern literature-Plato has several characters discuss the nature of love during a drinking party, while they wait for Socrates, who is running late. When Socrates at last arrives, he approves the subject but admits that he himself doesn't know anything about love, a characteristic Socratic claim. But he adds that he was once taught about love by a woman named Diotima who, to him, seemed to be a reliable source on the subject. (That Socrates would refer to a woman in this context is fascinating, even shocking, given the chauvinistic and homoerotic world of ancient Athens.) Diotima ultimately teaches Socrates that love is a ladder to the truth. But along the way she tells him a myth about how erotic love, or eros, came to be conceived. Eros, she warns him, is the child of "resourcefulness" (Poros) and "need" (Penia). Poros, she tells Socrates, had to get drunk before he would sleep with Penia, who deceived him into getting her pregnant while he was in a blackout. Thus eros, conceived in deception, is a combination of our resourcefulness and our need.

Now the idea that both self-deception and erotic love combine these two psychological forces, need and resourcefulness, does not itself advance an argument. Lots of different psychological situations involve both need and resourcefulness: to desire at all, we might argue, is both to need (or imagine a need) and to seek, imagine, or rely upon the resources to satisfy that need. The connection between James's account of self-deception and Diotima's account of eros is merely allusive. But what appeals to me about this comparison between self-deception and erotic love is that it is in the coupling of need and resourcefulness that both find their strength. Mere need alone will not sustain a self-deception for long; no matter how earnestly a parched wanderer in the desert lies to himself that an oasis is real, he will eventually die of thirst. Similarly, need alone will not create erotic love; unless there is some hope of that love's being requited, unless the lover believes he has some resources to accomplish the goal of being loved in return, he'll soon give up in despair. Still more to the point, we shall soon see that self-deception is not only a common strategy of lovers but among the most useful techniques they have at their disposal. Diotima recognizes, when she tells Socrates her useful myth, that it is deception and not the truth that brought love into the world.



Copyright © 2015 by Clancy Martin