The text for this essay might well be a paraphrase of an old
saw: "To lie is human."
None of us is lie-free; in fact we all frequently lie, for various reasons. I
am not referring here to inadvertently stating errors of fact, or to the
"lying" that bluffing poker players or magicians indulge in, but to
purposeful misrepresentations to people who expect the truth. Most often, these are "white
lies," told to avoid embarrassing others or ourselves. Yet the spectrum of lies is vast, a few
points on which I have marked in this graphic:
 |
| The Lying Spectrum. |
Immanuel Kant posited that lying of any sort is always
morally prohibited—one of his categorical imperatives—thus occupying the
extreme left end of this spectrum.
For him, lying is never justified, even to save an innocent life. I believe none of us joins Kant in that
extreme. Similarly, none of us
always lies; that would at any rate be self-defeating, since if one were known
as an inveterate liar, the truth would simply be the converse of whatever one
said.
(That reminds me of an old children's puzzle: If you came to a fork in a road, one
branch leading to a village of only liars and the other to a village of only
truth-tellers, and there is a person at the fork who comes from an unknown one
of these villages, what question would you ask to assure that you are told the
way to the truth-tellers' village?
The answer appears at the end of this posting.)
In between the extremes of the spectrum is a gradated set of
deceptive behaviors. Most
blameless are the white lies, and this is where the dispute begins. Sam Harris, in his Kindle single Lying, propounds the view that even "innocent"
white lies are "the social equivalent of toxic waste," polluting society to the detriment of all.
I previously tangled with another of Harris' immoderate
positions in my posting The Self. There I challenged his claim that free will does not
exist, that at core we are automata controlled only by the gestalt of nature and nurture which has programmed us. Of course, in the present
context that would mean our decisions are beyond our autonomous command, so we really
don't "choose" whether to lie or not.
Harris devotes a good portion of his Lying tractate to the perplexing question of whether to
tell a white lie. How do you
answer a woman who asks, "Do I look fat in this dress?" when in
fact you think she does look fat in it, in fact think that she is fat? Do
you cancel attendance at a dinner party by falsely saying you have a migraine
headache rather than by giving the real reason—that you simply couldn't stand
another night out? Do you
encourage a friend to continue an activity that you are sure he is bad at?
Harris says that, in each of these cases, by telling a lie
"… we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our
dealings with other people.
Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other
sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent
our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered. … By lying, we deny
our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in
ways we did not anticipate. Our friends
may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could only have been
solved on the basis of good information."
According to Harris, telling the woman that she might want
to put on another dress, or actually lose weight, might be valuable information
to be acted upon. Simply asking if
you can beg off the dinner party will at the very least allow the host to trust
your excuses in other, more weighty circumstances. Suggesting to your friend that he change activities might
help him open up new worlds of opportunity that he had been blind to. Moreover, tiny erosions of trust
accumulated by even innocuous white lies add up to eventual underlying
mistrust. And there is the
practical problem of what Harris calls "mental accounting": we have
to keep track of what lies we have told to whom. Telling the truth incurs no such penalty.
So, while Harris steers clear of Kant's categorical
imperative—he himself would lie to save an innocent person—he draws the line
infinitesimally to the right of that place on the spectrum. I have to disagree, even at the risk of
losing the trust of those who read this posting. We all, in our normal interactions with others, expect some
dissemblings and prevarications, and these don't rise to the level of breeding distrust. They are part of the minuet of sometimes-opaque
social behavior we constantly dance, like the courtesy of holding a door open
for someone we despise, or the frivolous exaggerations with which we embellish
a good story. We take these social
artifices in our stride, discounting them in the course of our rational
evaluation of people and situations.
Each of us has an fuzzy line in the lying spectrum that we
rarely cross—usually somewhere in the realm of white lies of various
moment. We venture beyond it only
at the risk of pangs of conscience, disapprobation by friends and family, and
sometimes severe societal penalties.
Where do you draw your boundary? Be careful!
I might not believe you.
________________________________________________________________________
Answer to puzzle: You can't ask "Which way to the village of
truth-tellers?" for—not knowing whether your respondent will tell the
truth or not—you will not know if the answer is correct. Instead, ask "Which road will you
take to go home?" Either type
of respondent will point the way to the truth-tellers' village. This question has the element of
self-reference that often leads to or resolves paradoxes of logic. See my posting Gödel and God.