we have a duty of circumspection regarding what we believe as well as what we do.10
Augustine distinguished different kinds of lies, from those that cause harm for
no good reason to those that harm no one and have certain benefits, such as avoiding
harm and injustice. Lying to cause harm or lying for the love of doing so and being
reckless about ensuing harms are both obviously wrong.
Perhaps the most influential ethical idea attributed to Augustine (although it
would be rash to credit him with complete originality, especially as he himself appeals
to Judaic texts) is what has come to be known as the principle that the end does not
justify the means. In this, Augustine combats the view that it is all right to lie for the
purpose of discovering heretics and bringing them to account. The whole purpose
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of bringing heretics to account, he says, is to free the world from error. But how can one suitably proceed against lies by lying? The weight of direct scriptural injunctions goes against lying in any form: “Thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie” (Psalm
5:7); “Thou shalt not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:16); “The mouth that belieth,
killeth the soul” (Wisdom—“The Book of Wisdom” or “The Wisdom of Solomon,
Apocrypha”—1:11); and St. Paul’s “Wherefore put away lying, and speak the truth”
(Ephesians 4:25). But various narratives appear to give tacit approval to some decep-
tions, notably when it comes to saving one’s people from destruction by an enemy.
Besides this appeal to authority, Augustine gives a version of the slippery slope argu-
ment: once you start to do evil to avoid evil, then evil wil no longer be measured by
the norm of truth but according to one’s own desire and habit.11
Augustine teaches that a dogmatic, doctrinal defence of lying to do good cannot be
sustained. It can never be right to lie, but it is right to be motivated to avoid harm, so that lies designed to avoid suffering, injustice, and death deserve less censure. For teachers
especially, the unreserved championing of lies in special circumstances has a tendency to
taint their own profession: “This much I know, that even he who teaches that we ought
to lie wants to appear to be teaching the truth.”12 Appealing to 1 John 2:21, “The truth
cannot give birth to a lie,” Augustine claims that the teacher will be wrong to teach that
it is sometimes right to lie. Augustine implies, although this is not spelled out, that if the teacher shows any compromising attitude to a lie, anything the teacher says becomes
suspect. How can one be sure that the teacher does not see himself or herself in one of
those situations where a lie is called for in the name of some public greater good?
St. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) does not add much, in terms of fundamentals, to the
position of Augustine. Schoolboys of an earlier generation were taught Aquinas’s
distinction between lies that are officious (in the older sense meaning “eager to serve
or please others”), that is to say, done for a good purpose; those that are jocose, where
the lack of intention to deceive removes an essential component of a lie properly
considered; and those that are malicious. Like Augustine, Aquinas holds that the
greater the good intended, the more the sinfulness of lying is diminished. He locates
the wrongfulness of the most serious lies in their violation of obligations to God and
of charity towards our neighbour. Teaching people falsehoods about science or moral
conduct is injurious to them, but telling falsehoods about things not affecting them
is not a serious (mortal) sin.13
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) shares with Augustine an uncompromising view about
the wrongfulness of lying, although he locates the wrongness formally in the violation
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of the principle of universalizability. If you lie, and take as a maxim that lying is all right to get out of a tough spot, then universalizing this maxim implies that anyone in
a tough spot can lie to get out of it. If this were the practice, lies would no longer be
believed, and the lying enterprise would in that way be self-defeating.14Truth-telling is
the case of lying to save the life of an innocent person and refuses to be moved by the
fact that death will follow the truth-telling. If you tell the truth and misfortune comes
through another’s act, the other person is responsible, not you, because you are fulfilling
the duty to tell the truth. On the other hand, if you lie and unexpected misfortune
follows, you bear some of the responsibility, because the causal chain will have gone
through your wrongful act. Kant says (though not very convincingly to many people):
After you have honestly answered the murderer’s question as to whether his intended
victim is at home, it may be that he has slipped out so that he does not come in the
way of the murderer, and thus that the murder may not be committed. But if you had
lied and said he was not at home when he had really gone out without your knowing
it, and if the murderer had then met him as he went away and murdered him, you
might justly be accused as the cause of his death. For if you had told the truth as far as
you knew it, perhaps the murderer might have been apprehended by the neighbours
while he searched the house and thus the deed might have been prevented.15
Here some belief in providence—the idea that an all-powerful God governs hap-
penings in the world and can work things to punish wrongdoing—seems to be
presupposed.
We can approach the morality of lying from the point of view of Kant’s other ver-
sion of his categorical imperative, the imperative that tells you what ought to be done
categorically, not merely hypothetically—“do this if you want to obtain that.” In this
case, we ask whether lying is a violation of the principle cal ing for respect of others as
ends in themselves. Kant does not see any difference resulting, but one might argue
that, if another person is bent on taking the life of an innocent person and the lie, and
only the lie, would deflect him from his intention, then telling the lie would be more
respecting of others as ends in themselves than would be truth-telling. The reason for
this is twofold. First, we respect others as ends in themselves when we help to deflect
them from a path of wickedness and do not contribute anything to help them along
such a path. Second, we respect the potential victim as an end in herself if we act so as
to prevent her demise.
grotius
Moving from absolutists against lying to those who allow exceptions, we now consider
the Dutch jurisprudential thinker, Hugo the Great, known from his Latinized surname
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as Grotius (1583–1645). Grotius grounded the wrongness of lying in the violation of the right of another to the truth. This right stems from liberty of judgment. If I do not
know the truth about some matter, and if I am fed falsehoods, my
judgment will not be
sound. However, that right can be removed under three sets of circumstances. First, the
person with whom we speak may expressly waive the right. (We sometimes play games
in which lies are an accepted part.) Second, the right may be waived by tacit consent or
consent assumed on reasonable grounds. Third, it might be outweighed by another more
compelling right.16
In so grounding the wrongness of lying, Grotius explicitly condones the tell-
ing of fictions to children or insane persons when this is for their own good because
they don’t have the same liberty of judgment as sane adults. He also argues that the
intended audience in any conversation has a right to the truth, but eavesdroppers do
not. If I make use of fictional devices that do not deceive my intended audience, I do
not have to accept blame for misleading those who have no right to be listening.17 A
wartime ruse, in which a false message is sent to an ally in order to deceive an enemy,
is not considered wrong for the same reason. The enemy is not owed the obligation
of truth-telling.
Grotius also allows for tacit consent to justify passing on a false report that will
help a wavering person win a battle. After winning, the person lied-to can be presumed
to approve of this form of deception. Grotius sides with those who place good results
above the value of truth in itself. He notes, though, that in the case of the wartime
“salutary lie,” the infringement on liberty of judgment does not last long, and the truth
emerges soon after.
Grotius conceives of the state as having rights superior to individuals within the
state, and so he supported Plato’s use of the “noble lie” as set out in the Republic.18 The rulers of the state are justified in lying to the public in such a way as to encourage a harmonious state, it being assumed that a strong and well-functioning state will benefit
the general public. In short, lying in the interests of the lied-to, by leaders who know
the best interests of the public better than they do themselves, is acceptable and right,
in Plato’s and Grotius’s accounts. It is this view that is strongly resisted by democratic
defenders of an open society, such as Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky.
Kant replies forcefully to the view that the morality of lying is grounded in the
right of another to the truth. Rights can be waived, but the demands of truth are
not subject to such easy dismissal, the exception of game contexts notwithstanding.
He points out that, by lying, one contributes to the erosion of trust and thereby of
law generally and, thus, commits a wrong to mankind generally.19 Kant is not arguing
consequentially, as if the empirical likelihood of anarchy were the deciding factor. He
insists that truthfulness is an unconditional duty. Here there comes into play his idea
that morality involves more than duties to individuals; social policies must also respect
all persons in a “kingdom of ends.” The duty to tell the truth is linked to the funda-
mental demands of reason, which all share alike. To depart from truth, for whatever
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reason, involves jeopardy to the whole enterprise of reason itself and so cannot be condoned.
Kant, Aquinas, and Augustine view truth as something so fundamental that it
cannot be bartered for some good. As a constituent of reason, a fundamental aspect
of what it is to be human, it cannot be treated as some bargaining chip subject to
negotiation. We can talk about the value of camping, sailing, gold, music, etc., without
those values affecting the discourse within which we discuss these matters. But when
it comes to arguing about the value of truth and the disvalue (or otherwise) of lying
or a cavalier disregard for truth, our attitude towards truth has implications for the
very discourse in which we express this attitude. If you subordinate truth, as a matter
of principle, to the aim of achieving some good objective, you affect the credibility of
what you say. Instead of the presumption in discourse that a person intends to speak
the truth, we have a different presumption. The speaker will speak the truth only if
there is not some greater good to be achieved by a lie or by reckless disregard of the
truth. But part of the reason for wanting to engage in this increasingly complex discus-
sion about lying and truth is that we want to know what exactly is the related truth
about the ethics of truth-telling and lying. Are we not in danger of unhinging our-
selves from the dogged determination to find the truth about these and other moral
questions if we have reached the conclusion that truth is negotiable along with other
competing values in our grab-bag? Truth has a special fundamentality in this respect,
one not shared by the other values and that affects both our own projects and our rela-
tion through discourse with others.
Having said all that, the outcome of the view that would apparently require
revealing the location of the innocent hunted person knowing that the victim would
be murdered seems contrary to decent feeling and simply wrong. Even though truth
has its own particular, very fundamental value in our thought systems, so does the
principle of not cooperating in evil. There is a truth in speech and another truth in
action, as Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have pointed out, the latter giving us
the expression “doing the truth.”20 It is also helpful to recall an insight of Swiss theo-
logian Hans Urs von Balthasar: there is a unity in Beauty, Truth, and Goodness such
that neglect of one is bound to undermine the others. He specifically spoke of the
neglect of beauty, but it seems to be true of each of the others as well.21
Ethical Thought in Late nineteenth-Century Britain
The question of the ethics of lying fascinated a circle of thinkers in Britain during the
late nineteenth century. The circle included Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, his cousin
Edward Dicey (older brother of Albert Venn Dicey), and Mark Pattison, the Master of
Lincoln Col ege, Oxford. These were thinkers who combined philosophical thinking
at a fairly high level with journalistic, legal, and political concerns. Dicey’s “The Ethics
of Political Lying,”22 while clearly politically motivated against Charles Stewart Parnell,
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the Irish MP and Home Rule advocate, contains some interesting philosophical ideas, which are in close proximity to commonsense thinking and acting and to the demands
of everyday administration.
Dicey begins with Dr. Johnson’s definition of a lie as a criminal falsehood, which has
the intention to deceive. He then observes, “we are all agreed that as a general rule it is an honest man’s duty to tell the truth.” He does not claim that this is an axiom that brooks
no exceptions; indeed, he allows that we all at times have said “the thing that is not”
with a view to deceiving and would do it again under the same circumstances without
compunction. But our code does regard falsity as a thing to be condemned. For whatever
reason, Dicey says, the business world has adopted a standard of veracity according to
which “to tell a direct lie is r
ecognized as an offence against the ordinary standard of
commercial behaviour.” The same is true of lawyers, who may hold briefs for a client,
arguing strenuously even when convinced of the client’s guilt, but counsel is forbidden
to “express his own personal conviction, to pledge his own personal belief, as to his cli-
ent’s innocence.” By the code of the medical profession, a doctor is not bound to tell the
whole truth to his patients, “but he is not justified in making statements on the strength
of his professional knowledge and experience which he knows to be untrue.” Diplomats
may make false statements, but they are not “entitled according to our British standard
to strengthen their force by giving [their] personal guarantee of their being made in good
faith.” In various card games, you can play a false card to deceive an opponent, but you
are not allowed to score points you have not earned or refuse to follow suit.
Having made these commonsense observations about the code of veracity, Dicey
considers the view that in politics one is not expected to speak the truth or, at any rate,
that lying in political matters is more venial than elsewhere. If the justification for this
view is the principle that good can come from evil, his answer is that this is casuistry
and “a dogma against which all Protestant divines and moralists have steadily set their
face.” If the justification is that lying is common practice in politics, this is false in fact.
The code of party politics may be lax, but it “does not sanction the employment of the
lie direct” (emphasis added).
This is a most interesting idea and deserves to be compared with modern view-
points. There are some who claim that the public does not mind politicians lying as
long as the lies are not contrary to their own particular interests. Here we have the
claim that the code in politics allows for all kinds of obfuscations and evasions, but
that the direct lie is unacceptable. Dicey elaborates:
In all other things, as I have endeavoured to show, the line is drawn at a distinct mis-
statement of fact, to which the utterer demands credence, in virtue of his hearers’ belief
in his own good faith and loyalty. In politics, as I contend, a like rule holds good also.