Ben Conroy
Everyday Philosophy
Much philosophical discussion about lying has tended to focus on the most extreme of extreme cases. “Is it acceptable to lie to a murderer about whether or not his would-be victim is in your house?” As is often the case in philosophy, the extreme case is a very bad place to start. Starting to think about the ethics of lying in the context of a case like this is likely to muddy, not clarify our thinking: we should figure out what sort of action lying is and only then turn to difficult cases.
Lying
My view is that lying is a bad sort of action, because it frustrates the purpose of human speech, and because it distorts people’s ability to perceive the truth about the world.
What do I mean when I say that lying frustrates the purpose of speech? It’s a standard part of Catholic ethics (and Aristotelian ethics more broadly) that living things, types of actions, and kinds of processes have things that they are for, or directed towards. What human speech is first and foremost ordered to, the purpose at which it aims, is the transmission of truth. It’s perfectly fine to use the human voice for other things (singing, music etc.), but to deliberately undermine the central purpose of speech is to misuse it.
This view is not taken by many people to be particularly credible. This is partially because so many lies seem harmless.
Now, some ‘white lies’ are arguably not lies at all. Saying something false is not enough to make something a lie: jokes and fictional stories are not lies. What makes them not so? The question is more complicated than it appears, but one part of it is that the listener is not expecting to be told the truth in this situation. Everyone involved is aware something false is being said, and no one is lying. In the case of a joke or a story, the aim of the type of conversation that both people are involved in is not the reporting of facts. There’s much more to be said, but this rough distinction helps with a lot of cases.
It suggests, for instance, that saying “grand” when asked by an acquaintance how you are is not a lie, even if you’re miserable. Here the “how are you?” functions as a bit of manners or a pleasantry, not a sincere question, and is understood by both parties to be so. But if your significant other sincerely asks you for your opinion on an outfit, to say something you don’t believe about it would be lying.
Harmless
These sorts of lies still seem pretty harmless. Many of them, indeed, are not that bad. But lies still make the world that bit more difficult to perceive truly for the person lied to: they distort creation in the eyes of the deceived. And lying for convenience is habit-forming: as with small acts of cruelties, small lies make it easier to tell bigger ones.
This distorting effect can eventually have disastrous consequences: people’s ability to accurately perceive the world can be distorted to such an extent that they start to lose touch with it entirely.
Winner
Consider the claim that the 2020 US election was stolen: that the real winner was Donald Trump and that widespread electoral fraud brought about Joe Biden’s apparent victory. Leave aside the question of whether Donald Trump is fully aware of himself as lying when he says that the election was stolen, or whether, unable to live in a universe in which he was defeated, he has convinced himself that the claim is true. What’s certain is many of those surrounding Trump are lying: his lawyers from Rudy Giuliani on down have alleged elaborate schemes and conspiracies in public broadcasts but then refused to bring those same allegations to court, settling instead for small-bore procedural complaints (which have themselves largely been thrown out).
Those lies have helped to disconnect vast numbers of people from reality. According to a Fox News poll taken in December 36% of US voters believe that the election was stolen, and 77% of Trump voters do. That disconnection ultimately gave rise to the attack on the US capitol in January in which rioters protesting the allegedly stolen election killed a policeman. According to YouGov polling 30% of Americans still believe that attack was orchestrated by the far left.It’s easy to place grand lies like this in a completely different category from our own small ones. Indeed, they are. But Donald Trump did not become comfortable with falsehoods in one fell swoop. Nor was the deception of his supporters an overnight process. The road to a completely distorted vision of reality can be long. But we begin to walk it whenever we knowingly lie.