Good Lies vs Bad Lies: A Fuzzy Gray Zone

Readers here may have noticed a recent uptick in content here that focuses on some aspect of morality, mostly as applied to politics. That is inspired by a growing personal belief that politics is significantly driven by moral beliefs and judgments. This discussion focuses on good vs bad lies-deceit in politics.

Good vs Bad Lies

There are times when politicians lie to the public. Essentially all, if not all, do this from time to time. Motivations range from honestly wanting to serve the public interest to honestly wanting to serve self-interest, even if it betrays or harms the public interest. One commentator wrote this in 2016 shortly before the election:

“You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, ‘balance’ — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today,” she said [Hillary Clinton in a 2013 speech]. She added: “Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching all of the back-room discussions and the deals, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So you need both a public and a private position.”

In politics, hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools. They can be used nefariously, illegally or for personal gain, as when President Richard M. Nixon denied Watergate complicity, but they can also be used for legitimate public purposes, such as trying to prevent a civil war, as in Lincoln’s case, or trying to protect American prestige and security, as when President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied that the Soviet Union had shot down a United States spy plane.

During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised to televise negotiations over health care reform, but when the real work had to be done, the negotiators shut the doors. In a study of defense bills in Congress, the political scientist Colleen J. Shogan quotes a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director as saying: “Why should we do it in the open? It would wreck the seriousness of the purpose. Staff needs to give candid views to senators, and you can’t do that in open session. Governing in the sunshine shouldn’t be applied to everything.”

Is it hypocritical to take one line in private, then adjust or deny it in public? Of course. But maintaining separate public and private faces is something we all do every day. We tell annoying relatives we enjoyed their visits, thank inept waiters for rotten service, and agree with bosses who we know are wrong.

The Japanese, whose political culture is less idealistic than our own, have a vocabulary for socially constructive lying. “Honne” (from “true sound”) is what we really believe. “Tatemae” (from “facade”) is what we aver in public. Using honne when tatemae is called for is considered not bravely honest but rude and antisocial, and rightly so. Unnecessary and excessive directness hurts feelings, foments conflict and complicates coexistence.

If one accepts those comments as basically true, government cannot operate under full transparency. The question is whether things can be more transparent than now, and the answer is yes. Often much of what is hidden is to shield the actors from bad publicity, not to serve the public interest.

Another commentator points out instances where a politician lies to deceive an uninformed public:

Political leaders often conceal their true views when the latter diverge from majority public opinion, or from the beliefs of a key part of their base. Both Barack Obama and Dick Cheney spent years concealing their then-unpopular support for same-sex marriage – only coming out of the closet when the political winds changed. Well-informed observers knew that their true views differed from their public positions long before Obama and Cheney openly admitted it. But they nonetheless kept up the pretense because it did effectively fool some substantial number of less knowledgeable voters.

Widespread voter ignorance also incentivizes another common type of political deception: lying about the nature of your policies in order to overstate benefits and conceal possible downsides. The most impressively successful recent deception of this type was Barack Obama’s promise that, under the Affordable Care Act, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

In view of the foregoing, it is inevitable that there are times when it makes sense to lie to the public or to be opaque and hide truth. The problem is that there are many times when service to the public interest is not the motivating force. As discussed here yesterday, the politicians and bureaucrats involved in neutering DEA drug enforcement efforts in 2016 to deal with the opioid epidemic clearly served the drug companies and the politicians who received benefits, while clearly harming the public interest and allowing many more people to die from drug overdoses. Everyone involved is doing what they can to hide what they did from the public.

Sometimes the line between a ‘good lie’ and a bad one is hard to know. It can be more of a gray zone than a line. Sometimes there simply isn’t enough information available to the public to make a reasonably informed assessment. In those situations, there is no choice but to trust the morality of public servants and the people they interact with. If one accepts that logic, then one could argue that immoral lying, immoral deceit and unwarranted opacity by public servants is usually more morally reprehensible than when it comes from most private sector actors.