Book Review: Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life

The social incentives to deceit are at present very powerful; the controls often weak. Many individuals feel caught up in practices they cannot change. It would be wishful thinking, therefore, to expect individuals to bring about major changes in the collective practices of deceit by themselves. Public and private institutions, with their enormous power to affect personal choice, must help alter the existing pressures and incentives. ..... Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.-- Sissela Bok

 

Sissela Bok

Context: The moral landscape

The book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (3rd edition, 1999), was written Sissela Bok, a leading moral philosopher who emphasizes the morality of lies and deceit. Lying is an influential philosophical work on the topic of the morality of  lies and deceit. In my opinion, this topic is a critically important and urgent topic for current public political discourse.

The dismal public track record of false and misleading statements by our president speaks for itself. As of Oct. 9, 2019, his 993rd day in office, our president had made 13,435 false or misleading claims in public. That deceit has been buttressed by conservative political leaders who support and condone the president’s immoral behavior through their silence. In view of the facts, the importance and urgency of coming to grips with the morality of lies and deceit in American politics will be obvious to most open-minded people.

Analyzing lies and deceit

First and foremost, Bok sees unjustified and inexcusable lying and deceit as immoral.[1] She focuses the book mostly on lies because they are the most clear-cut form of deceit. Bok defines lies as a communication of information that the liar believes is untrue but nonetheless conveys to intentionally deceive or mislead listeners. For the purposes of het book, she defines a lie as “an intentionally deceptive message in the form of a statement.” Obviously, lies can be broader than that.

Honest mistakes of fact or logic are not lies, they are just mistakes and thus on different, usually less immoral footing, sometimes or usually including no moral offense at all. Maybe intentional sloppiness about facts and logic can constitute some degree immorality. That raises the curious situation of a liar who makes a mistake and tells truth while believing it is false and intending to deceive. That is immoral because the speaker’s intent is where the immorality arises. Well-intended deceit can be immoral as in a white lie told to spare someone needless shame, pain, embarrassment or emotional stress. In Bok’s view, even well-intended white lies can be immoral when all factors are taken into account.

Bok analyzes lies as starting from a negative or immoral position that sometimes can be excused or justified. The problem with excuses and justifications is bias. The speaker may believe circumstances excuse or justifies his lies, but when examined critically by other people, especially those who have been lied to, the liar's excuses and justifications tend to be much less persuasive than they are to the liar.

A problem that is usually present is complexity. People are complex and so is divining their intent. Bok acknowledges the problem of moral theory in theory compared to making moral judgments in real world scenarios. Influences including psychological, political, social and religious beliefs and biases make analyzing many or most lies difficult and at least somewhat uncertain. The complexity of reality problem has been reduced to some extent by the rise of fact-checking and online access to far more information than was the case when Bok analyzed the situation in 1999.

Harms that lies can cause

Bok describes the kinds of harm that lies can cause to the liars themselves and to people and societies who are deceived:

• Lies lead to loss of trust in fellow citizens, government and social institutions
• Lying is dehumanizing by treating people means to achieve the liar's purpose instead of a valuable end in themselves; in turn dehumanization tends to foment social discord and distrust 
• Lies lead people to base their decisions on false information or flawed thinking, which deprives them of the freedom and power to decide for themselves based on facts and sound logic
• Lies are immoral, an argument that dates back thousands of years, and immorality can beget more immorality leading to loss of social trust and cohesion; lying leads some or most liars to lie more frequently and/or easily
• Reliance on lies can lead to social, physical or economic harm or loss
• The liar exposes himself to loss of trust from others and sometimes damage to self-esteem, which can lead to more bad behavior
• Resort to lies tends to obscure possibilities where lying is not necessary and the same information transfer can be attained without lying
• People who learn they have been lied to may doubt their own ability to assess truth and make their own decisions, which damages their ability to make free and informed choices; sometimes they seek revenge
• When the general level of truthfulness falls, that can encourage or even incentivize some people to lie; if lying becomes a generally accepted practice, trust in others and/or the institutions of society weakens and cohesion decreases, which in extreme cases can lead to actual social collapse

The Principle of Veracity

Bok arrives at a way to summarize the analysis. Her Principle of Veracity states that there is a strong initial presumption that lying is immoral. Lying is wrong but not when it is at least honestly excused and preferably justified. In asserting this moral principle, Bok rejects pure absolutism, which holds that all lies in all circumstances are immoral and thus immoral and unacceptable.

She also rejects utilitarianism, which considers only the consequences of the lie regardless of extenuating circumstances. For utilitarians, a lie that confers more perceived benefit than harm is acceptable. Lies that harm no one are acceptable. The problem is that some harms and benefits cannot be accurately assessed. For example, lies that lead to social distrust and reduced social cohesion. Also, lies can harm the liar as noted above. Bok argues “the more complex the acts, the more difficult it becomes to produce convincing comparisons of their consequences.” She points out that when multiple people are involved, assessing benefit and harm are “well-nigh impossible.”

Some questions

If lies can be considered immoral, can they ever rise to the level of evil? Bok does not appear to have addressed immorality compared to evil. She was focused on morality. If one defines immoral as something not consistent with rectitude, purity, or goodness and evil as something intending malevolence or harm, can a lie rise to the level of evil? If so, and in the context of arguing for civilized evidence- and reason-based politics, is it always counterproductive to call lies and deceit in politics evil or even immoral? Should the labels to confined to just calling lies lies and deceit deceit in the name of comity and keeping minds open?


Footnote:
1. Excuse - the liar speaks to himself: an attempt to extenuate or even eliminate moral blame by arguing to himself that (i) the lie was a joke or mere exaggeration, not a real lie, (ii) the liar isn't responsible and others are to blame for the need to lie, (iii) the liar did not intend to mislead, e.g., because he was high on drugs, (iv) circumstances, e.g., an emergency, made the lie necessary to avoid harm or unfairness to others or to confer a benefit on others

Justification - the liar speaks to others: an attempt to extenuate or even eliminate moral blame by arguing to at least some others to seek other opinions about the moral culpability of a lie; excuses can be presented to others and they can cast a moral judgement; this attempts to reduce the role of bias and self-deceit about the morality of lying and deceit; sometimes the others are seen as “reasonable people” and reciprocity (a form of the Golden Rule) applies: Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you

The test of publicity: which lies, if any, would survive the appeal for justification to reasonable persons