Lying

Truth is an attribute of God, whereas lying and deceit are characteristic of the wicked. Sacred Scripture stresses this continually. Accordingly, it prohibits lying time and again (e.g. Exodus 20:16 Leviticus 19:11, Proverbs 12:22, Colossians 3:9). The Church brings together all this together and teaches that:

“Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error. By injuring man's relation to truth and to his neighbour, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.
The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims. If a lie in itself only constitutes a venial sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice and charity.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2483-84)

Nevertheless, the Church’s teaching that lying is wrong by its very nature and can never be justified (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2485) has always been disputed. Virtually everyone acknowledges that lying is wrong in principle. Frequently, however, there have been debates over what counts as a lie. Moreover, many maintain that, under certain circumstances, lying may not be wrong at all but a morally necessary measure to protect the innocent.

In this interview, Christopher Tollefsen discusses some of the main theoretical and ethical disputes about lying and recommends five books on the subject.

Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. He works broadly in ethics, in an area of natural law philosophy popularly called the "new" natural law theory. He is the author of Lying and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press), co-author of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (University of Notre Dame Press), and co-editor of Natural Law Ethics in Theory and Practice: A Joseph Boyle Reader (Catholic University of America Press)

1. On Lying & To Consentius, Against Lying
   by St. Augustine
2. Summa theologiae II-II, qq. 57-120 (esp. 108-110)
   by St. Thomas Aquinas
3. Catholic Teaching About The Morality Of Falsehood
   by Rev. Julius A. Dorszynski
4. Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth
   by John Finnis
5. Truthfulness, Lies, and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn From Mill and Kant? (online pdf)
   by Alasdair MacIntyre

You have written an excellent monograph, Lying and Christian Ethics. What motivated your extensive research on theoretical and ethical problems surrounding lying?
Two defining events in my intellectual formation led to this.

One was time that I spent as a graduate student reading through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. There, as he did in various other of his writings, Solzhenitsyn talks a great deal about the extent to which lies pervaded Soviet life and the difficulty of being a person of integrity. That resonated with me as a graduate student at a secular philosophy program. I thought there was something to be learned there about the importance of speaking one's mind.

A second thing was of more proximate importance to the development of that book. I have always been involved in the pro-life movement and had written several essays in defence of the rights of unborn children. Around 2011, there was a lot of news about a prolife organization that had gone undercover to infiltrate various Planned Parenthood facilities in New Jersey. Members of the organization had pretended that an underage migrant needed an abortion. The workers at Planned Parenthood showed that they were willing to facilitate an abortion for the underaged. This was viewed as a great triumph for the prolife movement. However, I thought it was a disaster and that it was terrible for the prolife movement to be involved in offenses against truth. It seems to me that the strongest thing that we have going for us is that we speak the truth always, in season and out of season. Lying in the service of our mission would impair our ability to pursue it and witness.

That got me reading Augustine. He was faced with a very similar situation: the attempt of some Catholics to infiltrate a heretical sect by lying and pretending to be part of it. With many good arguments, he explained that this was a terrible idea.

That prompted me to write some articles on the topic for Public Discourse. Then, during a sabbatical at Princeton University in 2011-12, I worked on my book.

You have just mentioned the sting operation that some prolife activists carried out in Planned Parenthood clinics. However, the state also sponsors the sting operations of undercover intelligence agents and police officers. Is it licit for the state to do this?
Certainly not. In my book, I follow Augustine, Aquinas and several others (though there are not many others) in arguing that lying is always wrong. This, as I describe it, is an absolute view about lying: lying is the assertion of something contrary to one's mind and should never be done. That has far-reaching consequences, not just for church groups or the prolife movement, but for the government too.

Many think that just as government has the authority to use lethal force in ways that private citizens do not, so too does it have the authority to lie in ways that private citizens do not, and that this authority extends to the inclusion of undercover agents in criminal and terrorist operations.

If my view is correct—and it is the view of Aquinas and Augustine—then it is equally wrong for the state to perform such undercover operations.

Interestingly, Aquinas did believe that the state has a certain authority to perform acts of intentional killing in which private citizens may never engage. However, he never suggested anything of the sort when it came to lying. For instance, he believes that lying in warfare is always wrong, regardless of the circumstances. In that respect, his view on lying are even stricter and more absolute than those on state sponsored killing.

"The essence of the lie is the assertion contrary to what one believes."

A first question that needs to be addressed is, “What is a lie?” There is more to a lie than merely making statements that are untrue. Generally, we make false statements whenever we tell a story or a joke, as when Tolkien says, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” However, we do not take such statements to be lies. So, what is a lie?
The question, “What is a lie?” is of intense interest right now among philosophers, especially philosophers of language. Their interest overlaps incredibly with the initial discussion of that question in Augustine's book On Lying.

Any lie is an assertion. When one asserts something, one affirms it to be the case. For example, it is the case that my wife and children are out of the house thrift shopping right now. When I assert something of that sort to you, I intend for you to understand that I am affirming it and affirming it as true.

Whenever we say something on a stage, recite our lines in a play, write a story that begins with “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” or perform various other speech acts, such as questions and commands, we are not engaged in that act of assertion. We are not affirming something to be the case. Whenever you lie, you affirm something contrary to what you really believe. If I thought that my wife was actually upstairs reading a book, but I told you that she was out at a thrift shop, then that would be a lie according to this account.

Augustine appears to add another requirement, although he qualifies it in certain respects. For something be a lie, it needs be asserted with intention to deceive.

Today, many philosophers consider this to be the so-called traditional definition of a lie: an assertion contrary to what one believes with the intention to deceive.

Aquinas disagrees. He believes that the essence of the lie is the assertion contrary to what one believes. Indeed, many philosophers today believe that the intention to deceive is not necessary for a lie. They are impressed with what they call bald-faced liars, people who will lie to you even though they are known to be liars and know that they are known to be liars. Nobody is taken in by them in any respect whatsoever and yet they seem to be lying. Over the last five years, a huge literature has developed on the bald-faced liar. This goes right back to Augustine and is a testament to how the incredible, enduring importance of his writings on this issue.

Recently, the morality of lying has also come to the fore in the anti-realist current of metaethics called fictionalism. Authors such as Richard Joyce and Mark Kalderon maintain that there is no such thing as actual moral goodness or badness but that those who are aware of this should continue to act as if there were objective moral values since it is socially useful to keep up the pretence, much as a parent pretends Santa Claus exists for the good of the children.
Right. Bernard Williams had a lovely expression to describe views of that sort. He said that they “were not stable under reflection.” You cannot grasp the alleged truth of such a view and continue to operate as usual under it. If we genuinely thought that there were no moral norms and that they were all fictions, then we would treat them the way we do fictions. We would not give them the same respect that we currently do.

Certainly, some people are inclined in that direction, but it seems unsustainable as an overall way to treat moral norms. There is an interesting intersection there, but I am unconvinced by it.

There is a lot at stake with how one defines lying. Barring consequentialists, certain definitions entail an absolutist position: that every false assertion contrary to one’s mind is a lie and so wrong under every circumstance whatsoever. Other definitions are non-absolutist: asserting a falsehood contrary to one’s mind to someone who does not have a right to know the relevant facts is not a lie and so may be justified under certain circumstances. The moral entailments of the former definition, unlike those of the latter definition, appear counterintuitive. This is because lying appears to be morally necessary, under certain extreme circumstances, to protect the innocent. This argument is centuries old. Currently, the standard case-study used to frame it is that of a person who is hiding Jews at their home from the Nazis but must answer the Gestapo official who is asking whether there are any Jews in their house. The first edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared to imply that it would not be a lie at all to tell the Gestapo that there were no Jews in one’s house. This is because the provisory 1992 edition of the Catechism defined lying in a non-absolutist manner as “to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth” (n. 2483). However, the 1997 editio typica appeared to rule this out by removing the final clause of this definition and specifying that the other’s alleged right to know the truth is not an essential constituent of a lie. Why this change to the more rigid, absolutist definition of lying?
The definition of a lie as speaking falsely to one who has a right to the truth is, relatively speaking, a recent addition to the literature. It was introduced by Grotius. In a certain way, it pays homage to the absolutist view. It preserves absolutism about lying, but in a very formal, almost tautological way. Any instance in which you are justified in speaking falsely to someone will turn out, on this definitional approach, not to be a lie.

According to the more traditional view—which goes back to Augustine, Aquinas, and virtually everyone in between—it is important to separate the definitional question from the moral question.

First, one identifies the speech act to which lying belongs: assertions. Then, one identifies the feature that makes it a lying assertion as opposed to a sincere one. Only then does one ask whether such speech act can be morally permissible.

Of course, different people have different answers to that question.

There was a long tradition of Thomists and Neo-Thomists who argued that lying is contrary to the nature of the faculty of speech. There are other interesting and important approaches. However, that is a separate question because the definition of lying does not introduce moral terms.

This way of approaching the question is important and helpful. Saying that lying is always wrong whenever it is done to somebody who has a right to the truth does not give us any guidance on when such a right exists. Rather, first we need to identify when it is that we are lying and then we ask whether lying is ever permissible.

The shift in the Catechism reflects the interventions of several people, who in one way or another, indicated to the authors that the definition of the preliminary edition does not reflect Catholic thought on the matter.

Grotius was not a Catholic. There is a long tradition of thinking about lying in the way that I have just described. It goes back to Augustine and mirrors the broader Catholic tradition of thinking about moral absolutes: to identify an action’s natural kind independently of any moral assessment, and then bring moral assessment to bear on it. This is the focus of the book by John Finnis that I have recommended.

"I make a goods-based argument, not an argument about the normal function of a capacity. It is the argument that the good of society or community is always at stake whenever one is asserting. Whenever one lies, one directly violates that good."

In Lying and Christian Ethics, you defend an absolutist position and maintain that lying is always wrong, under any circumstance and regardless of the agent’s noble intentions. How do you defend this controversial position which is counterintuitive for many?
It is counterintuitive. One of the things that emerged from the discussion about the sting operation on Planned Parenthood is that it is not just counterintuitive. It is repugnant to many.