The Grotius view of lying

Grotius had a weird view: it is never permissible to lie, but “for purposes of natural law”, only assertions to people who had a right to the truth were lies. Nazis at the door, he would have said, have no right to the truth, so one isn’t lying when one asserts known falsehoods to them. This view has always seemed clearly wrong.

But I just realized that there is actually an interesting argument for a very similar view. Start with these three principles:

1. Every lie is an assertion.

2. A defining feature of an assertion is that it is the sort of speech act that the sincerity norm (e.g., “Don’t say what you think is false!”) applies to.

3. No norm applies in contravention of unequivocal moral norms.

Premise (1) is clearly true. Premise (2) is part and parcel of normative accounts of assertion (there is room for variance on what the sincerity norm exactly is, but that variance will not affect our main argument).

Premise (3) is highly controversial. It is a generalization of Aquinas’ principle that immoral “laws” are not really laws. The general idea is that morality not only overrides other norms that contradict it, but as it were sucks all the power out of them. When one knows that ϕing is morally forbidden, responses like “But the law of the land requires it” or “I’d be breaking the rules of the game if I ϕed” make no sense. For there is no normative force against morality. Here are two reasons to accept premise (3). The first is the controversial claim that all norms of action are a species of moral norms. (Here is a theistic argument for this: Norms are appropriately action-guiding; the only thing that can appropriately guide our action is what the love of God requires (we are to love God with all our heart); but to be guided by the love of God and to be guided by morality is the same thing.) The second is that if there are norms other than moral norms, they are created by our normative powers, but it is not plausible that we have the normative power to create norms that stand against the norms of morality (that is, for instance, why immoral promises are null and void).

Then:

4. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not an assertion. (By 2 and 3)

5. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not a lie. (By 1 and 4)

Now here is one way to fill out the rest of the argument:

6. In Nazi at the door cases, we are morally required to say what we disbelieve (i.e., go against what the sincerity norm would require).

7. So, in Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is not a lie. (By 5 an 6)

And that gives us a version of the Grotius view.

My own view is to flip the last two steps of the argument, replacing 6 and 7 with:

8. In Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is a lie.

9. So, in Nazi at the door cases it is still false that we are morally required to say what we disbelieve. (By 5 and 8)

10. In Nazi at the door cases, if it is morally permissible to say what we disbelieve, it is morally required.

11. So, in Nazi at the door cases, it is not morally permissible to say what we disbelieve. (By 9 and 10)

But a lot of people balk at 9. And they then have reason to accept the Grotius-like thesis 7.

So, all in all, if one accepts the normative view of assertion and one accepts the contravention principle 3, one has a choice between Kantian absolutism about lying and a Grotius-like view.