Lying in politics

Consider this reductio ad absurdum argument:

1. It is permissible to lie to achieve what one reasonably thinks to be practically necessary to save multiple innocent lives. (Assumption for reductio)

2. In typical elections to the highest political offices in a country, at least one candidate reasonably thinks that their winning the election is practically necessary to save multiple innocent lives.

3. In typical elections to the highest political offices in a country, at least one candidate is such that it would be permissible for them to lie to win the election.

4. But it would not be permissible for candidates for the highest political offices in a country to lie to win the election, except perhaps in atypical cases.

5. Contradiction!

6. So, it is false that it is permissible to lie to achieve what one reasonably takes to save innocent lives.

The thought behind (2) is that serious candidates tend to reasonably think that their policies would make a significant positive difference to the well-being of people. Given the tens of millions of people in a typical country, a fairly intelligent candidate will realize that this positive difference saves lives, by such factors as improving medical care, and decreasing stress, suicide and drug-abuse rates. And typical serious candidates are at least fairly intelligent. Additionally, in many countries abortion is relevant at election time, and these countries will often have candidates who reasonably think that abortion kills innocent people.

The “except perhaps in atypical cases” qualifier in (4) is to take care of the intuition that some people will have that lying is permitted to defeat someone with literally genocidal policies (which is fortunately an atypical case).

The above argument gives one reason to be dubious of the idea that it is permissible to lie to save lives. But I can also see an interesting answer. The most relevant kinds of lies of politicians would be lies to the public. But you might have this view: While it is permissible to lie once to save a life, it is not permissible to lie once in order to have a 0.1% chance of saving a life, nor to lie a thousand times to have a certainty of saving one life. For a lie is pretty bad, and too much lying outweighs the value of saving a life. Now, when you lie to a large group of people, you count as lying once to each member of the group. Thus, it would be wrong to lie to all the members of a population in order to save 0.1% of them or less. And in typical electoral cases, one would be unlikely to save more than 0.1% of the population!

I am not sure about this line of response. I am not sure the wickedness of a lie linearly multiplies with the number of people lied to. Imagine this. You are on the phone trying to dissuade a friend who has a large YouTube following from lying to their million followers. You see that you have a consideration they will think decisive, and are about to offer the consideration, but then you see a child drowning. If you jump in the water to save the child, you’ve lost your moment of influence and your friend will lie to a million. You should, typically, go and save the child. (Unless your friend’s lie would influence someone to commit murder.) So the disvalue of lying does not increase linearly with the size of the victim audience.