Is it wrong to assert falsehoods?

Years ago, when I was thinking hard about lying, I conjectured that perhaps we simply have a moral duty not to assert falsehoods. This way, we wouldn’t need to define lying for moral purposes–a very difficult task—because the wrongs in the vicinity of lying would all end up either being the assertion of a falsehood or the doing of something that one thinks is the assertion of a falsehood (and one should do neither wrong nor that which one thinks is a wrong). Of course, often, the assertion of a falsehood would be a non-culpable wrong, because one doesn’t know that one is asserting a falsehood.

I put that conjecture aside for a long time, and then just came back to it due to an email from a friend. But it now occurred to me that I have a pretty decisive argument against the idea that it’s wrong to assert falsehoods.

Consider a case where you know that someone has a false opinion on something, but you ask them their opinion on the topic anyway, for the sake of some minor good. There are many examples of such minor goods. You want to draw someone into an interesting conversation. You are asking a student a question on an oral exam where you know that the student will get it wrong but nonetheless you feel the student should have a chance at it like their peers. You’re on a panel and you know what your co-panelist thinks—and disagree with it—but you elicit their opinion so that the audience will know it, too.

However, in doing these things, you are leading another person to do wrong, if asserting falsehoods is always wrong. Yet these cases don’t seem like cases where you do wrong.

There are two possible subcases: you intend them to assert the thing you know to be false and you merely intend them to assert their opinion whatever it might be (while knowing that their opinion is in fact incorrect). In the first subcase, the action will be much more problematic if asserting falsehoods is always wrong. Granted, you are not intending that they do wrong qua wrong, but you are intending that they assert p when you know that asserting p is wrong. This is a pretty serious case of cooperation in evil. And this kind of case does happen, and apparently innocently so: perhaps you ask the opinion of a student in a class precisely because you think this student’s opinion is p, and you would like to have p represented in the discussion. In the second subcase, you intend only the expression of opinion as such, and you can make a reasonable Double Effect defense—but only if there is a proportionate good at stake. However, given that you know that this perosn’s expression of opinion will be a wrongdoing, that proportionate good would have to be fairly weighty. And yet we innocently elicit such opinions without “fairly weighty” reasons.

I guess if one thought that it’s wrong to assert a falsehood, instead of asking a first-order question like “Is it wrong to steal from the rich and give to the poor?” one might ask a second-order question like “Do you think it is wrong to steal from the rich and give to the poor?” For then perhaps the other person answers truly as long as they are sincere. But I don’t think we need to do such tricks. Plus, it’s not clear that a “Do you think …?” question is really a second-order question—it may just be a social form for asking the first-order question.