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 person’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.
4 comments:
I am tempted to say that the good aimed at in theoretical conversation is something like *our* (collective) articulated apprehension of articulated reality, and the assertion of falsehoods is often somehow necessary to achieve that end, precisely because there are (overridden) reasons for believing that such falsehoods are true. And in order to see reality with all its articulations, we need to see not just the way things are but also the way things would be, sans the overriding.
But I don’t know if this is right, and if it is, I’m not quite sure how it would wind up affecting the analysis of lying.
Surely we could say that it's not always wrong to assert a falsehood, but it is to assert what one believes to be a falsehood? After all, the main moral problem with dishonest speech isn't that my interlocutor forms a false belief, but that I am willing them to form a false belief. Hence my dishonesty is a direct willing against their good, which is opposed to love for them.
It's more complicated than that. There are weird cases when it's not dishonest to assert what one believes to be a falsehood. Suppose you believe that the capital of North Dakota is Fargo (it's not). But suppose you you know for sure that (a) you've gone temporarily deaf, and (b) you know that a mad scientist has made you temporarily incapable of speech if and only if the capital of North Dakota is Fargo. You now try to assert: "The capital of North Dakota is not Fargo." You know that you will only succeed in making the assertion if and only if the assertion is true, so it's a safe thing to try to do. Either you will succeed in making an assertion, in which case you will say the truth, or you will fail in making an assertion, in which case no wrong has been done. You expect to fail to make the assertion, but you know you are fallible, so there is a chance you will succeed. So, you try to speak, and as it happens you succeed. You have asserted something you believed to be false, but you neither led anybody to false belief nor did you even risk leading anybody to false belief, and it seems that what you did is right.
The theory that what's wrong is the asserting a falsehood handles cases like this beautifully, because in the above case you know for sure you are performing an action that you know for sure won't be the asserting of a falsehood.
A difficult question in the vicinity: In cases where you know you'll succeed in asserting, is it OK to assert p when you believe p is false but believe that you believe p is true?
That’s a fun example. Couldn’t we say that in the North Dakota case we only succeed in uttering the phrase ‘The capital of North Dakota is not Fargo’, as opposed to asserting it? After all, removed from any social context and where I’m not even trying to communicate with myself, it doesn’t appear to be a communicative act (which would be necessary for assertion but not for utterance).
Were I to read that the same phrase (Fargo) was a tongue twister, and vocalised it privately just to see if I could say it, we presumably wouldn’t say that I’ve thereby asserted that the capital of North Dakota isn’t Fargo. This seems a close parallel to the given case.
One thing I like about restricting the wrongness to assertion of what one believes to be false is that it stays close to what makes the dishonesty wrong, on either love based or perverted faculty accounts.
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