Alibis and lies

This is an attempt at a reformulation of a line of thought from this post.

Suppose a close friend of mine is accused of a capital crime.  The case against my friend is extremely strong, indeed strong enough to convict him, except for one thing.  My friend was with me when the crime was committed, at a location far from the crime.  I am the only witness to this fact.  My innocent friend's life depends on whether I am believed when I say that he was with me at the crucial time.

Now, suppose I am the sort of person who would lie to save an innocent close friend from execution.  Then my affirming the alibi is worthless.  If, on the other hand, I am the sort of person who is known to refrain from lying even if it were to save an innocent close friend from execution, my truthful witness may save my friend.  And if I am a loose cannon, with it not known whether I would or would not lie, my witness may or may not be sufficient.

So in cases like this, there is a significant benefit from being the sort of person who is known to refrain from lying even if an innocent friend's life is at stake.

Of course, such cases are rare and extreme.  But so are cases of the sort brought up by the defenders of lying.  It is very rare that one is hiding Jews and Gestapo officers come and ask whether one is hiding any Jews.  Most of us aren't hiding any innocents from unjust law enforcement (it may be different for readers of the blog in repressive countries--my heart goes out to any such), and few unjust law enforcement officers bother to ask if one is hiding an innocent except in order to have another charge against you if you say "No" and they find you were lying after searching your home anyway.

This makes it plausible that having a character willing to lie to save an innocent life is not actually beneficial in terms of saving lives.  Or, at least, it is far from clear that it is beneficial--while the benefits of being known for unwavering honesty are significant (think of how one's letters of recommendation get treated).

Objection 1: What about another sort of case, though?  You know your friend is innocent because you know his character in ways that won't convince the court, but he has no alibi, so you make one up.  Aren't cases like that just as common as ones where you're the only witness to his innocence?

I don't know how common such cases are.  But I think people's judgment of their friends' innocence tends to be flawed when that judgment is based on character rather than on eyewitness observations.  So a willingness to make up alibis for people whom one thinks one knows to be innocent is not a good thing to have.

Objection 2: Perhaps one could have a character known to be willing to lie to save an innocent's life, except under oath.  Such a character would be good enough to save one's friend's life.

Maybe, but not always.  It might well be that it's really important to keep one's friend out of court altogether (maybe the local court is likely to be biased against him), and hence to convince the police of one's friend's innocence before the matter comes to court.  And one doesn't want one's friends to have the experience of being tried for a capital crime.

Furthermore, in practice it may be hard for third-parties to know what one would or would not be willing to do under oath.  Most of us are very rarely under oath.  People's judgments of our trustworthiness under oath are going to be based on our trustworthiness not under oath.

Besides which, Jesus tells us to behave without an oath just as we would under oath, or so I read the following:

But I say to you, do not swear at all; not by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.  (Matthew 5:34-37)

Epistemically otiose appeals to authority

Suppose I am an art graduate student.  After careful study, a certain well-known painting of uncertain provenance looks very much to me like it is by Rembrandt.  Kowalska is the world expert on Rembrandt.  I have never heard what Kowalska thinks about this painting.  But I reason thus: "This painting is almost certainly by Rembrandt.  Kowalska is very reliable at identifying Rembrandt paintings and has no doubt thought about this one.  Therefore, very likely, Kowalska thinks that the painting is by Rembrandt."  I then tell people: "I have evidence that Kowalska thinks this painting is by Rembrandt."

What I say is true--the evidence for thinking that the painting is by Rembrandt combined with the evidence of Kowalska's reliability is evidence that Kowalska thinks the painting is by Rembrandt.  But there is a perversity in what I say.  (Interestingly, this perversity is a reversal of this one.)  By implicature, I am offering Kowalska's Rembrandt authority as significant evidence for the attribution of the pointing, while in fact all the evidence rests on my own authority.  Kowalska's authority on matters of Rembrandt is epistemically otiose.

This kind of rhetorical move occurs in religious and moral discourse to various degrees.  In its most egregious form, one reasons, consciously or not: "It is true that p.  Jesus knows the truth at least about matters of this sort.  Therefore, if the subject came up, Jesus would say that p."  And so one says: "Jesus would say that p."  (I am grateful to my wife for mentioning this phenomenon to me.)  Here it seems one is implicating that Jesus' theological or moral authority supports one's own view, but in fact all the evidential support for the view comes from one's initial reasons for believing that p.  One's reason for thinking that Jesus would say that p is that one thinks that it is true that p and one therefore thinks that Jesus would say it.

At the same time, there are contexts where this rhetorical move is legitimate, namely when the question is not primarily epistemic but motivational--when the point is not to convince someone that it is true that p, but to motivate her to act accordingly.  In this case, the imaginative exercise of visualizing Jesus saying that p may be helpful.  But when the question is primarily epistemic, there is a danger that one is cloaking one's own epistemic authority with that of Jesus.

Still, sometimes it is epistemically legitimate to appeal to what Jesus would say.  This is when one has grounds for believing that Jesus would say that p that go over and beyond one's other reasons for believing that it is true that p.  We can know about Jesus' character from Scripture and cautiously extrapolate what he would say about an issue.  (Likewise, we might know that Kowalska judged paintings relevantly like this one to be by Rembrandt, and this gives us additional confidence that she thinks this one is Rembrandt's.)  But we need to be very cautious with such counterfactual authority.  For one of the things that we learn from the New Testament is that what Jesus would say on an issue is likely to surprise people on both sides of the issue.  In particular, even if it is true that p and Jesus knows that p, Jesus might very well not answer in the affirmative if asked whether it is true that p.  He might, instead, question the motivations of the questioner or point to a deeper issue.

Here is a particularly unfortunate form of this epistemically otiose appeal to authority.  One accepts sola scriptura and one thinks that it is an important Christian doctrine that p.  So one concludes that Scripture somewhere says that p.  With time one might even forget that one's main reason for thinking that Scripture says that p was that one oneself thought that p, and then one can sincerely but vaguely (or perhaps precisely if  eisegesis has occurred) cite Scripture as an authority that p.  This is, I think, a danger for adherents of sola scriptura.  (Whether this danger is much of a reason not to accept sola scriptura, I don't know.)

But religious authority is not the only area for this.  This also happens with science.  One accepts the proposition that p for some reason, good or bad.  That proposition is within the purview of science, or so one thinks.  So, one concludes that one day science will show that p or that science will make disagreement with the claim that p ridiculous, and one says this.  Here, the appeal to a future scientific authority is epistemically otiose and has only rhetorical force, though one may well be implicating that it has more than rhetorical force.

Here is another interesting issue in the neighborhood.  Suppose I know some philosophical, theological or scientific theory T to be true, and I know that God believes all truths.  Then I should be able to know that God believes T (barring some special circumstances that make for a counterexample to closure).  But it sounds presumptuous to say: "I know that God himself believes T."  I think the above considerations suggest why such a statement is inappropriate.  It is inappropriate because in standard contexts to say that one knows what an expert believes implicates that one believes it in part because of the expert's opinion--one is covering oneself with the expert's mantle of authority.  Still, inappropriateness is not the same as presumptuousness, and so the above still isn't a very good explanation of why "I know that God himself believes T" sounds bad.  Maybe a part of the explanation of the apparent presumptuousness is that by saying that one knows what God believes one is suggesting that one is one of God's intimates?  (Still, surely no theist would balk at: "God believes that 2+2=4.")