Just go ahead and lie

JENNIFER SAUL

The view that lying is morally worse than merely misleading is a very natural one. Its what led St Athanasius, questioned by his pursuers about the whereabouts of Athanasius, to say He is not far from here rather than Athanasius isnt here (MacIntyre 1994: 336). Its (probably) also what led Bill Clinton to say There is no sexual relationship rather than There never has been a sexual relationship. For most of us, honest reflection on our own lives will reveal that we do the same thing. And were in good company here. Kant, not exactly noted for his tolerance of deception, forbade lying but not mere misleading. Nonetheless, this preference is very puzzling: it amounts to a preference for one mode of deception over another. If the result is the same, and the motivation is the same, why should we have this moral preference? Ill argue here that we should not.1 (More precisely, I will argue that, holding all else fixed, acts of mere misleading are not morally preferable to acts of lying, and that successful lying is not morally worse than merely deliberately misleading.2) In fact, except in certain very special contexts, I will suggest that we might as well just go ahead and lie. 1. Misleading is not always better It is actually very easy to show that acts of misleading are not always better than acts of lying. Consider for a moment the story of Frieda, who suffers from a peanut allergy so dire that even the tiniest amount of peanut oil could be deadly. George knows that, and invites her to dinner, murderously preparing a stir-fry with peanut oil. Frieda, appropriately cautious (though not cautious enough), asks, Are there any peanuts in the meal?, to which George replies No, there are no peanuts. Frieda eats the stir-fry, and dies. If misleading is always better than lying, then George did something slightly less bad by choosing his true but misleading utterance rather than a false one like No, its perfectly safe for you. This seems clearly wrong.

Downloaded from http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Leeds on October 20, 2013

1 2

Bernard Williams also argues for this in his 2002. We need to hold all else fixed to avoid problems from the fact that lying about sock preferences is less bad than misleading about committing a murder. The other clarifications are needed because misleading, but not lying, may be accidental; and because mislead, unlike lie, is a success term: one has not misled unless ones audience winds up with a false belief.

Analysis Vol 72 | Number 1 | January 2012 | pp. 39 doi:10.1093/analys/anr133 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

4 | jennifer saul

2. Misleading is not almost always better One might well reply to this sort of counter-example by moving to a slightly weaker claim: Misleading, except in certain special circumstances, is better than lying. (Except in certain special cases: holding all else fixed, lying is morally worse than merely deliberately attempting to mislead; and successful lying is morally worse than merely deliberately misleading.) This claim is not vulnerable to counter-examples like the one above. Of course, its defender would need to do some work on specifying the special circumstances referred to. But I wont dwell on this, because the far more serious problem is that, despite many attempts by great thinkers, there is no convincing justification for this claim.
2.1 Differing responsibility for false belief

The overwhelming majority of justifications for the belief that lying is worse than mere misleading turn, in one way or another, on holding the audience more responsible for the falsehood they believe in the case of mere misleading.3 This often involves the idea that the audience must make inferences to arrive at what is merely conveyed but can read what is said directly off the sentence the speaker has uttered.4 I take this to be a mistaken view of how language understanding works, one that can be seen to be mistaken rather quickly by reflecting on, for example, the role of inferences in working out the reference of an indexical (something which nearly all theorists take to be a part of what is said).5 But, more fundamentally, there is good reason to doubt the claim that sharing of responsibility with the audience would reduce the badness of the deception perpetrated. The claim at issue is that acts of misleading are less bad than acts of lying, because responsibility for acts of misleading is partly borne by the misled audience. Assume that that this view is right about the distribution of responsibility: for whatever reason, audiences bear partial responsibility for their false beliefs. This fact, I will argue, does not show that acts of lying are worse than acts of misleading. The reason for this is that we cannot move so quickly from sharing of responsibility to a reduction in badness. Compare two mugging victims.
3 For discussions of this view, see for example Green 2001: 165; MacIntyre 1994: 337; Adler 1997: 444; and Mahon 2003: 11920). MacIntyre et al. attribute versions of this view to Kant. An even simpler version of this idea, attributed by MacIntyre (1994: 337) to Kant, is that a speakers duty is confined to what they say and not to what they otherwise convey. The thought behind this is that saying is something the speaker does, but arriving at a false belief from something true that is said is something that the audience does. However, deliberately misleading is something that the speaker does, so this purported asymmetry does not hold up (On this point, see also Williams 2002: 108. For more on this, see Saul forthcoming, Chapter 4.

just go ahead and lie | 5

Victim A is always careful to only walk through safe parts of town in full daylight. Victim B often ventures out late at night in dangerous areas, with money hanging out of his pocket. Both are beaten up and have their wallets stolenVictim A in a good part of town in broad daylight, and Victim B in a bad part of town in the middle of the night. It seems perfectly reasonable to say that Victim B, who has been reckless, bears some responsibility for being mugged, while Victim A does not. But does this make the mugging itself less bad in the case of Victim B? Clearly not. Nor does it even make the mugger less culpable. A mugger who confines their muggings to unsafe parts of town is not in any way a nicer mugger than a mugger who sticks to safe parts of town. We cannot move from a claim that responsibility is shared to a claim that the act is less bad or that the actor is less culpable.6 It cannot, then, serve as a justification for morally preferring misleading to lying.
2.2 Breach of faith

Chisholm and Feehan (1977) suggest that lying is a breach of faith and misleading is not, because audiences have a right to expect that the speaker believes what is said to be true but no such right with regard to what is otherwise conveyed.7 But this is false, as the case of conversational implicatures makes clear. Since conversational implicatures are claims that the audience is required to think that the speaker believes, the audience does have a right to expect that these are true. Suppose that my office heater is now perfectly fine, although last year it was not. Someone from estates is planning a radiator-fixing effort, and trying to discern where work is needed. They ask me, Does your office have a working heater? and I reply (truthfully) with I had to order electric gloves that plug into my computer to keep warm. In order to understand me as cooperative, the person from estates must take me to believe that my heater isnt working. They, therefore, clearly have

In fact, I believe that such sharing of responsibility never reduces the wrongness of the act. But arguing this would take more space than I have here. (I discuss it more fully in Chapter 4 of my forthcoming.) It is compatible with what I have said here that there may be cases in which such responsibility sharing does reduce wrongness. But if that is right, the burden of proof will be on the person who wants to argue that misleading is one such case, since I have shown that this is not true in all cases. It is far from obvious to me what they might point to in order to argue this. (Thanks to Michael Clark and an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this. In a very recent paper, Strudler (2010) suggests that lying damages trust more than misleading does, because we are able to carry on a productive conversation even after a misleading has been discovered (where we wouldnt be in the case of a lie). Again, I think that reflection on the widespread role of implicatures in communication reveals that trust is disrupted just as much by misleading. Moreover, the kind of case that is central to his discussion, a real estate negotiation, should probably be thought of as one of the special contexts I discuss in Section 4.

6 | jennifer saul

a right to expect that this is true. And yet I have clearly implicated rather than said something false, and thereby misled rather than lied.8
2.3 We need a way of deceiving that is less bad than lying

Jonathan Adler (1997) suggests a very distinctive pragmatic justification for preferring misleading to lying. The justification takes as its starting point the fact that we do sometimes have a legitimate need to deceive (e.g. from discretion or tact). This need, he suggests, generates a norm of conversation to the effect that truthfulness is more important with respect to what we say than what we otherwise convey. This norm of conversation, he suggests, acquires moral force (451). I think this is actually the most promising of the justifications that have been given. But it leaves something very important bafflingly unexplained. There is another norm that would be far better suited to the purposes Adler describes: a lessened demand for truthfulness when one has legitimate reason to deceive. If the reason for allowing some kinds of deception is that sometimes we have legitimate reason to deceive, this norm makes much better sense than one that focuses on method of deception. Compare the case of violence. In general, we think that violence is bad; but sometimes, e.g. in self-defence, we think it is legitimate. We accommodate this fact not by allowing that, say, shootings with one brand of gun are better than shootings with another, but by allowing that violence for the sake of self-defence is better than other violence. 3. Mere misleading is not (in general) better than lying I would like to suggest that we should give up on the view that acts of misleading are better than acts of lying. That view simply cant, it seems to me, be justified. Moreover, we can give up this unjustifiable view while still retaining the appealing thought that often a decision to lie or to mislead is morally revealing. Why might such decisions be morally revealing? There are many ways this can happen. Here are just a few: (1) A decision to mislead may reveal an admirable desire to mitigate the wrong of ones deception: Since many people hold the false belief that misleading is better than lying, many people think they do something better by misleading than by lying. A person concerned with being moral, and troubled by deceit, will often make the effort to craft a merely misleading utterance in the hope of doing something less bad. That what they do is in fact equally bad does not undermine the fact that a person like this, who tries to act morally, is more admirable than one who simply does not try because they do not care.
8 Jonathan Adler makes a similar point in his 1997 (444).

just go ahead and lie | 7

(2) A decision to mislead may also reveal something morally problematic. George, for example, may have decided to merely mislead Frieda about the peanut oil so that he could later deny that he lied. There is nothing admirable in this. (3) A decision to lie may, similarly, be morally revealing. As already noted, it may reveal a total lack of concern with morality. But it may also reveal an especially clear moral sense. Consider the famous case of the murderer at the door, asking for the whereabouts of their innocent victim. Now imagine that the person at the door wants to be absolutely sure that she saves the victim, and judges that the best way to do this would be an outright lie (she knows, perhaps that the murderer will keep pressing if she attempts indirection). Since it is clear to her that a persons life is far more important than the purported difference between lying and misleading, she opts for the lie. To many (though not of course all) this will seem more admirable than to opt for a misleading utterance with less certainty of success, for the sake of preserving her own moral purity. My thought, then, is that decisions to lie or mislead are often morally revealing ones. Because of this, and because we tend to focus too much on the cases in which the choice to mislead reveals something admirable, we have mistakenly thought that acts of misleading are morally better than acts of lying. 4. Mere misleading is sometimes better than lying Despite all of the above, there are some contexts in which acts of lying are morally worse than acts of mere misleading. This is because there are contexts in which the speakers responsibility is narrowly confined to just what she says. The clearest example of this is that of legal contexts, in which witnesses are required to truthfully answer precisely the question put to them, and lawyers are expected to make sure that everything important is explicitly spelled out. Since this rule is known to all, and accepted by all, lying is far worse than merely misleading.9 And this is recognized in US perjury law. Take, for example, the case of US v Earp (Green 2001: 177). Earp, a KKK member, was asked if he had ever burned a cross at the home of an interracial couple. He replied that he hadnt, knowing that he had tried to do so, and been foiled by his inability to get it to light. Earp was charged with perjury, but the court ruled that he was not guilty: he had not lied. And this seems right: he answered the question put to him, and the lawyer really should have followed up with further queries.

For more discussion of the special nature of legal contexts, see Solan and Tiersma 2005: ch. 11.

8 | jennifer saul

There are other contexts in which it is similarly accepted that the speaker is only responsible for literal truth. In these contexts as well, lying will be worse than mere misleading. A couple with an open marriage might, for example, agree that lying about affairs is not acceptable while misleading is. There are also intermediate contexts. A political interview, for example, may be similar to a courtroom context, though the extent to which this is so may vary with the interviewing style. 5. Just go ahead and lie Suppose, then, that you are faced with a need to deceive. Perhaps you are convinced that deception is justified, perhaps you just cant figure out what else to do. Moreover, youre not in a courtroom or any of the related contexts mentioned above. Should you, then, carefully construct a truthful but misleading utterance rather than simply lying? It seems to me that you should not. You should simply go ahead and lie. Or if you do choose to merely mislead, you shouldnt do so in the comforting belief that you are thereby doing something better. That might have been a morally admirable choice before you read this paperback when it would have revealed a laudable desire to minimize wrongdoing. But if you have been convinced by my arguments, that choice is no longer an admirable one for you: you no longer think that you will thereby minimize wrongdoing. In general, acts of misleading and of lying seem to be morally on a par. Now that you know that, you might as well just go ahead and lie.10 University of Sheffield Sheffield S3 7QB, UK j.saul@sheffield.ac.uk References
Adler, J. 1997. Lying, deceiving, or falsely implicating. Journal of Philosophy 94: 43552. Chisholm, R. and T. Feehan. 1977. The intent to deceive. Journal of Philosophy 74: 14359. Green, S.P. 2001. Lying, misleading, and falsely denying: how moral concepts inform the law of perjury, fraud, and false statements. Hastings Law Journal 53: 157212.
10 I am very grateful to the following people for their discussions of this paper and related issues: Jonathan Adler, Heather Arnold, Chris Bennett, Elisabeth Camp, Josep Corbi, Nir Eyal, Don Fallis, Paul Faulkner, Tobies Grimaltos, Daniel Hill, Chris Hookway, Rosanna Keefe, James Mahon, Marta Moreno, Carlos Moya, David Owens, Lina Papadaki, Seana Schiffrin, Roy Sorensen, Andreas Stokke, Ray Drainville, the participants at the Trust and Lying Workshop (Sheffield), the participants at the Lying, Saying and Meaning Workshop (Oslo), audiences at the University of Lund, the University of Valencia and the University of Wolverhampton, the Philosophy Cafe (Leeds), the members of Lina Papadakis MA class (Crete) and some anonymous referees.

FREGEGEACH OBJECTION TO EXPRESSIVISM

| 9

MacIntyre, A. 1994. Truthfulness, lies, and moral philosophers: what can we learn from Mill and Kant? In Tanner Lectures on Human Values 30969. Princeton University. Mahon, J. E. 2003. Kant on lies, candour and reticence. Kantian Review 7: 10233. Saul, J. Forthcoming. Lying, Misleading, and the Role of What is Said. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solan, L. and P. Tiersma. 2005. Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strudler, A. 2010. The distinctive wrong in lying. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13: 17179. Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The FregeGeach objection to expressivism: still unanswered

JOHN SKORUPSKI

1. In his admirably clear and enjoyable book, Being For, Mark Schroeder (2008) undertakes a partial defence of meta-ethical expressivism. As he says, it is at best only partial. In fact, by the time he reaches page 177, where he stops short of announcing, as he puts it, that he has constructed a reductio of expressivism, it is hard to know what more a reductio would have needed. Be that as it may, however, the questions I want to raise here concern his partial defence of expressivism, rather than his very comprehensive drawing-out of the difficulties it faces. I shall argue that even Schroeders partial defence fails in just the same way as previous defences have failed, and for the same reason: it provides no real answer to the well-known FregeGeach objection. It seems that that objection is the malicious ghost at the expressivists party: it keeps on returning, however often it is laid to rest. 2. First, I summarize some relevant points in Schroeders discussion. As is familiar, expressivists have to explain why (1) Murder is wrong is inconsistent with (2) Murder is not wrong. Their answer is that these utterances serve to express inconsistent attitudes. Schroeder agrees, and adds a useful clarification the idea of an
Analysis Vol 72 | Number 1 | January 2012 | pp. 918 doi:10.1093/analys/anr136 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com