by Propaganda
No doubt the distinction between lying that is permissible and lying that is prohibited
is of a very arbitrary and artificial kind. As a question of abstract morality it might be
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a less heinous offence than the lie pure and simple. But practically the distinction in question is intelligible enough.... We are quite prepared to accept any number of conventional falsehoods.... But we still act on the assumption, that when a man commits
himself to a positive statement of fact on his own authority, he does not make that
statement knowing it to be false and with intent to deceive. . Any one who offends
against this convention is justly regarded as an offender against our social code, and
anything which tends to upset the authority of this code is a public misfortune.
Dicey’s observations come from first-hand experience with the world of business
in which he had some involvement early in life. In any case, the view that there is a
line between acceptable hyperbole and over-optimism, on the one hand, and out-
right violation of trust on the other, accords well with some journalistic pronounce-
ments on political ethics. In 1996, the New York Times expressed its view that William Waldegrave and Sir Nicholas Lyell, two MPs under John Major, should resign following the revelation that they deliberately misled Parliament by relaxing rules governing
arms sales to Iraq, which permitted the sale of previously prohibited sophisticated
equipment, “some of which later turned up in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.”
Waldegrave “repeatedly told Parliament there had been no change. Sir Nicholas
improperly pressed his Cabinet colleagues to issue gag orders to block disclosure of
the loosened guidelines in a court case.”23
With the rise of utilitarian philosophy, the absolutist stance has come increasingly
under attack. Henry Sidgwick, a late nineteenth-century British philosopher, argued
that, if it is sometimes permissible to kill in self-defence, surely it should be permis-
sible to lie instead of killing. It may in general be permissible to prevent a “palpable
invasion of our rights,” he thought.24 Obviously, truth-telling is enormously beneficial
on the whole, and there are good utilitarian arguments to support this as a general
practice. But we have already seen examples where occasional exceptions could avoid
some grave wrong to an innocent victim. The idea that admitting such rare exceptions
would bring down the whole edifice of trust seems ludicrous. And yet, from the very
rare exceptions, what is to stop one from arguing to less rare exceptions and finally
treating truth-telling as something that might be rejected routinely? Contemporary
debate no longer treats that slippery slope as obviously abhorrent.
Contemporary Discussion: Bok and nyberg
Sissela Bok
Sissela Bok has resisted the slippery slope while not totally embracing an absolutist
position. She might be regarded as holding to an “almost absolutist” position. Her argu-
ments are partly utilitarian and partly Kantian as they involve questions of respect for
others. Bok defines a lie as “any intentionally deceptive message which is stated.” She
argues that the wrongness of lying comes from the following:
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1. There is a societal need for a minimum of trust. Lies tend to erode this. As she writes, “The aggregate harm from a large number of marginally harmful instances may
. . be highly undesirable in the end—for liars, those deceived, and honesty and trust
more generally.”25
2. When you give false information you tend to restrict the freedom of choice of others.
You are violating the principle of treating them with the respect due to beings who are
ends in themselves. If we want to be moral, we should consider how we would judge
the lie, not just from the point of view of the liar, but also from the point of view of the
person lied to and from the point of view of the general public.
Liars usually weigh only the immediate harm to others from the lie against the
benefits they want to achieve. The flaw in such an outlook is that it ignores or under-
estimates two additional kinds of harm—the harm that lying does to the liars them-
selves and the harm done to the general level of trust and co-operation. Both are
cumulative; both are hard to reverse.26
Lying involves loss of integrity, a kind of double-entry bookkeeping: one col-
umn for those to whom one lies, another for one’s own accounting. Such a person
will need, as the Romans observed, a good memory. The loss of integrity is some-
thing regrettable on its own account, because with that loss goes some of our sense
of well-being. Those who lose a sense of integrity are in constant danger of revealing
this loss to others in their speech and actions. Thus, they are in constant danger of
forfeiting one of life’s great assets, the sense others have that they are trustworthy
individuals.
3. The liar wants to be believed, but lying undermines the foundation for credibil-
ity. There is an element of self-contradiction and a violation of the universalizability
principle.
4. As with Augustine, Bok sees that lying in one matter begets lying in others. A point
she stresses is how prone we are, once we accept the possibility of exceptions to the
truth-telling principle, to make exceptions that are grounded in our self-interest and
not some general benevolence. Lying can easily become a habit.
In order to compensate for the biases in our estimation of the goods and harms
to come from a contemplated lie, Bok gives us the following practical test for what is
acceptable:
As we consider different kinds of lies, we must ask, first, whether there are alternative
forms of action which will resolve the difficulty without the use of the lie; second,
what might be the moral reasons brought forward to excuse the lie, and what reasons
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can be raised as counter-arguments. Third, as a test of these two steps, we must ask what a public of reasonable persons might say about such lies.27
The same test can usefully be applied to evaluate the ethics of propaganda.
David Nyberg
As mentioned earlier, David Nyberg’s approach is bottom-up, meaning that he first
considers real-life practices and the forms of deception encountered there, then moves
from practices we accept or reject to arrive at a suitable encompassing theory. He thinks
that starting out by treating lies in their generality gives us a false oversimplification. If, on the other hand, we focus on particular cases, we will not lose the ability to perceive
the telling details, which so often make a difference to the ethical evaluation of a course
of action. Nyberg approvingly quotes George Steiner, “the human capacity to utter
falsehood, to lie, to negate what is the case, stands at the heart of speech....” Nyberg
goes on to say, “Deception is not merely to be tolerated as an occasionally prudent
aberrati
on in a world of truth telling: it is rather an essential component of our ability
to organize and shape the world.”28 The general upshot of his argument is that lies are so
built into the fabric of our ordinary dealings that we should cease to agonize over moral
questions about lying, as such, and concentrate instead on damaging, reprehensible lies.
If we spend our time dealing with the generality of lying, we are less likely to marshal
our condemnatory forces where they are most appropriate.
Much of Nyberg’s treatment of deception relates to cases where we simply remain
silent about what we are thinking. There is no question but that in our everyday deal-
ings with others we have good reasons to keep in check what we may be thinking.
Imagine if people were governed by the principle of speaking frankly, in the sense of
always saying what is on their mind. You stop a complete stranger in the street and say,
“You look remarkably ugly!” “Well, and you have terrible breath.” “That may be, but
your clothes show no taste whatever.” It is not difficult to imagine such insults escalat-
ing into a street fight. Still, there is a difference to be kept in mind between not volun-
teering to communicate some truth when there is no need to do so and gratuitously
saying what one thinks. St. Augustine, for al his absolutism against lying, was clearly
not in favour of volunteering every truth one possessed. Some of Nyberg’s defence of
lying trades, I believe, on amalgamating that question with the distinct question of
whether to express truthful thoughts when there is no specific obligation to do so. For
example, Nyberg asserts that we are meant to sympathize with Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia
Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. The children in the story look forward to a boat trip, and she holds out hope, despite impending bad weather. But Mr. Ramsay sees the barometer
fal ing and, as Nyberg says, “snaps out irascibly that there is no chance of going.”
She, on the other hand, still hopes the wind might change and doesn’t want to disap-
point the children prematurely, so she is unwilling to tell them the trip is canceled. She
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tells the children simply that it might be fine tomorrow, and for their sake, she hopes it will be. He curses her for “flying in the face of facts,” is enraged by the “extraordinary irrationality of her remark,” and accuses her of telling lies. ( To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1927) 50–51.)
Mrs. Ramsay’s response is astonishment at such lack of consideration for the children’s
feelings. Nyberg analyzes the situation: “Her passion was for clarity, relationships, and
a caring morality. His was for simplicity, rules, and a principled morality. His mind
was arranged more like a piano keyboard, hers like a painter’s palette.”29 Since the sec-
tion in which this appears in Nyberg’s book is called “Lying to the Children,” we are
meant to conclude that, in some sense, Mrs. Ramsay was lying and that it was right
for her to do so.
If we take “lying” to mean “say what one knows to be false, with the intention of
deceiving,” then Mrs. Ramsay could well be acquitted of lying, since she does not know
for certain that the weather will be bad and the trip cancelled. On the other hand, she is
not giving a fair account of the likelihood of this happening, so she is involved in some
suppression of truth. A proper moral assessment of this kind of case must go beyond
the context of strict lying and into the territory of withholding information.
Nyberg gives other examples where statements of falsehoods are involved in some
way, where “lies” may be too harsh a description, and where most people probably
would agree that they are condonable. We are confronted in our modern world with
endless cases of form-filling. The correct description of matters in one’s personal life
may be unclear and debatable. Marital status, job situation, place of residence, state
of health, and so on may involve uncertainties, the nature of which the form pro-
vider may not have a right to know or, indeed, any direct interest in knowing. It is
understandable that one intelligent approach to form-filling is to ask oneself why the
information is needed and to provide whatever is the most helpful interpretation of
one’s situation consistent with an honest assessment of that need.
Here is an analogous example. Suppose your name is misspelled on an identity card,
which you want to retrieve from the athletic club after you finish playing squash. The
attendant asks for your name. You can either pronounce the name as misspelled or you
can give your true name and expect a delay in getting your card back. Or you can explain
that although your name is so-and-so, it was misspelled on the card and the attendant
should look for such-and-such. Meanwhile, the people in the line-up are getting impa-
tient. It saves time and trouble if you pronounce the name as misspelled. Is it lying to do
so? There are different ways of analyzing such a case. Nyberg says that it is better to resign ourselves to lying in this way from time to time. Augustine and followers tell us either to
say the truth, with the resulting inconvenience to others and ourselves, or to find a way
in which the false statement of name would not properly be considered a lie.
There is a moral tradition called casuistry that arose precisely to deal with the
problems caused by applying rigorous moral principle to practical situations. The word
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“casuistry” comes from “casus” meaning “case”; it means meshing principle and practice on a case-by-case basis. It was given a bad name by Blaise Pascal, especially, who
attacked the Jesuits in the seventeenth century for what he saw as their moral laxity.
In fact, however, the seeking of consistency following case-by-case studies is admirable
and is the method of the English Common Law. There are many good things to be
said about casuistry, and Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin have said them in The
Abuse of Casuistry.30 What brought casuistry in disrepute was the use of highly con-
trived distinctions to rationalize some convenient evasion of moral or legal duties.
Sometimes the distinctions were useful and justifiable, but at other times they could
be stretched beyond what common sense could accept. One useful device was that of
mental reservation combined with equivocation. Faced with the dilemma of telling
the truth and violating trust or telling a lie, one solution proposed by casuists was to
use equivocal language. A priest, asked whether he knows something he in fact does
know through hearing a confession has an ethical dilemma. He is under the strictest
obligation not to reveal what he has heard in confession. On the other hand, he is
obliged either to not answer or to tell the truth. Saying he cannot answer might sug-
gest that he knows. The casuist defends a simple “No” with the unstated mental reser-
vation “I don’t know with a knowledge communicable to anyone but God.” If asked by
a well-known and persistent cadger whether we can lend him something, “I don’t have
any money” is a recognized and widely acceptable response, even th
ough we may have
money in the pocket and in the bank. The mental reservation is present according
to which “I don’t have any money” means “I don’t have money for you at this time.”
However, the doctrine of mental reservation can be taken to extremes, as the fol-
lowing case described by Jonsen and Toulmin indicates. In 1585, the British Parliament
passed an act banishing all Jesuits and seminary priests, declaring it treason for any
Englishman ordained overseas to enter the country. The penalty was to be hung,
drawn, and quartered. The Dean of Durham wrote about the testimony of a certain
Father Ward:
First, he swore he was no priest, that is, saith he (in a subsequent explanation), not
Apollo’s priest at Delphi. Second, he swore he was never across the sea, it’s true
he saith, for he was never across the Indian Seas. Third, he was never at or of the
Seminaries. Duplex est Seminarium, materiale et spirituale [Seminaries are twofold, material and spiritual], he was never of the spiritual seminary. Forthly [sic], he never
knew Mr. Hawksworth; it is true, saith he, scientia scientifica [in the way of scientific knowledge]. Fifthly, he never saw Mr. Hawksworth, true, he saith, visione beatifica
[he didn’t see him in a beatific vision].31
Jonsen and Toulmin cite a medieval casuist, Raymond of Pennacourt, as suggest-
ing a possible equivocation that might be used to protect an innocent person hiding
in one’s house. Asked by the intended murderer whether he is in the house, one might
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reply, “non est hic,” which can mean either “he is not here” or “he does not eat here.”
The word “est” is an alternate form of the Latin “edit,” meaning “he eats.” The speaker
hopes that the murderer interprets the words in the first sense. But a lie is not involved
(on this theory) because the second meaning is the one the speaker intends.
The use of mental reservation opens the door to a basis for widespread distrust,
regardless of whether it technically provides an escape from lying. It may do as much
harm to confidence in human assurances. If we cannot interpret meaning in the ordi-
nary way words are understood, but must constantly be on the lookout for hidden
