by Propaganda
meanings, communication will become too complicated. David Hume combatted
this tendency in his Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, in which he insisted that the obligation of a promise depended on the conventional meaning of words, not on some
unorthodox interpretation placed on them by a hidden intention:
The expression being once brought in as subservient to the will, soon becomes the
principal part of the promise; nor will a man be less bound by his word, tho’ he
secretly give a different direction to his intention, and with-hold himself both from
a resolution, and from willing an obligation.32
Insofar as we trace an obligation to tell the truth to the existence of a right on the
part of the hearer to be told it, the use of deliberate equivocation, designed to mislead,
does not seem to be in a category very different from straightforward lying. What it
does, perhaps, is to make the deceiver a little less uncomfortable in the deception.
Apart from that, the arguments that might justify this form of deception might be
deployed equally well in defence of lying. Nyberg offers us a less complicated picture
or, rather, a picture in which the complications are located in the factual realm rather
than in the contrivance of mental reservation.
Mental reservation may be difficult to employ when a continuous set of decep-
tions must be maintained. Nyberg relates how, during the Nazi occupation, a
Dutchwoman deceived her neighbours about an expected baby due to be born to a
Jewish family who had taken refuge in her home. She concealed this by “progressively
padding herself with layers of clothing, letting others believe she was pregnant. None
were surprised when a new baby appeared in the house.”33 It can be assumed that,
along with the padding, a suitable false story was told to the neighbours to keep them
from asking questions about where the baby came from.
The need for invoking mental reservation can be avoided if we accept Nyberg’s
proposal for the definition of a lie. In Nyberg’s view, a lie has four parts: it is a state-
ment, a belief in the mind of the statement-maker, an intention, and involves the char-
acter and rights of the person addressed. Just as Grotius had argued that the intending
assassin has no right to the truth, Nyberg takes the position that, if we think the assas-
sin has no right to expect us to tell the truth according to the “ordinary mutual trust
obligations in conversation,” then he is “no longer operating within the context in
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which truth telling and lying can be sensibly defined. The very ideas of true and false are inappropriate and irrelevant, and so lying does not enter as a possibility.” The lie
“cannot be committed when truth is irrelevant.” Jokes and tall tales told around the
campfire, etc. also are removed from the area in which “true” and “false” are appropri-
ate. Hence, Nyberg defines lying as “making a statement (not too vague) you want
somebody to believe, even though you don’t (completely) believe it yourself, when the
other person has a right to expect you to mean what you say.”34
The proposal may work well with jokes, irony, and other cases where people know
and expect some blarney. But in the joke situation, both parties know and understand
that no serious underwriting of what is said is straightforwardly intended (of course,
one can have serious things to say through jests). By contrast, does the assassin share
with the respondent the sense that a new game is being played, in which what is said
cannot be expected to be treated as true or false? Quite likely not. And if the respon-
dent gives any cue that a special game is in progress, the assassin will be tipped off. If
the respondent is not harbouring the victim, he might well want the assassin to believe
him when he says so. If he is harbouring the victim, he will not want to let on that he is
playing any game. On the contrary, he will want his lie to be believed. Either way, the
attempt to remove the situation from the realm where true and false apply does not
seem convincing, and we are led back to Grotius’s view. Perhaps if the assassin knows
in advance that the respondent is a Nybergian, then he knows that there is a game in
progress, but in that case he will take no account of the respondent’s answer.
Nyberg’s proposal is that, in telling falsehoods in the context of entertainment or
danger, the “burden of having to justify uttering falsehoods is lifted completely.”35 That
burden is certainly lifted if communicator and communicatee are both in agreement.
If they are not, the burden remains, although one way of discharging it is to say that
the context is one in which the communicatee “ought to know” or can be “presumed
to know” that the communicator does not feel bound by the ordinary norms of truth-
telling. However, this in turn would need justification, so the burden does not disap-
pear so easily.
Dirty Hands Arguments
The “dirty hands” problem deals with variations on the theme of lying to save lives or
killing to prevent more numerous killings. Arthur Koestler put the case for selective
use of violence well, at a general level, when he had one of his fictional characters
say about people who are averse to vivisection that “if these people had their say, we
would have no serums against cholera, typhoid, or diphtheria.”36 But real people, not
lower animals, are the subject of discussion. What seems like a disease in the body
politic to some may appear to others as a liberation movement, as Koestler himself
illustrates so well in Darkness at Noon. The consequential reasoning here should be
treated with caution because it has been used in the past to sanction atrocities such
as the execution of heretics. Christian beliefs in eternal damnation and the belief that
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heretics were headed there could easily be seen to justify condemning a few to save the many. Substitute for the Christian beliefs the false promises of some new politically
obtainable heaven on earth, and you have the kind of belief that would sanction new
atrocities, such as killing those who would stand in the way of this political Valhal a.
Among those who have had wise things to say about the “dirty hands” problem,
Max Weber is one of the most profound. In his oft-cited “Politics as a Vocation,” he
introduces the important distinction between two kinds of ethics: the “ethics of con-
science” or “ethics of ultimate ends” and the “ethics of responsibility.” The first kind of
ethics, epitomized by the Sermon on the Mount, is a call to imitate Jesus Christ or St.
Francis by eschewing violence and by achieving one’s ends through means other than
compulsion. By contrast, the “ethics of responsibility” accepts the necessity of using
violence to prevent the potential violence of others from being actualized against
innocent people. The same goes for truthfulness. Weber thought that at the end of
World War I, German politicians were all too ready to publish documents in the name
of the duty of truthfulness, particularly those that placed blame on their
own country.
One-sided confessions of guilt followed, without regard to consequences. The result
was not the furthering of truth but an unleashing of passion. The impossible demands
of the Treaty of Versailles and the later hyper-inflation that resulted from insistence
on some of its provisions paved the way for Hitler’s rise. The ethics of conscience
reveals the truth it happens to possess without regard for the consequences of doing
so. The believer in this ethic protests against injustice in the world by testifying to pure
intentions; however, such acts may in various circumstances have only exemplary value
and, in many cases, will have an outcome quite contrary to the good intentions of the
believer. Weber says that it is fine to hold an austere ethics and, in doing so, to save
one’s soul, as long as one avoids political life; the ethics of conscience, or ultimate ends, is not suited to the practical world where rules must be enforced by the use of violence
against offenders. It does not help solve crime or deter murderers and robbers for a
civic magistrate to announce that victims or their relatives and friends should turn the
other cheek and only do good by forgiving their enemy.37
By contrast, the ethics of responsibility allows one to exercise power with effective
consequences for law and order. Party politics in modern democratic society means
pandering to a wide variety of different groups and sympathizing with their often
quite base motives, such as revenge, power, booty, and spoils, to maintain the neces-
sary level of support. Some elect you because they expect spoils from your success;
that means you have to be ready with a payoff. The effect of all this compromise and
dubious dealing is likely to be corruption. As Weber says, the politician “lets himself
in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence.”38
Having said that and having recognized that politics is a matter of the head over
the heart, Weber cautions against “windbags” who are intoxicated with romantic
notions about doing what is right regardless of the consequences. The politician who
has his admiration and support is the one who, fully cognizant of the need for taking
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account of consequences, nevertheless is weighed down by the considerations that an ethic of conscience produces. “In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an
ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only
in unison constitute a genuine man—a man who can have a ‘cal ing for politics.’” Such a person will not crumble merely because the world is unwilling to embrace, through
stupidity, small-mindedness or the like; such a person retains some vision of what is
right, which has motivated him or her from the beginning.39
In the end, Weber does not give us a clear answer to the “dirty hands” problem,
although he canvasses in an enlightening manner the different dimensions it assumes,
taking account of the character of those making decisions as well as the effects of
these decisions on others. There is no simple ethical formula, such as the utilitarian for
example, which can operate to lighten the conscience of the politician. Weber’s world
where both ethics are pertinent gives us politicians with troubled souls.
Michael Walzer has situated Weber’s position between two extremes. The first is
that of Machiavelli, whom he characterizes as exemplifying the ethic of responsibility
untroubled with the ethic of conscience. The opposite is that presented by Camus,
in such writings as The Rebel, or his play The Just Assassins,40 in which there is nothing praiseworthy about undertaking violence against another, although to do so may
be necessary to prevent further violence. If one judges that it is a duty to kill some
other person, the ethic of solidarity requires that one lose one’s own life in the process.
Walzer sees in the spirit of this restriction a certain necessary brake on the potential
injustice that an unreserved embracing of the ethic of consequences might engender.
We should hold our politicians to act according to certain principles, and they should
follow the rules—protecting the rights of citizens, no dirty-dealing, and so on. But
cases may arise where playing strictly according to the rules will allow evildoers to
escape punishment or when rules have to be bent to protect the rest of us. In these
exceptional cases, dirty hands actions may become morally acceptable. Yet for Walzer,
if officials are caught breaking the rules, they should still be brought to account. Even
if they were morally justified in doing what they did, we cannot openly and publicly
allow this, because the consequence of doing so would likely encourage future rights-
violations by the authorities. As Walzer notes, this makes the general public, which
would adopt such a prosecution of well-intentioned public officials, a party to dirty
hands dealings. “[Hoederer] lies, manipulates, and kills, and we must make sure he
pays the price. We won’t be able to do that, however, without getting our own hands
dirty, and then we must find some way of paying the price ourselves.”41 Fortunately for
the general public, it has itself too thick a neck for hanging; its punishment is the loss
of principled people from government service following application of this theory,
with more cynical people taking their places, resulting in harm for the public.
Frank Knopfelmacher, an Australian psychology professor, deals with the dirty
hands problem in a way that resembles in one respect Nyberg’s treatment of lying; that
is, he demarcates an area where the ordinary rules governing not just lying but any aspect
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of morality do not apply. The rules of morality are only transactable within a relatively stable society in which institutions can flourish, so the first priority will be to establish those institutions, and that will require force of some kind. Here, the norm of pacifism
is ultimately self-destructive, because absolute pacifism prevents the enforcement of the
rules establishing the institutions. A key claim Knopfelmacher makes is: “If the moral
norms were always absolutely valid, they would be nontransactable in practice because
they would lead sooner or later to the destruction of the very social order through which
alone they can be maintained, and which in itself has to be maintained by frequently
immoral methods.”42 Whether or not he is right, his view seems to have the support of
people in the highest reaches of some justice systems. Consider the following report on
a US Supreme Court decision, which appeared in the New York Times:
The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 today that the police may use deception to keep a
defense lawyer away while they interrogate a criminal suspect. The Court upheld a
Rhode Island murder conviction based on a confession obtained after the police did
not inform the suspect that a lawyer retained by his sister was trying to reach him,
and falsely told the lawyer that no interrogation was planned.
To rule otherwise, the court said, “would inhibit crime-fighting because lawyers would
prevent guilty suspects from confessing.”43
&nbs
p; The task of the statesman, Knopfelmacher says, is essentially strategic: to
establish and defend institutions. As a man of society the politician obeys the Ten
Commandments, but as a statesman he cannot do so because he may have to use
violence, deception, and fraud in defence of the polity. Knopfelmacher distinguishes
two sorts of acts: intra-institutional and meta-institutional. Intra-institutional acts
are guided by the norms that define them morally in an absolute manner. “The
norms proscribing killing, stealing, raping and cheating are absolutely valid, except
for the trivial proviso that, at times, proscribed acts represent a lesser evil—a state
of affairs statable both in deontological and utilitarian terms.” On the other hand,
meta-institutional acts are regulated by the ethic of responsibility, which safeguards
the institutional structure within which the way of life unfolds itself. This does not
mean that anything goes at the meta-institutional level, only that the ordinary rules
of morality don’t apply. “How far one can ‘go’ must be judged by the culturally well-
formed ear. There are no rigid rules.... There are no meta-rules....” The objection that
this lack of moral rule-determination might lead to totalitarian disregard for human
rights is met by Knopfelmacher in the following way. A totalitarian such as Hitler
turns the whole institutional structure into a pernicious social order. It is the ends
that condemn the totalitarian, not the means; however, the totalitarian also permits
any action that will promote the utopian vision. In Knopfelmacher’s scenario, the
meta-institutional ethical rule-holiday is subject to rule-governance regarding the
morality to be protected.44
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Knopfelmacher’s theory is dangerous because of a human propensity to seek
to increase one’s power. Without meta-institutional rules governing their activity,
officials may find it much too convenient to dispense with bothersome things such
as the rule of law. This in turn provokes resentment, reaction, and the need for more
severe measures to keep “law and order.” Eventually, injustices may become so wide-
