Professional liars

Social Research, Fall, 2004 by Alan Ryan

PREAMBLE: WHAT IS THE SUBJECT?

MY TITLE IS A COME-ON, BUT IT SUGGESTS THE ISSUES THE PAPER embraces. The notion of a professional liar suggests someone who tells lies for a living, perhaps someone who tells lies well, with conviction and with aplomb, certainly someone whose stock in trade includes the capacity to utter the well-judged falsehood. The sort of example I have in mind is the beau ideal of a British civil servant according to Lord Armstrong's testimony in the Spycatcher case: someone who is "economical with the truth" when he must be, who is not on such an occasion likely to squirm with embarrassment, nor to bluster out of a feeling that he is not carrying with conviction. He may even have a fastidious sense that he ought not to presume too far on his audience's credulity, lying to them in a tone that suggests that he certainly intends to deceive them, but that he does not propose that they should feel utterly foolish. A finance minister or one of his officials discussing the prospects for a devaluation of the currency might well pride himself on lying thus.

The paper does not explore the notion of the well-told falsehood in the detail I would like, but relies on the thought that there might be such a thing as the well-told professional lie to explore a very small part of the obligation to tell the truth and to lie under certain conditions as it attaches to the performance of certain professional roles. Obvious professions include doctors, lawyers, and politicians, and doubtless university teachers, too. I say a lot about the first, something about the second, a little about the third, and maintain a decorous silence about the last. I take it that we all know rather too much about the fibs by which we prop up the morale of students and colleagues.

Such novelty as is possessed by what follows lies in my attempt to pursue the plausible but indistinct thought that to sort out our ideas of when lying is permissible or perhaps even mandatory we must understand what relationship the passing of information and disinformation is serving. Lying within marriage offers an example. The "little white lie" is acceptable to a nonsevere (relational) moralist because he or she takes the survival of a marriage as a proper goal, and thinks the reply "absolutely hideous" will not help it, even if it is the honest answer to the question, "What do you think of my new suit?" Severe moralists will deny it--William Godwin springs to mind as an example of a man who would have destroyed a marriage rather than hide the truth about his sentiments. But severe moralists come in several flavors; Kantians are severe for other reasons than severe utilitarians. A severe moralist who was also what I am calling a relationship moralist would have to give as his grounds for wishing the truth to be told even at the cost of the marriage some such thought as this: the badness of a marriage in which the parties did not disclose their deepest feelings with absolute spontaneity is so awful that any relationship that cannot be sustained on that basis ought to expire forthwith. "Green tweed; what a question!" The rest of us, I think, would feel that it was precisely the marriage relationship that imposed especially strict duties of truth-telling in many conditions and the obligation to lie intelligently in others. This paper inspects the connection between kinds of truth-telling (lie-telling therein included) and the relationships in which they are embedded. I begin with a quick glance at some familiar answers to the question why we ought to tell the truth and not lie in general, not to say anything novel, but to get some obvious ideas about the point of truthful and untruthful speech into the open for discussion.

LYING: THREE THEORIES OF THE DUTY TO TELL THE TRUTH

A general and powerful argument for truthfulness is that truthfulness has good results. But all consequentialisms run into the difficulty that (as with promise-keeping, just conduct, and similar issues) they cannot make truthfulness special. The consequentialist answer to, "What shall I say?" must always be, "Whatever does most good." If you ask me when the bus goes, and I believe you would be happier if you thought it went sooner than it does, I will say it goes in 10 minutes even though it goes in an hour. Ill fear you will resent the lie, I may tell you it will go in an hour and a half, knowing your irritation at being lied to will vanish in your pleasure at not having to wait so long. I may decide that it is too difficult to know what you will feel and tell you the truth as a compromise. Irish and Greek social life used to depend a good deal on such shadings of the truth. The philosophical point, however, is merely that in a consequentialist perspective the truth of a statement occupies (apparently) no special position in my motivation in uttering it.

There are two difficulties. The first is that the truth must have some special standing. I cannot calculate what it is best to tell you unless I attend to what is as a matter of fact so. To make you happy with the early arrival of the bus, or to palliate its lateness by pretending it will come sooner than it will, I must know when it will come, and I must, therefore, mind about the truth in a way I do not acknowledge when I speak to you. Most people believe there is something wrong if I mind whether my own views are true, while I do not mind whether your views are true. The more telling objection is the second, that the consequentialist speech-practice suggested here is parasitic on nonconsequentialist truth telling. If I came to think that you had not asked me what time the bus went in order to learn the truth but to make me feel good by being treated as an authority, my incentive to know what time the bus does go disappears. This suggests that consequentialism is self-defeating as a total theory of truth telling. My wish to do you good by what I tell you will be frustrated if what you tell me of your wishes is not the truth. My calculations will be rendered indeterminate, so complex that the whole enterprise has to be given up.