Cavalier Liars

By Leslie Pratch
May 18, 2010

Sissela Bok is formally a sociologist and a philosopher but calls herself a field practical ethicist. She certainly comes from good stock: she is the daughter of two Nobel Laureates: the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal. She also happened to marry the former Dean of the Harvard Law School, the much loved Derek Bok. To avoid confusion with her husband, I will refer to her with her first and last name.

In the middle portion of Sissela Bok's career she started her inquiry into lying among medical doctors. Like Niebuhr, the subject of my previous posts, she maintains that good intentions on their own usually do not create good results.

Sissela Bok wrote her first book in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. At the time, she noted that trust in public officials had gone down since Eisenhower. Oliver North who was open about why he thought it had been a good idea to lie opened up the debate in philosophy--and to some extent social science--as to whether there is more lying than meets the eye that goes on among public officials. She hesitates to estimate the prevalence of lying because a successful lie is one that is never found out. (This is the same problem I face in my research: how do my clients and I know if an executive I recommend against hiring would have been successful had he been hired?) How do you know if someone is lying if the lie is not discovered?

Sissela Bok then started to ask how public officials justify lies. One rationalization is "national security"-one vast umbrella. When exactly does national security justify lying? In war, lying to enemies may be necessary to survive, but that does not make it necessary always to lie to adversaries and citizens.

Another rationalization is that lying serves the greater good. If it helps a politician get elected, the end justifies the means. (Tell that to Elizabeth Edwards.) And some politicians justify their lies because they believe their knowledge is superior and the public is ignorant. (Great: Let's ruin democracy and save a few jobs.)

Another category is the white lie. A white lie has no harmful effect. It is a huge category that has nothing to do with public service but is widespread in general life.

But Sissela Bok believes we lie far more often than justified though there are some exceptional categories where saying what you don"t mean to mislead others is indeed for the good but these exceptions must be very narrow. We must temper the impulse to expand the realm of "it is not harming others," to think of oneself as exceptional.

She cites Kant who said (and I paraphrase), "What do you say to an official who is coming intending to kill your friend who is hiding in your house, and your friend is an innocent person?" In more recent times, it might be a Nazi hunting a Jew. (Recall Kant was born April 22, 1724). Kant said that even then you must not lie. Bok thinks that one can lie under those circumstances. Saving the life of an innocent person is more important than not lying.

But it would be better if you could do something besides lie. You could bore or distract the official so that he forgot about his reason for coming to get your friend. She imagined that the brilliant, articulate Kant would have managed to detain the murderer long enough for the friend to escape but most of us are not capable of that kind of delay tactic.

Another exceptional circumstance is games where lying is expected because those are the rules. But that kind of lying is not deceptive. Finally, a third category is where there is literally nothing at stake""a truly white lie but even there we should use our imagination to say things that are not deceptive. As an example, if your spouse asks how do you like my tie, one might say "I think the brown tie goes better with the blue suit." She doesn't have to lie. The three exceptional circumstances are saving the life of an innocent friend: the second is a game; the third is an innocuous white lie.

What's the big deal about lying? In my book, it boils down to the Golden Rule and treating others as you would want to be treated yourself. To lie is to set up a bifurcated self, one that lives by a duplicitous set of standards, two (or more) sets of books).

For Sissela Bok, lying is harmful for two reasons. One, the liar assumes a power over the person to whom he lies. When someone you trusted to tell you the truth lies it feels bad. It harms the relationship. Another person who is harmed is the person who is telling the lie. We know that person cannot be trusted, and that person will have difficulty retaining a team around him or her. In Kant"s last book, The Anthology, he wrote that the only way we know whether we have character is if we know we are trying as hard as we can to be honest with other people and with ourselves. The liar is injured by lying as is the person who is deceived.

Larger considerations also loom, which pertain to trust in general. It is hard to work with individuals you don"t trust. That might be the largest danger of all. We have seen so many scandals in government and on Wall Street. Since Eisenhower, many Americans have lost trust in the institutions originally created to engender social stability, transparency, free markets, a social safety net including access to health care, and democracy in general. That loss of trust makes it harder to work together toward common goals.

Lying erodes the safety and well-being of the community. If you are interested in learning more, see this blog for more in integrity.