A World without Why by Geuss Raymond

Author:Geuss, Raymond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

A Note on Lying

It has often seemed odd to me that lying, meaning the intentional telling of what one knows to be false as the truth, has had such a bad press in the modern world, and I can explain this only by the persistence of bog-Christian attitudes. Christianity is, after all, intended to appeal to simple souls whose speech was to be “Yea, yea” and “nay, nay” with everything else consigned to the category of the “evil” (ἔστω δὲ ὁ λόγος ὑμῶν ναὶ ναί, οὒ οὔ• τὸ δὲ περισσὸν τούτων ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ ἐστιν; Matt. 5:37). In claiming that lying has had a bad press I do not, of course, mean to say that I think it is a good thing, merely that it is not clear to me that it deserves the uniquely reprehensible status sometimes assigned to it, and that in some contexts there is more to be said for it than is often acknowledged. In a way the fact that a government feels the need to lie to its population can be seen as a progressive trait. Governments that were utterly sure of themselves and their own power and ruthless in their use of it would not need to lie. So the fact that they need to lie can, it seems to me, not unreasonably be seen as a kind of advance on a state of primitive brutality in which force and the threat of force could be used. To be sure, Christianity has traditionally argued the opposite, so that Dante, for instance, places liars and evil counsellors lower down in Hell than the violent. The reason for this is presumably that lying is a perversion of a higher human capacity, that for speaking the truth, and it is worse to corrupt a great possible good than simply to act in a brutal way. It is possible, of course, to be of two minds about this. So one question I would suggest we ask is: Is lying always and in all contexts an absolute evil? Even if the alternative is the direct use of force? A second question is: Is lying, meaning by that term the intentional assertion of something one knows to be untrue, necessarily worse for the liar than telling an untruth one does not know is untrue? Finally, is being lied to necessarily worse for a person than being told an untruth by someone who is himself taken in by it? I submit not that lying is sometimes clearly a good but that in all three of these cases the jury is still out.

It has often been noted that ancient Greek philosophers were obsessed with the issue of the distinction between appearance and reality but showed relatively little interest in lying versus truth-telling, and in particular showed no tendency to think of the distinction between the two as indicating a basic moral issue. In general the idea that under all circumstances it is categorically wrong to lie and that lying is a sign

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