Life by Julian Baggini & Antonia Macaro

Author:Julian Baggini & Antonia Macaro [Baggini, Julian & Macaro, Antonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473568563
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

See also: Calm, Control, Fate, Regret, Risk, Superstition, What If

Reading

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 523)

Thomas Nagel, ‘Moral Luck’ in Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Lying

‘Sorry I missed the party – I wasn’t feeling well.’ ‘That shirt suits you.’ ‘I’m so excited for you!’ Few people will consider such lies to be anything other than sensible attempts to grease the wheels of social intercourse. But there are many other times when the decision to tell the truth or not carries a lot more moral weight. Do you say, ‘You’re going to be fine’ to someone who is not likely to be? Do you keep a one-off infidelity secret? Do you report a colleague for inappropriate behaviour?

One of the few things we can be certain about is that anyone who says they have never lied is a liar – beyond that, it is all rather complicated. Immanuel Kant tried to strip away the complexities by asserting that ‘To be truthful in all declarations is … a sacred command of reason prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by any conveniences.’ Honesty is an absolute duty, lying is never justified. Benjamin Constant, one of his contemporaries, saw the problem with that. He accused Kant of insisting that ‘it would be a crime to lie to a murderer who asked us whether a friend of ours whom he is pursuing has taken refuge in our house’. Kant’s reply has been picked apart by scholars ever since. Let’s just say that he didn’t unambiguously deny the accusation.

Assuming that most of us are not absolutist about lying, the question becomes: when are we permitted, or even obliged, to do it? The simple utilitarian answer is that lying is justified when it has better consequences than telling the truth. One of the founders of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, seemed to have Kant and Constant in mind when he gave an example of such a justified lie: ‘when the withholding of some fact (as of information from a malefactor, or of bad news from a person dangerously ill) would save an individual (especially an individual other than oneself) from great and unmerited evil, and when the withholding can only be effected by denial.’

The problem with the utilitarian approach, as Mill recognised, is that it is of vital social importance that we trust people to be generally honest. If we know that people will lie whenever it seems to them that the consequences of doing so are good, the whole institution of truth-telling is undermined. ‘Any, even unintentional, deviation from truth,’ said Mill, ‘does that much towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends.’

Confucius and Aristotle would have cheered Mill for this. They both believed that the key to being good is the cultivation of good character, and that includes being honest and trustworthy.

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