Truth, Lies, and Non-duplicity
1. Introduction. We don’t like to be lied to because we need to know what is going on. But a lie is only one way of presenting or supporting a false view of the world, and if we focus too much on defining and moralizing about lies, we will never get to the really important question: “What information shall we share with others?” The question is not only whether to tell the truth, but how much to tell, when to tell it, and how much to regulate the non-verbal things we do that influence the beliefs of others. What do we want, or even require, from others in the way of information, and what are we willing to give? What sort of “information contract” do we have with others, and is there anything we can do to improve the quality, quantity, and relevance of the information we consume and share? As we shall see, questions about lies and lying are only the tip of the iceberg of the ethics of information.
2. Verbal and Non-verbal Deception. Because I have cable TV and you do not, I invite you to my house to watch basketball. You arrive and we turn on a game between the Detroit Pistons and the New Jersey Nets. Then, to my dismay, you spend the next two hours complaining about foreign and domestic affairs and gossiping about our colleagues. At the end of the game I turn the TV off, take the snacks to the kitchen, and start turning off lights. You thank me for a pleasant evening and depart. As your car drives away I get the snacks back out, turn the TV on, and watch the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets in the second half of the Friday double-header.
I did not lie to you, but what I did led you to believe I was not going to watch that second game, and that led you to go home. This is an instance of what Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant describe as non-verbal deception. Telling a lie—deception of the verbal sort—is thought to be often wrong by Grotius and always wrong by Kant, but they both see non-verbal deception as morally permissible, something we may indulge in whenever we please.
In The Law of War and Peace Grotius gives the example of the “Romans who threw bread from the Capitol into the posts of the enemy that they might not be believed to be distressed by famine.” Following the “Medievals,” he calls this management. Kant’s distinction between verbal and non-verbal deception is made in “Ethical Duties towards others: Truthfulness,” where he notes that “it is possible to deceive without making any statement whatever.” He says that such deception is no lie, and mentions, as an example, packing his luggage in order to make people think he is off on a journey. In such a case, he says, another person has “no right to expect that my action will express my real mind.”
Grotius thinks that lies, when not justified by circumstances, are wrong because they violate a right of the person lied to. This right is a right to “liberty of judgment,” a right to form opinions without being encumbered by false information, a right “which, as if by some tacit agreement, men who speak are understood to owe to those with whom they converse.” This “mutual obligation,” he says, is one “which men had willed to introduce at the time when they determined to make use of speech and similar signs.”
Like Grotius, Kant claims that there is a right of mankind not to be misled by lies. Grotius bases this right on a tacit agreement we make merely by speaking, and Kant seems to agree when he says that “every lie is objectionable and contemptible in that we purposely let people think that we are telling them our thoughts and do not do so. We have broken our pact and violated the right of mankind.”
Now it is clear why Grotius and Kant are so comfortable with the distinction between verbal and non-verbal deception. They both assume that only verbal deception is covered by the tacit understandings we develop when we share information. Since we have made no agreement to refrain from what Grotius calls “pretense,” he concludes that all such devices “are of such a sort that they may be employed by anyone at his discretion.”
For those who have chosen to deceive, the distinction between lying and non-verbal forms of deception is doubtless welcome, but it is not as significant as Grotius and Kant think because our “contract” with others goes beyond the simple agreement to refrain from saying what is false. We lose the “liberty of judgment” Grotius mentioned as quickly by being tricked or misled with a truth as by being told a lie. So while we do share a general convention that our remarks should not be false, most of us would say that in addition to truthfulness we want a level of non-duplicity that rules out management and other clever tricks. In particular cases what we expect (and want) depends on our interpretation of the situation and on an array of changing tacit and explicit understandings.
After inviting you to my house, I got you to leave earlier than you might have by making you believe I was not going to watch a second game. But, since I knew you well enough to ask you to my house, my charade may have been as much a violation of our mutual (if tacit) understanding about how to deal with one another as an outright lie would have been. If you return to my house later to retrieve your coat and find me watching the second game, you will not feel less manipulated because I cleverly managed your beliefs without lying to you.
3. Lying and Duplicity Compared. Kant grouped lying, assassination, and poisoning together as “expedients which take us off our guard,” and branded them all as “thoroughly mean.” He said that attacking a man on the highway is “less vile than the attempt to poison him” because “in the former case he can at least defend himself.” Lies do leave us defenseless, because when they are successful we either never learn of them, or learn of them too late to protect ourselves. But this is the case with all forms of duplicity. Indeed, we may be even more defenseless against non-verbal deception, which can be perpetrated by people who seem innocently to be going about their normal business (like packing for a trip) and not even trying to tell us, or make us believe, anything.
Outright lies, premeditated management, and other forms of duplicity are calculated to produce, sustain, or exploit a false version of events. False beliefs harm us when they deprive us of property, credit, or confidence, but they can do damage even when the deception is well-intentioned or fails to achieve its goal. Long after an act of deception, false beliefs generated by duplicity can linger and, like toxic waste, pollute a victim’s reservoir of information.
Just as lying is potentially harmful to the liar, to the victim, and to social and personal relationships, so are deliberate exploits of non-verbal deception. As soon as we have managed to deceive someone, no matter how the trick was done, the reasonable fear of discovery can disturb our peace of mind and sour the fruits of our deception. The freedom that comes with non-duplicity generates a sense of ease and well-being, but duplicity makes us slaves to our deception, perpetually servicing the false realities our duplicity has created.
When we resort to duplicity (verbal or non-) we are trying to accomplish something by bringing or allowing others to see the world mistakenly, and in more cases than Grotius and Kant were willing to acknowledge, this is something we have “agreed” not to do.
4. Perfect Non-duplicity and “I–Virtue.” Imagine a person who refuses to lie, who is unwilling to employ non-mendacious verbal deception, and who never intentionally acts to create a false impression. We can say that such a person has achieved perfect non-duplicity. We want non-duplicity from our friends and associates, but not perfect non-duplicity. We want less than perfect non-duplicity because, as we all know, sometimes lies and pretense are appropriate. And we want more because we usually want to be given information we need whether we have asked for it or not. Alexander Butterfield did not volunteer information about Nixon’s secret tapes, but when he was asked if there might have been some kind of recording device in the White House, he replied, “I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me that.” Less momentously, consider the unhelpful companion who, when asked “Why didn’t you tell me there was a snake in my bed?” replied, “You didn’t ask.” Neither Butterfield nor the unhelpful companion deviated from perfect non-duplicity, but neither volunteered the information most needed at the moment.
We want timely, accurate, and relevant information presented in a way we can understand. We consider someone whose remarks usually meet these conditions trustworthy. I shall say that such a person has “I–virtue.” (The ‘I’ stands for ‘information’.) Like other virtues, I-virtue is a (relative) mean. An I-virtuous person is truthful but not inappropriately so, non-duplicitous unless duplicity is called for, and responsive to our need for information. An I-virtuous person will not always tell the truth, and in the right circumstances he or she may not even tell us when there is a snake in our beds. It depends on our I-contract and on the circumstances.
Randy Cohen, author of “The Ethicist,” discusses the case of a 60 year-old man who neglected to tell his wife about a previous heart problem, “both to spare her worry and to shield myself from the stress of her ‘hovering’, which might increase the likelihood of another heart attack.” Cohen grants that different families have different policies about medical disclosure, but in this case he assumes that the wife neither expects nor wants her husband to conceal information about his health. He says that by doing so the husband is violating his “implicit agreement” with his wife. Cohen is right. Cohabiters almost certainly have at least an implicit understanding that they will not keep medical secrets from each other.
5. Why be I-virtuous? In speaking of the “artificial virtues,” Hume observed that however much one or another individual may be inconvenienced by a single act of honesty, fidelity, or respect for property, these virtues stabilize our social world and give us the freedom to flourish, so we commend and recommend them. Nevertheless, “a sensible knave” may reason that while it may be a “good general rule” that honesty is the best policy, he “conducts himself with most wisdom, who observes the general rule, and takes advantage of all the exceptions.” To such a person, Hume speaks eloquently of the satisfactions of an untroubled conscience and the joys of benevolence, friendship, humanity and kindness. He even adds that the “knave” would have to be invariably lucky and exceptionally skillful to get away with his deceptions. But get away they sometimes do, and we all know that.
To keep the number of sensible knaves at a minimum, we encourage truthfulness and non-duplicity early and often, and since I-virtue involves sticking to our various I-contracts (an instance of “fidelity”), we try to encourage that too. But there are times when it is obviously not in our interest to give others the information they need, and even when some I-virtuous act seems to be in our interest, passion and partiality can make this difficult to see, and if seen, difficult to act on.
For these reasons Hume considered, and I think recommended, employing fictions to pick up the slack when circumstances make us forget about the joys of benevolence and an untroubled conscience. Our “avidity and partiality,” he said, would produce “an infinite confusion in human society” if we did not consider ourselves bound by “general and inflexible principles,” which are “unchangeable by spite or favor, and by particular views of private or public interest.” These principles urge us to tell the truth, keep our word, and respect the claims of others. It is in explaining why we should follow these principles without exception that the fictions come in. For example we are told that honesty is invariably good policy, and that crime does not pay. Sensible knaves and clear-headed observers of life will not buy it, but these false generalizations are often repeated, and apparently already widely believed.
A second type of fiction Hume favored is the idea that actions that deviate from generally accepted standards of honesty and fidelity are violations of objective moral requirements. They are intrinsically evil, wicked, morally wrong, and in the most general terms, not to be done. This was, of course, neither Hume’s considered opinion, nor his final word. He failed to find the vice even in “willful murder.” But skepticism about morality is not for everyone, and in the Treatise Hume notes, with apparent approval, that parents “are induc’d to inculcate on their children, from their earliest infancy, the principles of probity, and teach them to regard the observance of those rules, by which society is maintain’d, as worthy and honourable, and their violation as base and infamous.”
6. Truth and Fictions. Hume was not alone in recommending that we “raise a fiction” to restrain those who might be led astray by self-interest and confined generosity. Plato explicitly defended the policy, and countless kings, priests, and moral philosophers have adopted it, but not always openly. Even contemporary philosophers, some of whom think that moral judgments are never true, find it useful to be able to say that lying (or duplicity, or secrecy) is morally wrong, or that truthfulness or honesty has intrinsic value.
Few who proclaim that honesty is the best policy really believe that an act of honesty always has better results than a deception. Repetition of this false generalization might have some causal effect on our own behavior, or on that of others, but its influence is easily neutralized by fear or greed. The non-fictional fact is that unless we embrace (and often thoughtlessly follow) general practical principles such as “tell the truth” and “stick to your I-contracts” we could not stand to be around each other. But the idea that we should treat these useful slogans as “general and inflexible principles” is foolish and dangerous. What we need is a steady but not inflexible observance of the rules and laws that make things work.
The very idea that we need to appeal to self-interest to support or encourage truthfulness and I-virtue is disturbing. We do not want our friends and associates to follow unbreakable rules, and we really do not want them to base their information-decisions on self-interest. It would be the end of conversation and trust if we thought that people only tell us what they judge it will be in their interest for us to believe. We don’t even want to be told something true because someone judges it is good for society, or even for us, to believe it. We just want the truth, and we want it without ulterior motive.
People may be willing to promote false generalizations and fictions about morality because they fear that if we have neither self-interested reasons nor moral reasons to deal honestly with others, we will be helpless when self-interest and passion urge us to deceive. But this is surely a mistake. We have many resources for encouraging truthfulness, honesty, fidelity, and I-virtue. Social approval and disapproval, legal sanctions, and positive and negative reinforcement of many sorts are effective and ubiquitous. In fact, traits like honesty, respect, and I-virtue are taught and reinforced daily by almost everyone. Finally, the considerations Hume mentioned—the joys of benevolence, friendship, humanity, and kindness—are made possible and amplified by habitual and selfless acts of I-virtue.
7. Non-duplicitous Solutions. If we are inclined to stick to the terms of our “information contracts,” or impressed by the bad features of duplicity, we may begin to look for non-duplicitous solutions to our problems. I used what Grotius called “management” to get you to leave after the first basketball game, but by now I hope it is clear that I can claim no special moral merit for having found a way to achieve my end without having told a lie. My solution was non-mendacious yet duplicitous, but it is easy to think of non-duplicitous ways to deal with the situation, and easy to think of reasons for doing so.
For example, early in the game I might have said something like “Hey let’s watch the game and talk later.” In my story that didn’t happen, or if it did, it didn’t work, so when we got to the end of the first game my discomfort led to my duplicitous solution. One “I-virtuous” thing to have done may have been to clarify the situation by giving you some information. The information you needed was that your behavior was disturbing to me, even if the fault was completely mine for being so devoted to a game. If I had decided to level with you, and if you had been receptive, we could have spent the time between games figuring out how to balance talking and watching. Then we could both have enjoyed the second game. Unfortunately this “perfect solution” is not available if we are (or if either of us is) too defensive or unpracticed in introspection to profit from such a conversation, or if our I-contract frowns on meta-conversation. Since we are often defensive, afraid of confrontation, and impatient with talk about talk, most of our I-contracts are hammered out tacitly—which accounts for many misunderstandings, and not a few disasters.
8. Conclusion. If our goal is to improve the quality, quantity, and relevance of the information we consume and share, we need to exhibit the I-virtuous qualities we wish to promote and to encourage people to value them. But it would be a mistake to claim that they have some mysterious kind of value, and a mistake to promote them for any advantage they might generate.
If we want to encourage honesty and I-virtue without resorting to convenient fictions and noble lies, thereby succumbing to terminal irony, it would help to become aware of why people are tempted to mislead. In my example, I allowed my impatience and discomfort to goad me into an act of duplicity. In fact, we are continually being tempted to shape the information we share and to restrict the information we provide. It is relatively easy to come up with an excuse for duplicity, and it is true that sometimes lies and other forms of duplicity are called for. But more often than not, and in the normal flow of daily life, we can preserve our I-virtue by finding a non-duplicitous way of dealing with others, and a reason for doing so that is based more on compassion and respect, than on self-interest or on fictional notions of moral duty and inherent value.
Grotius and Kant were not wrong to think that we have a kind of agreement to speak the truth; their mistake was to think the agreement is limited to our statements. In reality there is a far richer fabric of agreement about how, what, and when information is to be shared. I-virtue is the habit of trying to stick to the complex and ever-changing terms of those explicit and tacit agreements and understandings. The major practical and moral objections that apply to lies also apply to many other acts of duplicity and deviations from I-virtue, so it is not just truthfulness that is the foundation of all our cooperative undertakings, it is our ability to feel confident that others are very nearly as I-virtuous as are we.