Speech Matters

On Lying, Morality, and the Law

Seana Valentine Shiffrin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400852529
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

To understand one another as individuals and to fulfill the moral duties that require such understanding, we must communicate with each other. We must also maintain protected channels that render reliable communication possible, a demand that, Seana Shiffrin argues, yields a prohibition against lying and requires protection for free speech. This book makes a distinctive philosophical argument for the wrong of the lie and provides an original account of its difference from the wrong of deception.Drawing on legal as well as philosophical arguments, the book defends a series of notable claims—that you may not lie about everything to the "murderer at the door, " that you have reasons to keep promises offered under duress, that lies are not protected by free speech, that police subvert their mission when they lie to suspects, and that scholars undermine their goals when they lie to research subjects.Many philosophers start to craft moral exceptions to demands for sincerity and fidelity when they confront wrongdoers, the pressures of non-ideal circumstances, or the achievement of morally substantial ends. But Shiffrin consistently resists this sort of exceptionalism, arguing that maintaining a strong basis for trust and reliable communication through practices of sincerity, fidelity, and respecting free speech is an essential aspect of ensuring the conditions for moral progress, including our rehabilitation of and moral reconciliation with wrongdoers.

CHAPTER ONE

Lies and the Murderer Next Door

In human social life, the principal object is to communicate our attitudes, and hence it is of the first importance that everyone be truthful in respect of his thoughts, since without that, social intercourse ceases to be of any value. Only when a person voices his opinions can another tell what he thinks, and if he declares that he wishes to express his thoughts, he must also do it, for otherwise there can be no sociality among men. Fellowship among men is only the second condition of sociality; but the liar destroys this fellowship, and hence we despise a liar, since the lie makes it impossible for people to derive any benefit from what he has to say.

—Immanuel Kant, from his Lectures on Ethics¹

Benjamin Constant famously complained about a “German philosopher” who implausibly maintained 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.”² In response to this allegation, Immanuel Kant notoriously rejected Constant’s contention that one has a duty to tell the truth only to a person who has a right to one’s sincerity, declaring:

Truthfulness in statements that one cannot avoid is a human being’s duty to everyone, however great the disadvantage to him or to another that may result from it; and although I indeed do no wrong to him who unjustly compels me to make the statement if I falsify it, I nevertheless do wrong in the most essential part of duty in general by such falsification which can therefore be called a lie …; that is, I bring it about, as far as I can, that statements (declarations) in general are not believed, and so too that all rights which are based on contracts come to nothing and lose their force; and this is a wrong inflicted upon humanity generally.³

Kant’s notorious refusal to dissociate himself from the Murderer-at-the-Door example often serves as the fulcrum around which critical parodies of him, and of deontology more generally, pivot. Although a spate of recent work suggests both that Kant’s nuanced position has been misunderstood and that a plausible position on lying may be constructed from Kantian materials, much of it has focused on showing that the Kantian position need not be as extreme as critics and the Murderer-at-the-Door passage suggest.⁴ Less of it, I think, has made sense of why lying as such exercised Kant so strongly and why, despite the strong temptation to dismiss his position about the Murderer at the Door, that passage exerts a magnetic attraction on critics and friends alike.

Here, I aim to address that gap and to sketch a theory that provides some plausible ground for a qualified form of Kant’s absolutism about lying, building upon the themes Kant adduces in the opening passage of the selection from the Lectures on Ethics. Although I draw inspiration from some of Kant’s texts and from some Kantian interpreters, my main interest is in what we may glean from Kantian or neo-Kantian themes. I do not claim that my worries are, in the end, the same as Kant’s, and I do not aspire to an accurate exegesis of Kant’s text.

Investigating the resources of the Kantian position has contemporary relevance because a tension in our moral attitudes toward lying remains unresolved. On the one hand, with respect to everyday cases, few people subscribe to consequentialist accounts of the wrong of lying. Whether one should lie for personal gain does not seem to turn upon the question of whether the benefits to oneself outweigh the costs to others. Even when large benefits to oneself would eclipse the costs to others, most people are persuaded that more principled, nonconsequentialist arguments explain why the lie is impermissible. To lie for personal convenience seems to violate fundamental norms of equality and interpersonal respect by wrongfully treating oneself as more important than one’s interlocutor, whether because one thereby makes an exception for oneself to crucial rules of communication, because one thereby attempts to gain an unfair epistemic advantage over another, or because one attempts to manipulate another’s trust for one’s own private ends. The deontological view that the duty of sincerity regulates one’s behavior for reasons independent of the overall value of the consequences of its fulfillment or violation seems plausible. Considerations of this sort suggest that deontological accounts of sincerity are planted on solid ground, at least when the temptation to violate a prohibition arises from self-oriented motives.

Deontological positions often seem to lose their firm footing, however, when the temptation to violate a prohibition arises from moral motives, especially when the immediate beneficiary of the prohibition would be a moral criminal. When the murderer comes to one’s door asking for the whereabouts of his intended victim, it does not ring true to insist that lying would involve carving out an exception for oneself or manipulating trust for one’s private ends. One’s ends here could not be more publicly oriented: to save the innocent and to frustrate a terrible criminal endeavor. Even those who regard dishonesty as a serious moral offense often begin to hedge when the subject of exigent circumstances arises. If an innocent life is at stake, surely the strictures against misrepresentation substantially relax. Many find it hard to resist the idea that in exigent circumstances, when one’s aims are public-spirited, and particularly when the circumstances are created by a wrongdoer, the consequences should determine what one communicates—most famously, that one should lie to the Murderer at the Door about the location of his intended victim to save that victim’s life.

I feel the pull of these ideas about exigent circumstances, but, upon reflection, I think they are overly simple. In particular, they seem insufficiently sensitive to the role of communication in enabling moral agency, securing our moral ends, and facilitating moral connection and moral rehabilitation, even with, and perhaps especially with, wrongdoers. The conditions of forging moral progress together seem to depend upon securing and protecting the lines of communicative trust. In what follows, I try to offer a deontological account of the wrong of lying that distinguishes the wrong of the lie from the wrong of deception (when it is wrong) and that resists complete (theoretical) capitulation to the Murderer at the Door.

I do not contend that one may never intentionally misrepresent anything at all to the Murderer at the Door. In fact, although many recent accounts try to reconcile Kantian principles with the permissibility of misrepresenting to the Murderer at the Door, I believe they do not venture far enough. They endorse untruthful representations to the murderer at one’s own door, but they have a difficult time justifying what seems an equally clear case: the neighbor’s intentionally false representation about the intended victim’s whereabouts to the murderer next door.

In other respects, however, recent efforts to recast the Kantian position go too far and, in essence, endorse an overly broad range of misrepresentations to wrongdoers. We need not represent truthfully when our representations would constitute cooperation with a criminal aim, but at the same time, the fact that the murderer has a nefarious aim does not suffice to authorize any manner of misrepresentation. Some intentional misrepresentations told even to the Murderer at the Door are wrong. I suspect the over-breadth of some recent reconciliations emanates from some larger presuppositions that I reject about our relations to wrongdoers and how and when we may reasonably expect moral transformation and reconciliation to occur.

To elaborate these ideas, I will begin with some preliminary thoughts about what typifies the lie and what I take the distinctive wrong of lying to be, as opposed to the wrong of deception (when deception is wrong). Although lies are often used to achieve deception and often a part of the wrong of such lies is their deceptive use, I contend that lying is distinct from deception. Further, the wrong of lying differs from the wrong of deception. I will then proceed to the problem of the Murderer at the Door and connect it to other issues about our moral relations with wrongdoers and the process of their moral evolution. My overarching aim is not to defend an absolutism blind to the circumstances of communication, but to try to reframe how the consequences of communicative actions matter by advancing a more contextual and content-based approach to the question of when one may misrepresent.

Lying and Its Wrongfulness

Why Truthful Communication Matters

I will start with what I take to be the central, but relatively neglected, good that Kant stresses as promoted by truthful communication.⁵ Its fuller appreciation helps to explain his profound animosity toward untruthfulness.

As Kant emphasizes in his Lectures on Ethics, we lack direct access to the content of one another’s minds. We must rely upon communication for mutual understanding and cooperation, which are compulsory ends for human rational agents living together.⁶ As human beings, we have foundational interests in knowing the contents of one another’s minds.

Given our mutual epistemic limitations and the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves, we depend upon one another’s beliefs, knowledge, and reactions to our beliefs to construct a reliable picture of our world, so that we can navigate through it and understand who we are and where we are situated. This mutual epistemic dependence encompasses not only our ability to apprehend the material and social world, to learn history, and to apprehend the wide realm of a priori truths.⁷ It also includes our ability fully to understand our moral and political duties. As imperfect rational agents in a complex and evolving social world, we need one another’s help to understand what morality requires. Moreover, as is explicit in democracies, because our political duties demand responsiveness to what other agents believe is right, we need to have a clear and reliable understanding of their will in order to be appropriately responsive to it.

In addition to relying upon one another’s understanding of the moral environment to form a coherent, accurate picture of our general moral and political duties, we have other moral reasons to seek knowledge of the contents of one another’s minds. Many moral duties require responsiveness to other people as particular individuals, which demands a good sense of others’ thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and perceived needs. To respect their autonomy, we need to know what their capacities are, what information they have access to, and, most important, what they will. Further, our ability to assess when others have behaved well or badly, whether they have acted in or out of character, whether they have and exercise virtues and vices of character, and whether they have acted freely or under coercion will often depend on our knowing what beliefs, reasons, emotions, and other motives propel their behavior. Because our full moral assessments of their behavior depend upon some understanding of others’ mental contents, so will our apt moral reactions to their behavior. Relatedly, we care for one another and both need and care to be known and cared for by others. Relationships of recognition and close relationships—both necessary for full self-development and flourishing—depend upon access to the contents of one another’s minds. For me to be an object of particularized respect and appreciation requires others to know me for who I am, although it is important that I have some control over who has access, to what, and when. The fulfillment of these foundational moral interests requires a mechanism for accurate, discretionary self-revelation.

Speech, which I will use as shorthand for “linguistic communication,” plays a special role in allowing us access to this necessary information, helping us overcome the opacity of one another’s minds. Although we can often observe behavior, including facial expressions, and make inferences about what that behavior reveals about others’ mental contents, that behavior provides only a rough guide to the variegated and nuanced territory of the mental. It is difficult to read behavior accurately and to grasp the subtleties of mental content through just our external actions.

Communication by one mind to another, particularly through speech, provides the only precise mechanism by which one’s mental contents may be conveyed to another mind, with all their subtlety and detail. Intentional communication is also the only authoritative source of one’s own mental contents. Only I have direct access to the contents of my mind. My representations about what I think, believe, feel, experience, have decided, and so forth, have an authoritative status that other sources of information about me lack.

Of course, individuals may not fully know themselves and, further, may be self-deceived. Hence, they may not be fully equipped to share (should they decide to do so) all of the contents of their minds with others and to enable others to know themselves directly through testimony.

The phenomenon of self-deception does not diminish my point. Even when people are self-deceived, what they consciously take to be their beliefs, emotions, and other mental contents is a vital aspect of who they are and composes part of their mental contents.⁸ Sharing these contents, confronting the reactions of others, and learning of any observations of one’s behavior to the contrary are often crucial both to others’ understanding of oneself and to resolving and eliminating one’s own self-ignorance and self-deception. That process is an important part of being taken seriously as a rational agent, albeit one who is flawed and partially self-deceived. It enables one to confront one’s imperfections as a rational agent in a rational, self-conscious way.

Together, our need to convey our mental contents and to have access to others’ mental contents, combined with the unique role speech plays in addressing that role, underpin the view that we have duties to promote truthful understanding about our beliefs and other mental contents, and that there is a default moral pre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Lies and the Murderer Next Door
• Chapter Two: Duress and Moral Progress
• Chapter Three: A Thinker-Based Approach to Freedom of Speech
• Chapter Four: Lying and Freedom of Speech
• Chapter Five: Accommodation, Equality, and the Liar
• Chapter Six: Sincerity and Institutional Values
• Index