Lying

This is an original article.

Lying is telling or writing or otherwise promulgating a false statement or claim with intent to deceive. From antiquity, lying has been rejected and even condemned by God or the gods, by religious figures, by philosophers, by ethicists, by jurists, and others.

Yet, despite all those received condemnations of it, lying and the possibility that it may not always be wrong are of considerable interest to ethicists, philosophers, theologians, politicians and others because, prima facie at least, there are cases when lying may be preferable to telling the truth.

Intent to Deceive

Not every falsehood is a lie. Lying requires correct or accurate knowledge on the part of the giver, and it also depends on the intent with which it is given. In order for a falsehood to be a lie the person giving it needs to know that it is false, and it must be given with intent to deceive. If the person making the statement thinks or believes that it is true, but it is in fact false, then it is not a lie.

Prohibitions Against All Lying

Some commentators have strictly forbidden all lying. This was often but not always done on a religious basis. The writer of Revelation, for example, claims that the one who sits on the throne [of heaven] declared: “But as for the cowardly, the faithless… murderers, fornicators… and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death.” (Rev. 21:8, Revised Standard Version)

St. Augustine was one who rejected all lying for what were religion-based reasons. In the Enchridion he wrote:

…it is evident that speech was given to man, not that men might therewith deceive one another, but that one man might make known his thoughts to another. To use speech, then, for the purpose of deception, and not for its appointed end, is a sin. Nor are we to suppose that there is any lie that is not a sin, because it is sometimes possible, by telling a lie, to do service to another.

Note that Augustine recognized that, for consequential reasons, it might be preferable sometimes to lie because doing so leads to doing a service to (or for) another person. Yet Augustine rejected such a consequentialist defense of lying because lying, he held, is nevertheless a sin, and sin must always be avoided.

British theologian-evangelist John Wesley similarly rejected consequentialist justifications of lying on the basis that a lie is a sin and sin cannot be condoned even if it leads to good. In one of his sermons he declared:

If any, in fact, do this: either teach men to do evil [so] that good may come or do so themselves, their damnation is just. This particularly applicable to those who tell lies in order to do good thereby. It follows, that officious lies, as well as all others, are an abomination to the God of Truth. Therefore there is no absurdity, however strange it may sound, in that saying of the ancient Father “I would not tell a willful lie to save the souls of the whole world.”

Wesley thus wholly embraced the seeming contradiction of rejecting the sin of telling a lie even if doing so would lead to universal salvation; he claimed that this is no contradiction and no absurdity, even though most other people would not agree with him on this.

German philosopher and ethicist Immanuel Kant also rejected all lying even though lying might lead to good consequences because Kant rejected consequentialism itself. Kant did this on the basis of his notion of the status of human rationality and his view that rationality is directly connected with human dignity. To lie to a person, Kant claimed, is to offend against that person’s rationality and dignity, and thus a lie is always wrong even though it may seem to lead to good consequences. In Doctrine of Virtue Kant wrote, “By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.”