This is an original article.
Lying is telling or writing or otherwise promulgating a false statement or claim with intent to deceive.
Here we will be concerned with lies as statements — not lies of demeanor or costume or some other such non-veridical appearance or presentation. The existence of lies is dependant on the existence of truth and the ability to discern or discriminate truth from falsehood.
From antiquity, lying has often been rejected and even condemned by religious figures, by God or the gods (as people have represented God or the gods), by philosophers, by jurists, and others. One of the Ten Commandments, for example, forbids "bearing false witness," meaning giving or promulgating a lie or deliberate falsehood in a juridical or evidence-giving context. (Exodus 20:16) That prohibition would presumably also apply to such things as falsifying data in a scientific or engineering situation. Lying when under oath (in a judicial proceeding or similar legal context) even to achieve some greater good is itself the crime of perjury, and is subject to criminal penalties. Lying to government investigators, even if there is no prior crime, has often resulted in people being prosecuted for that crime of lying although the supposed crime that was being investigated had not actually occurred.
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, at least prima facie, there are cases when lying may be preferable, ethically and otherwise, 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.
Absolute 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.”
Mental Reservation as a Response to Absolute Prohibitions of Lying
When there is an absolute prohibition against something that people strongly want or need to do, then creative ways of circumventing the prohibition will be found. The absolute prohibition against lying within Roman Catholicism led to the formation and use of the doctrine of “mental reservation.”
Common Roman Catholic teaching holds that a lie is intrinsically evil and that an evil thing may never be done in order that a good may result from it, so it is never permissible to tell a lie even if doing so saves a human life. But we are, the teaching holds, also obliged to keep secrets faithfully, and sometimes the best way to do that is to tell a lie. Many writers, ancient and modern, have accepted this, and have thus held that when there is a conflict between doing what is just and telling the truth, justice should prevail. The theory of mental reservation was formulated to give a means whereby the demands of both veracity (truth telling) and justice (what is ethically required) can be satisfied. (See the Catholic Encyclopedia on this at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10195b.htm)
