Ground Rules for Telling Lies

The average American prevaricates some 200 times daily

When is it permissible to tell a lie? Never, according to Augustine and Kant. Machiavelli approved lying for princes, Nietzsche for the exceptional hero--the Superman. Most other philosophers, and ordinary folk, are less certain, allowing some lies, but not others. After some 2,500 years of moral speculation, says Philosopher Sissela Bok, mankind is still trying to work out ground rules for acceptable lying.

In her new book, Lying, Bok--the wife of Harvard President Derek Bok and daughter of Swedish Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal--traces the history of convoluted arguments on the subject. For instance, Grotius said that speaking falsely to an intruder is not a lie. This, Bok suggests, would be something like knocking a man to the ground, then explaining that you did not hit him because he had no right to be there. Kant insisted that all lies were immoral--even those told to a murderer to protect an innocent life. Erasmus disagreed, but Cardinal Newman sympathized with Kant. His solution: instead of lying to the murderer, knock him down and call the cops. Casuists invented the "mental reservation." Example: "Mr. Smith is not in today"--a lie that is magically transformed into a truth by adding the unspoken thought "to you." The Talmud allows lies for "bed" (inquiries into one's sex life) and "hospitality" (if a host was generous, one could lie about it so that the host would not be inundated by unwelcome guests).

Most norms on lying, Bok writes, grow out of elaborate moral systems of thought that "are often elegant in operation, noble in design. But when we have to make difficult concrete moral choices, they give us little help." In the absence of clear social guidelines, she says, casual lying has become entrenched in America. Indeed. Social Psychologist Jerald Jellison estimates that the average American outstrips Pinocchio by telling a whopping 200 lies a day, including white lies and false excuses ("Sorry I'm late. I was tied up at the office").

Bok thinks that the problem is a practical one, because lying by the government has begun to corrupt our politics: 69% of the public, according to Cambridge Survey Research, believe that the country's leaders have consistently lied to them over the past ten years. Bok also argues that lying is now an accepted part of many professions, including law and the behavioral sciences. In a typical experiment in social psychology, for example, a subject is misled about the aims of the study to see how he reacts under pressure.

In medicine, prescribing placebos and lying to patients are commonplace. Says Bok, who teaches medical ethics at the Harvard Medical School: "The requirement to be honest with patients has been left out altogether from medical oaths and codes of ethics, and is often ignored, if not actually disparaged, in the teaching of medicine." Bok sees problems in journalism too. Reporters Bernstein and Woodward, she says, seemed untroubled by "the whole fabric of deception" they used to uncover the Watergate scandal. Those lies, she maintains, were not clearly necessary and may encourage other reporters to use such tactics routinely.

What kinds of lies should be permitted? Bok's answer: only those approved in advance by the general public. The use of unmarked police cars is one example of socially approved deception. By this standard, she argues, political lies are rarely justifiable. "If government duplicity is to be allowed in exceptional cases," Bok concludes, "the criteria for these exceptions should themselves be openly debated and publicly chosen. Otherwise government leaders will have free rein to manipulate and distort the facts."

Bok feels that doctors should stop virtually all lying to patients, universities should root out fraudulent and deceptive research, and government officials should be expected to stick to the truth. Her point: the public is now so cynical about being lied to that only extraordinary efforts to avoid lying will restore a feeling of trust. Or, as Mark Twain once observed, "Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."

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