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A lie is an untruthful statement made to someone else with the intention to deceive. To lie is to say something one believes to be false with the intention that it be taken for the truth by someone else. A liar is a person who is known to have a tendency to tell lies.
A lie involves the use of conventional truthbearers, (i.e., statements in words or symbols) and not natural signs. Intentional deceit involving natural signs, such as wearing a wig, shamming a limp, or wearing a fake arm cast, is not usually classed as "lying", but as "deception".
A true statement may be a lie. If the person who makes the true statement genuinely believes it to be false, and makes the statement with the intention that his audience believe it to be true, then this is a lie. When a person lies he or she is intentionally untruthful, but he or she is not necessarily making an untrue statement.
Types of lies
A lie-to-children is an expression, or more specifically a euphemism, that describes a lie told to make an adult subject, such as sex, acceptable to children. The most common example, though not currently in widespread use, is "The stork brought you."
A white lie would cause no discord if it were uncovered and offers some benefit to the liar or the hearer, or both. For example, when two people collide in a crowded hallway and one falls down, he might tell the other that he's not hurt, even if he's hurt a little bit. Lies which are harmless but told for no reason are generally not called white lies.
Lying by omission means allowing another person to believe something to be true that one believes is false, by deliberately failing to reveal one's belief, rather than by being untruthful. Hence it is normally classified not as a lie but as an act of deception. An example of this would be in a classroom setting when a professor may ask his class a question such as, "Who here has watched The Jerry Springer Show?". If a person were to fail to raise their hand despite having watched the show,that would be considered lying by omission. However, if a person instead raised their hand but had actually never watched the show, this would be considered deception.
Perjury is not the same as lying, since it does not require an intention to deceive, and since it requires that the statement(s) made, under oath, be false as well as untruthful, and be about facts material to the hearing. One can lie under oath without perjuring oneself (if the lies are not about facts material to the case, or if the lies happen to be true), and one can perjure oneself without lying (if one lacks the intention that anyone believe one's untruthful and false statements about facts material to the case).
Bluffing is an act of deception that is not usually seen as immoral because it takes place in the context of a game where this kind of deception is consented to in advance by the players. For instance, a gambler who deceives other players into thinking he has different cards than he really does, or an athlete who indicates he will move left and then actually dodges right, are not considered to be lying. In these situations, deception is accepted as a tactic and even expected.
Misleading is when a person tells a statement that isn't an outright lie, but still has the purpose of making someone believe in an untruth. An example would be a child who knocks over a vase, and, when questioned, states that "the cat was playing around on the shelves". The cat, indeed, was doing so, but was not the cause of the accident.
Dissembling is a polite term for lying, it can be considered as just misleading but is also used as a euphemism for lying. The term came to prominence in the United Kingdom due to its use by a Member of Parliament who cannot under the rules of the house accuse somebody of lying but got away with this close synonym.
Careful speaking is distinct from the above in that the speaker wishes to avoid imparting certain information, or admitting certain facts, and additionally, does not want to 'lie' when doing so. Careful speaking involves using carefully-phrased statements to give a 'half-answer': one that does not actually 'answer' the question, but still provides an appropriate (and accurate) answer based on that question. As with 'misleading', above, 'careful speaking' is not outright lying.
Jocose lies are lies which are meant in jest and are usually understood as such by all present parties. Sarcasm can be one example of this. A more elaborate example can be seen in storytelling traditions which are present in some places, where the humour comes from the storyteller's insistence that he or she is telling the absolute truth despite all evidence to the contrary (ie. tall tale). The Cumbrian Liars in the United Kingdom provide one example. The film Laughter and Grief by the White Sea shows an illustration from the Pomors culture by Russia's White Sea. There has been debate in the past about whether these are "real lies", with different philosophers holding different views (see below).
Morality of lying
The philosophers Saint Augustine, as well as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, prohibited all lying. According to all three, there are no circumstances in which one may lie. One must (unfortunately) be murdered, suffer torture, or endure any other hardship, rather than lie, even if the only way to protect oneself is to lie.
Each of these philosophers gave several arguments against lying, all compatible with each other. Among the more important arguments are:
- Lying is a perversion of the natural faculty of speech, the natural end of which is to communicate the thoughts of the speaker.
- When one lies, one undermines trust in society.
- When one lies, one uses the humanity of another person as a mere means to one's end — one bypasses the person's rationality and in effect makes a decision for the other person, instead of allowing the other person to use her/his own rationality and make her/his own decision.
Some philosophers (notably utilitarians) have argued that lying is not prohibited in certain circumstances, such as when telling a lie will save an innocent life. They have in mind here such circumstances as lying to Nazis in WWII that there are no Jewish children in one's house. Some philosophers have also argued that paternalistic lying, or lying for the good of those lied to, is justified, even if it violates their autonomy. They have in mind here a case such as that of lying to someone who is terminally ill that he is not terminally ill.
Schopenhauer, in On the Basis of Morality, §17, asserted that lying is permissible at times. He cited the case of Jesus Christ supposedly telling a lie in 7:8-10 John 7:8–10.
Lying in the Bible
Although the Bible commands, “Do not lie to one another” (Leviticus 19:11; Colossians 3:9), it also contains accounts of lying, e.g.,
- The Hebrew midwives lied to the king of Egypt rather than carrying out his decree of killing all male Hebrew babies; the midwives did this because they “feared God” (Exodus 1:15–20);
- Rahab lied to the king of Jericho about hiding the spies (Joshua 2:4–5) and was not killed with those who were disobedient because of her faith (Hebrews 11:31);
- When Samuel goes to Bethlehem in order to anoint David for the kingship, he is worried that Saul might kill him if the people find out his purpose and word gets back to Saul. God tells Samuel to say his purpose there is to perform a sacrifice. (1 Samuel 16:2)
While some see these examples as support for the idea that lying can be justifiable as the lesser of two evils (see above section), others (Davids et al 1996) disagree, arguing that the correct Biblical response is to pray that God will provide a way to avoid the greater evil without lying.
In the New Testament, Jesus refers to Devil as the father of lies. (John 8:44)
The Bible commands people not to lie to one another, but when the laws of men contradict God's Divine Law, He commands them to obey Him rather than the laws of men.
Etiquette of lying
Although lies are normally condemned, it is also normally believed that some lies are worse than other lies. In particular, lies that are believed to be harmless lies are often called "white lies" or "fibs".
Augustine divides lies into eight kinds: lies in religious teaching; lies that harm others and help no one; lies that harm others and help someone; lies told for the pleasure of lying; lies told to "please others in smooth discourse"; lies that harm no one and that help someone; lies that harm no one and that save someone's life; and lies that harm no one and that save someone's "purity". Importantly, however, Augustine holds that "jocose lies" are not, in fact, lies.
Thomas Aquinas divides lies into three kinds: the useful, the humorous and the malicious. All are sinful according to Aquinas. Humorous and useful lies, however, are venial sins. Malicious lies are mortal sins.
Paradox of lying
Lying is the subject of many paradoxes, the most famous one being known as the liar paradox, commonly expressed as "This sentence is a lie," or "This sentence is false." The so-called Epimenides paradox — "All Cretans are liars," as stated by Epimenides the Cretan — is a forerunner of this, though its status as a paradox is disputed. A class of related logic puzzles are known as knights and knaves, in which the goal is to determine who of a group of people is lying and who is telling the truth.
Psychology of lying
The capacity to lie is noted early and nearly universally in human development. Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the theory of mind which people employ to simulate another's reaction to their story and determine if a lie will be believable. The most commonly cited milestone, what is known as Machiavellian intelligence, is at the age of about four and a half years, when children begin to be able to lie convincingly. Before this, they seem simply unable to comprehend that anyone doesn't see the same view of events that they do — and seem to assume that there is only one point of view — their own — that must be integrated into any given story.
Young children learn from experience that stating an untruth can avoid punishment for misdeeds, before they develop the theory of mind necessary to understand why it works. In this stage of development, children will sometimes tell fantastic and unbelievable lies, because they lack the conceptual framework to judge whether a statement is believable or even to understand the concept of believability.
When children first learn how lying works, they lack the moral understanding to refrain from doing it. It takes years of watching people lie and the results of lies to develop a proper understanding. Propensity to lie varies greatly between children, some doing so habitually and others being habitually honest. Habits in this regard are likely to change into early adulthood.
Some view children as on the whole more prone to lie than adults. Others argue that the amount of lying stays the same, but adults lie about different things. Certainly adult lying tends to be more sophisticated. A lot of this judgment depends on whether one counts tactful untruths, social insincerity, political rhetoric, and other standard adult behaviors as lying.
Deception and lies in other species
The capacity to lie has also been claimed to be possessed by non-humans in language studies with Great Apes. One famous case was that of Koko the gorilla; confronted by her handlers after a tantrum in which she had torn a steel sink out of its moorings, she signed in American Sign Language, "cat did it," pointing at her tiny kitten. It is unclear if this was a joke or a genuine attempt at blaming her tiny pet. Deception or misleading as to intent is well documented in other social species such as wolves.
Lie detection
The question of whether lies can reliably be detected through non-verbal means is a subject of particular controversy.
- Polygraph "lie detector" machines measure the physiological stress a subject endures in a number of measures while he/she gives statements or answers questions. Spikes in stress are purported to indicate lying. The accuracy of this method is widely disputed, and in several well-known cases it was proven to have been deceived. Nonetheless, it remains in use in many areas, primarily as a method for eliciting confessions or employment screening. Polygraph results are not admissible as court evidence and are generally perceived to be pseudo science. Additionally, polygraph administrators will typically not give one to someone that understands how they work as that allows them to manipulate their physiological reactions and skew the results.
- Various truth drugs have been proposed and used anecdotally, though none are considered very reliable. The CIA attempted to find a universal "truth serum" in the MK-ULTRA project, but it was largely a fiasco.
- Facial microexpressions have been shown to expose lying reliably, according to Paul Ekman's Diogenes Project. Namely, a tiny flash of a "distress" facial expression, though difficult to see with the untrained eye, may give away when a person is lying.
- More recently, neuroscientists have found that lying activates completely different brain structures during fMRI scans, which may lead to a more accurate (if impractical) method of lie detection. Brain fingerprinting is a related way of using the brain to determine if a person is telling the truth.
Representations of lie
- Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio is a wooden puppet often led into trouble by his propension to lie. His nose grows with every lie. A long nose has thus become a caricature of liars.
- In the manga and anime "One Piece", one of the main characters Ussop lies and tells tales regularly — and has an exceptionally long nose.
Covering up Lies
Sir Walter Scott's famous couplet "Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!" describes the often difficult procedure of covering up a lie so that it is not detected at some future time.
In "Human, All Too Human" philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that those who refrain from lying may do so only because of the difficulty involved in maintaining the lie. This is consistent with his general philosophy that divides or ranks people according to strength and ability. Thus some people tell the truth only out of weakness.
Evolution, game theory, and the lie
While most human societies have developed moral, ethical or religious codes prohibiting lying it would appear that other animals on this planet engage in deception quite regularly, and that the deceit has been the result of and promoted by all the usual evolutionary forces.
Deception by predators and prey
Specifically, predation often employs deception, as does avoidance of predation. A predator is deceptive if in the process of acquiring prey it conceals its location, uses camouflage capabilities of its skin and appendages, or dangles an appendage as a bait. A prey is deceptive if it uses camouflage to conceal itself or make it seem to be larger than it is or seem to be another species that is poisonous or distasteful to the predator (compare viceroy butterfly to monarch butterfly).
Such capabilities to deceive likely developed very gradually during evolution and likely began as very small changes in the appearance or behavior of some organisms. As the changes brought advantage to the organism it may therefore have increased in number due to that advantage, and due to continued pressure from a predator or scarcity of prey the advantage locked in and became a trait of that creature.
Game Theory of Evolution
This incorporation of deception into schemes of evolutionary advantage is a concept treated in the study of Game Theory of Evolution. Game Theory of Evolution assumes that creatures are often in resource conflict or in predator/prey relationships with each other and develop strategies for advantage gain or loss reduction.
Innate or reasoned behaviour?
These strategies may or may not be the result of some reasoning capabilities of the creature. In some cases the environment interacting with the way a creature has evolved so far creates the strategies for the creature without it needing any reasoning faculties. In other cases, there may be a combination of some reasoning and some environmentally formed deceptive abilities. The crocodile seems to know that if it drifts slowly, like a log, towards a wildebeest drinking at the edge of the river the wildebeest will not be alarmed and run away. The crocodile both resembles a log, having been shaped that way by evolutionary forces, and has some reasoning faculties.
So-called animal "cunning"
Over eons this ability to deceive became built into and a natural part of many species. Humans have used the word "cunning" to represent this ability in the non-human animal world, and then when the word "cunning" is applied to a human it is meant to connote sub-human behavior.
Deception and "moral" behaviour among humans
Sub-human behavior is of course just a value judgment. The case remains that deception in general, and lying in particular, are likely a natural and normal behavior for Homo sapiens. People lie to attain advantage or to escape loss. This is no different from being a predator or a prey, except that Homo sapiens are expected to know right and wrong and animals are not.
Thus, being honest in spite of a perceived opportunity to gain via a lie may be considered a particularly human behavior. Possibly this could be considered simply a longer-term strategy of gain, i.e. the larger gain from being regarded as trustworthy and/or ethical, which would require a fairly developed sense of abstract thought to grasp.
References
- Adler, J. E., “Lying, deceiving, or falsely implicating”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 94 (1997), 435-452.
- Aquinas, T., St., “Question 110: Lying”, in Summa Theologiae (II.II), Vol. 41, Virtues of Justice in the Human Community (London, 1972).
- Augustine, St., "On Lying" and "Against Lying", in R. J. Deferrari, ed., Treatises on Various Subjects (New York, 1952).
- Bok, S., Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 2d ed. (New York, 1989).
- Chisholm, R. M., and T. D. Feehan, “The intent to deceive”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 74 (1977),143-159.
- Davids, P. H., Bruce, F.F., Brauch, M.T., & W.C. Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Bible (InterVarsity Press, 1996).
- Flyvbjerg, B., "Design by Deception." Harvard Design Magazine, no. 22, Spring/Summer 2005, 50-59.
- Frankfurt, H. G., “The Faintest Passion”, in Necessity, Volition and Love (Cambridge, MA: CUP, 1999).
- Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005).
- Kant, I., Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, The Metaphysics of Morals and "On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy", in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, eds. Mary Gregor and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: CUP, 1986).
- Lakoff, George, Don't Think of an Elephant, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004).
- Mahon, J. E., “Kant on Lies, Candour and Reticence”, Kantian Review, Vol. 7 (2003), 101-133.
- Mahon, J. E., “Lying”, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., Vol. 5 (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2006), p. 618-19
- Mahon, J. E., “Kant and the Perfect Duty to Others Not to Lie”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2006), 653-685.
- Mahon, J. E., “Kant and Maria von Herbert: Reticence vs. Deception”, Philosophy, Vol. 81, No. 3 (2006), 417-44.
- Mannison, D. S., “Lying and Lies”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 47 (1969), 132-144.
- Siegler, F. A., “Lying”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 3 (1966), 128-136.
See also
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