Lying by Sissela Bok

First published: 1978

Type of work: Social criticism

Form and Content

In Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, Sissela Bok acknowledges that, despite numerous religious and moral pronouncements against lying, people almost universally resort to the practice in certain situations. Indeed, even in professions such as medicine and law, deception is often taken for granted by those who make the rules, wield power, and tell lies to advance their purposes. Bok examines the many justifications people use to support their lies to show that, although some reasons may be sufficient, most are not.

Bok cites the pervasive damage resulting from deceit in such areas as television evangelism and political campaigning to show the need for changes in the practices of lying. Asserting that dominant practices have served people poorly, victimizing individuals and eroding public confidence, she examines alternatives, for society and for individuals, to those practices. She suggests means of changing the practices, possible incentives for doing so, and the numerous risks threatening would-be liars. She narrows the gap between the moral philosopher and the people actually confronting practical moral choices in deciding whether to lie or to tell the truth.

Like everyone else, Bok says, she has faced problems of honesty in her personal life. She was first motivated to examine problems of professional honesty and dishonesty, however, while she was preparing to write about the use of placebos in medicine. Whereas she often heard physicians discuss the deception involved in prescribing placebos with a condescending attitude toward the patients and a joking tone, she learned that the patients usually regarded such deception as a breach of trust and a personal injury, for they valued honesty above all other attributes in their care-givers.

Bok uses the first four chapters of Lying to examine the nature of lying, lying’s effects on human choice, and basic approaches (religious and philosophical) to evaluating lies. In particular, she examines Saint Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’ prohibition of all lies and shows how both Roman Catholic theologians softened their treatises by arranging kinds of lies in a hierarchy from pardonable lies (those told to be helpful and those told in jest) to malicious lies, which they considered mortal sins. Bok also details philosopher Immanuel Kant’s absolutist position against lying and measures it by the harm that might result from someone’s adhering to it in extreme circumstance. As British author Samuel Johnson argued, though truth should never be violated, exceptions occur when, for example, a would-be murderer asks a person where the murderer’s intended victim has gone. Although Bok agrees that some circumstances might warrant lies, she values the absolutists’ concern for the harm to trust and to oneself that can result from lying.

Bok similarly examines lying from the perspective of utilitarian philosophers, who justify acts more or less according to the goodness or badness of their consequences. She finds the utilitarian view unsatisfactory, however, because difficulty in comparing the consequences of acts increases with the acts’ complexity. For example, utilitarians disagree among themselves about such matters as suicide and capital punishment. In Lying’s fifth chapter, Bok shows the limitations of prevalent approaches such as absolutism and utilitarianism in evaluating lies by applying those approaches to white lies.

Chapters 6 and 7 are pivotal to Lying in that in them Bok deals with circumstances that might excuse some lies; also, she establishes some criteria and methods of justification to determine whether some lies can be approved before they occur. In chapters 7 through 15, Bok tests kinds of lies that are frequently considered justifiable—for example, lies in wartime and other crises, lies protecting confidentiality, and lies in research and the practice of medicine—by applying the criteria she has established in chapters 4 and 7. Bok concludes her discussion by calling for a renewed respect for truth to protect trust and integrity. Lying’s useful appendix contains excerpts from works by theologians and philosophers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant.

Context

In her introduction to Lying, Sissela Bok notes the relative scarcity of materials examining deception beyond the classical period and the Middle Ages. Perhaps because the institutions most widely served by deceptive practices in Western civilization have traditionally been controlled by men, it has taken a woman’s perspective to motivate an honest, thorough study such as Bok’s; nevertheless, Bok stresses that all deceivers and society as a whole suffer when lying is a prevailing means of gaining or conveying information, of manipulating or controlling others. Certainly, women have frequently been manipulated and controlled by deceptive practices and will benefit from greater honesty in interpersonal and institutional relationships.

Bok’s own investigation into deception has resulted in two more books related to the subject: Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (1982) and A Strategy for Peace:Human Values and the Threat of War (1989). In Secrets, Bok examines secrecy and self-deception, issues she purposely eliminated from consideration in Lying. In A Strategy for Peace, Bok established a moral framework, supported by religious and secular traditions, to constrain deceptions both within and among nations to cultivate world peace. In her comprehensive series, Bok applies ethical principles to matters of grave concern to all human beings—to matters of human existence.

Bibliography

Bok, Sissela. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Bok acknowledges the indispensability of secrecy but also cautions that it can be destructive. She explores the relationships among secrecy, morality, and self-deception in personal lives. Further, she examines how secrecy can be used to acquire and/or to abuse power, as well as to avoid accountability, in business, science, government, the military, and the social sciences. Finally, she shows how whistleblowing, research, investigative journalism, and undercover police operations can both use secrecy and counteract some of its abuses.

Ekman, Paul. Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Although Ekman considers some lies to be morally defensible, in this work he focuses on lying’s negative effects and explores strategies for detecting lies. He cautions that evaluating behavioral clues to deceit can be hazardous and provides ways to reduce the dangers. He also explores the limitations of the polygraph in detecting falsehoods.

Lerner, Harriet Goldhor. The Dance of Deception:Pretending and Truth-Telling in Women’s Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Lerner’s popular work argues that inequality and truth-telling cannot coexist: Lerner examines how women have developed deceptive strategies to cope with their lack of economic, political, and social power. She argues that women must recognize and express their diverse voices in order to gain integrity and make deceptions less necessary than they have been through the twentieth century. Lerner acknowledges her extensive debt to Bok’s works.

Pocheptsov, Oleg G. “Mind Your Mind: Or, Some Ways of Distorting Facts While Telling the Truth.” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 49, no. 4 (Winter, 1992): 398-409. Pocheptsov’s essay, originally written in Russian in 1980 but not permitted publication then, examines the means by which a speaker can influence an audience by manipulating the quantitative aspects of a phenomenon. Specifically, Pocheptsov explains how selecting an order or unit of measurement, rounding up or down, disadaptation (in which the speaker presents data in a system of measurement alien to the addressee—for example, lira versus dollars), and discorrelation (the presentation of data absolutely, without related data to permit comparison) are used to deceive others.

Revel, Jean-François. “The Flight from Truth.” Partisan Review 59, no. 1 (Winter, 1992): 52-59. Revel asserts that “the foremost of all the forces that drive the world is falsehood.” Whereas tyrannies misuse information, democracies abuse it by producing it haphazardly without regard for truth, so that people are overwhelmed by the flood of data. Revel calls for respect for the truth, predicting that such respect would promote and enhance democracies worldwide.