persuasive speech of lying is always wrong

• Abortion , Lying

Why Lying is Always Wrong

• February 14, 2011

Christopher Kaczor and several others have been gracious enough to respond to my essay on the tactics of Live Action with a number of criticisms, many of which deserve a response. For convenience, we may divide the major objections into three sets.

The first set of criticisms calls into question whether the behaviors and utterances of the Live Action “actors” were really lies. First, some think a false assertion is a lie only when told to those with a right to the truth. Second, some think that the Live Action actors made, or perhaps could have made, no false assertions.

The second set of criticisms concerns whether it is always wrong to lie; many critics deny just this, for one or more of the following reasons.

• One view would have it that lying is not wrong in war. A presupposition of this view, which is defended by Joseph Bottum , is that the pro-life movement is at war with Planned Parenthood and other purveyors of abortion.
• A second view holds that sometimes lying is defensible by double-effect type reasoning: the harms of lying must, on this view, not be intended. With this objection we get to the heart of the ethical matter: what are the harms of lying, and are they essential to the intention of someone who deliberately lies or not?
• A third view is that lying is permissible in order to save a human life; on this view, the prohibition on lying is simply not absolute.
• A fourth criticism concerns my claim that to lie is to fail in love to those lied to; some misunderstand this as a claim that what I call for is “gentleness” towards wrongdoers, perhaps to the exclusion of punishment, but I trust my claim that truthful correction of wrongdoing is genuinely loving suffices to show that I do not hold that view. But others argue that to deceive is not as such unloving, and that the lies told to Planned Parenthood workers were in fact to their good.

The third set of criticisms, finally, concern the consequences of my view. Many critics have claimed that if it is always and everywhere wrong to lie, then such practices as undercover police (or journalistic) work, and some forms of espionage are also wrong.

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The Live Action “Actors” Lied

Let us begin, then, with the first set of objections. Was there really no lying done in the Live Action “stings”? Christopher Kaczor cites an early, and subsequently amended, version of the Catholic Catechism which defines lying as not telling the truth to “someone who has the right to know the truth” (CCC 2483). The quoted phrase is omitted in subsequent versions and for good reason. Consider the following scenario: I spend $500 of family money on gambling. My wife has a right to know what happened to this money; my ten-year old son does not. The “right to know” view would have it that I only lie to my wife when I assert to both that I gave the money away to charity. This seems clearly wrong, and points us towards the Catechism’s amended definition: “To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error.” On this view, what is essential to a lie is that an agent assert, through speech or action, something he believes to be false; here is the nature of the lie, and thus here also is where the wrong must be found: not in a failure to respect an agent’s “right” to the truth.

But perhaps the Live Action agents did not actually make false assertions? A perusal of the transcripts suggests the implausibility of this view. In the Bronx Planned Parenthood Transcript, for example, the “pimp” says, “Now, also, so we’re involved in sex work, so we have some other girls that we manage and work with that they’re going to need testing as well.” While these seem like straightforward lies, some have suggested that “sex work” here is ambiguous, and that the actors mean something like “work that will end the sex trade.” I can only say that this view strains credulity.

Others have claimed that Live Action did, or could, work only with “hypotheticals”: “what would you say if…” sorts of questions. But consider again the Catechism’s definition of a lie, which suggests that one can lie in action as well as in speech, by using one’s actions—including, presumably, one’s personal presentation—against the truth, in order to lead someone into error. And this too the Live Action “actors” surely did: they were dressed and acted as pimps and prostitutes, not because this was how they usually dressed or acted, but precisely to convey information to the Planned Parenthood workers about what they were , information that they also conveyed in speech: “we’re involved in sex work.” So, it is not the case that they worked only in hypothetical questions, and it is unclear whether, in practice, a hypotheticals-only approach would, in fact, serve their ends.

So I believe we should conclude without doubt that the “actors” in the Live Action videos did indeed lie. This obviously raises the next crucial question: were they wrong to do so?

Lying is Always Wrong

As a preliminary point, those who think, for intellectual or religious reasons, that the theological and philosophical tradition of Western Christianity has evidential value should be much more impressed with the agreement between Augustine, Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and the updated Catechism, all of whom hold that the norm against lying is absolute, than with the secondary tradition which admittedly also exists within Christianity that holds that lying is occasionally permitted. Catholics in particular have very good reason for taking the updated Catechism’s view to be normative for them: “By its very nature, lying is to be condemned” (CCC 2485). This judgment reaffirms a claim from the Catechism of the Council of Trent: “In a word, lies of every sort are prohibited.” But we seek here some further understanding of why this unequivocal condemnation might be entirely reasonable.

The first objection was, to recall, that lying is permissible in war. In fact, the authorities mentioned in the previous paragraph did not hold this: Aquinas, for example, condemned lying in war, but he allowed that military feints might be carried out. In a military context, it is assumed (as it is in poker, and in the theater) that what is done will not always have the significance it otherwise might, since soldiers have good reason for preventing the enemy from inferring from what they do what their true plans are. Thus no false assertion is made by the feint. But if lying is always and everywhere wrong, these possibilities do not serve as counterexamples: they are not themselves lies.

More importantly here, however, it is crucial to point out that the pro-life movement is not, in any but the most distantly metaphorical sense, “at war” with Planned Parenthood. To take such a claim strictly would raise unsolvable problems in terms of just war thought: who, for example, is the legitimate authority that has tasked Lila Rose with this work? And it would justify untenable conclusions, for if anything is justified in war, it is the use of arms. Yet the pro-life movement has, rightly in my view, converged on an understanding that the use of arms to stop abortion is not right: it provides a counter-witness to the value of life; it constitutes an unjustified attack on our nation’s overall legal structure; and it is unlikely either to bring peace or to result in a proportionate balance of benefits over harms. The appeal to war is thus a non-starter.

Perhaps, as some suggest, lying could be justified via double effect? As I noted, this question gets us to the heart of the matter, for double effect reasoning is appropriate when there is a moral principle forbidding the intentional bringing about of some harm. Some actions, which bring about that kind of harm nevertheless can be justified because the harm is not intended, but merely foreseen. Thus, assuming that the taking of human life is a harm, and that it is always wrong to intend that harm, nevertheless, many moralists defend some actions which result in death, because the death is not intended.

Now: what are the harms of lying? To answer this question we must understand something of the goodness of truthful communication, for it is that goodness that is, presumably, absent in lying. And that goodness is, I shall suggest, multiple.

In truthful communication, persons disclose, or reveal, reality in two dimensions. Consider the common case of being asked by a stranger for directions. He does not know how to get to a theater, and you provide him directions: you tell him where to go. In this example, your honest communication reveals to him the way the world is, to his benefit. Without such revelation, the truth would be unavailable to our stranger, as would all the other goods that would be available by means of the truth, such as the stranger’s getting to the theater in time to meet his friends and enjoy the show.

But truthful communication also discloses something personal: in affirming that things are this way, not that , not only do you reveal the world to the stranger, but you reveal yourself as well: this , not that , is how you take things to be. When the stranger hears the directions, he does not just hear words; because of the personal dimension of communication, he hears you . And this disclosure’s personal nature is responsible for a well-known aspect of such small gestures of kindness to a stranger as providing accurate directions: to disclose oneself to another through honest communication is a primordial act of the creation of a community, a community which, in this case, is short-lived, but no less real for that.

It is this disclosing aspect of language that has made speech such a natural analogue, in the work of John Paul II, to the self-giving by which spouses enter into marital communion with one another—hence his image of the “language of the body.” And perhaps we can even work backwards from the mutual giving of selves in the body, which characterizes marital union, to the wrong of lying, by way of the following analogy.

Imagine the sexual receptivity of a wife towards her husband that conceals an attitude that is other than one of self-donation; such a concealment would be both a mutilation of the relationship as physically embodied in the union, and of the spouse whose actions are at odds with her inner thoughts and attitudes. More concretely, consider a spouse who fantasizes during marital intercourse about another, or thinks only of his or her own pleasure in the act, or who wishes he was unmarried. Such a spouse is damaging the relationship, but also damaging him or herself by dividing his or her self into the physical (but only illusory) giver of self, and the inner lover of self.

This is indeed quite similar to the wrong of lying. In a lie, a person divides his or her self, making her outer person to say one thing, while her “inner” self believes something else. “Inner” and “outer” are somewhat, but only somewhat, metaphorical here. One’s full self is not, in fact, disclosed just by one’s physical being in the world; it remains for one to communicate much of who and what one is to others in acts and words. When that disclosure is truthful, inner and outer are brought into harmony; when dishonest, inner and outer are sundered.

Could this division be anything but a harm to a person? We show in many ways the value of being able to present a “true face” to the world, as when we rebel at restrictions on freedom of expression, or resent an ideological pressure that prevents us from speaking freely, or when, because of our desire not to harm, we succumb to pressure and say what someone else wants to hear. We respect those who are what they seem, and who speak straightforwardly and with candor: we admire their integrity , precisely that which we see damaged in one who cannot, or will not, speak his mind.

So here is the initial harm of the lie: it divides the inner and outer self, damaging the agent’s integrity; and integrity is a great good. (I expand on this argument in my article in the American Journal of Jurisprudence “ Lying: The Integrity Approach .”)

But, as the example of the stranger in need of directions indicated, truth in self-disclosure just is the primordial means by which we establish community with another; and the forming of community—the entering into communion—with others just is what it means to love another (thus, naturally enough, as there are many forms of communion, there are many forms of love, and not all are equally appropriate to each person). But this too is damaged in the lie. The essential disclosure of persons to other persons that brings them into a unity is impossible on the foundation of dishonest communication. That communication does not disclose; it seeks to conceal.

There is thus a very strong connection between the virtue of honesty and both the integrity of the self and the unity of persons in love, and a very strong connection between dishonesty—lies—and disharmony of the self and disharmony with others. Of course, the specific truths that are communicated often can play a further role in the building up of community with others, because those truths are, as again the example of the lost stranger showed, essential to the pursuit of many other goods. Yet some truths are not essential in these ways, and yet others could be harmful, so there is no obligation to say all that one knows to be true. Such a duty is not implied by an obligation never to lie.

We now have the resources to make quick work of the central objections to the claim that it is always wrong to lie. Against the claim that double effect reasoning could play a role, for example, we see the following difference between lying and using lethal force: intending death is not intrinsic to the use of force and thus can be accepted as a side effect, but the division of the self that just is the destruction of one’s integrity is intrinsic to the telling of a lie. This harm just is part of what anyone who sets himself to assert what he does not believe to be true intends.

We thus see also why the prohibition on lying is absolute: the goods of integrity and community are fundamental goods, and in themselves, they are nothing but goods, for human persons. In themselves, they thus give us only reason to pursue and promote them for ourselves and others. Things would be different if integrity or community were good only in some respects, but not in others; we would then have reason to seek them, and reason to avoid or prevent them; but just in themselves, they are goods. Action directed at the destruction of one of these goods would thus be, as such, nothing but harmful to persons, and thus wrong. And the prohibition against lying gives witness to this. In speech and action, these goods are never to be intentionally damaged , and as we have seen, a lie always involves such intentional damage.

Of course, most lies are not just intentional damagings of the liar’s integrity, but damagings for the sake of some further good. Yet, since the damage just as such gives no reason to carry out the lie, such a choice could only be justified if the good sought were a greater good than the harm caused by the lie. Such an idea is at the heart of the reasoning of those who believe it permissible to lie to save a life. The good of life must be greater than the good of personal integrity on such an account.

Yet we have no reason to think such weighing is possible; by what measure is there more good in life than integrity? And if that is how the scales come down, than ought not a man to foreswear his faith, or abandon the truth, to save his life? Yet if the weighing is not possible, then the conclusion is clear: there can be no “exceptions” to the norm against intentionally lying, even for serious reasons.

Finally, I believe I have shown why all lies are unloving. It is not because they are not sufficiently gentle, or because they cause hurt feelings, or lose jobs. It is because they are incompatible in the deepest way with a will towards communion with others, which must always be founded on truth, both generally speaking (for falsehood does indeed bring with it many pernicious consequences for a community), and, more specifically, the truth of persons. I have no doubt that the actions of Lila Rose and her Live Action colleagues are ultimately motivated by love; but in utilizing lies and deceit, they have built on a treacherous foundation, thus threatening the entire construction.

Many of our Current Practices are Wrong, Too

The truth that all lies are wrong and that they must all be avoided is hard, no less for polities than for individuals. And this brings us to the final set of objections, which I will here address only briefly. Those objections concerned the practices of undercover work, espionage work, and other forms of journalistic, police, and governmental work that might require lying. Some have expressed surprise that these practices should be called into question; yet Augustine felt it necessary to address the morality of lying precisely in order to stop the practice of Christians infiltrating heretical sects for the defense of the faith; so questioning the legitimacy of undercover work is a very old part of the Christian tradition (I have argued against such work in a philosophical vein in my book Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry ).

The position I have argued for here could not easily be adhered to. And a firm commitment, by any person, or any group, to avoid all lies would inevitably have radical consequences. For there is no doubt that we are surrounded by lies, by deceit, by dishonesty and that each one of us drinks of this cup too often, even in a day’s work. We would lose what we might take to be essential tools of daily life, both personally and politically, were lies taken away from us.

Yet these are only consequences of my view, they are not themselves arguments, and anyone who believes, as members of the great Abrahamic religions do, that the Father of Lies is at the root of much evil, must make a constant struggle not to let their commitment to truth become obscured by the demands of the fallen world. That we have become conformed in our social practice to lies as an essential part of the defense of the realm, and for the protection of citizens, just as in our personal lives, is a fact; indeed, this conformity is, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, the very demand which evil and violence make upon us: “obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” But this participation is neither an inevitability, nor, in my view, a reflection of what is genuinely demanded by truth and love.

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Essay on Lying Is Always Wrong

Students are often asked to write an essay on Lying Is Always Wrong in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Lying Is Always Wrong

What is lying.

Lying means not telling the truth. When people lie, they say something that they know is not true. Lying can hurt people’s feelings and make it hard to trust the person who lied.

Trust is Important

Trust is like a glue in friendships and families. When someone lies, it can break this trust. If people do not trust each other, they can’t work together well or be good friends.

Lying Can Hurt

Lies can cause pain. For example, if you lie to a friend, they might feel sad or betrayed. Lying can also lead to more lies, making things very complicated.

Always Wrong?

Some think lying is always wrong because it breaks trust and can harm others. Telling the truth is a good habit that helps everyone get along better and feel happier.

250 Words Essay on Lying Is Always Wrong

Why lying is bad.

Lying is always wrong because it breaks trust. Trust is like a special promise between people that they will be honest with each other. When someone lies, it hurts this promise. If people find out that someone has lied to them, they might feel sad, angry, or find it hard to believe that person again. This can ruin friendships and make it difficult for people to work together or be close to each other.

Lying Can Hurt People

Lies can also cause harm to others. For example, if a person lies about something being safe when it is not, someone could get hurt. Even small lies can lead to big problems. When someone starts lying, they often have to tell more lies to cover up the first one. This can create a web of lies that is hard to escape from.

Always Choose Honesty

It is important to always choose honesty over lying. Being honest might be hard sometimes, but it is the right thing to do. When people are honest, they build strong relationships with others based on trust and respect. Honesty also helps people feel good about themselves because they know they are doing the right thing.

In conclusion, lying is wrong because it breaks trust, can hurt people, and leads to more lies. Always being honest is the best path to take.

500 Words Essay on Lying Is Always Wrong

Lying means not telling the truth. When people lie, they say something that they know is not true. Sometimes they do this to hide something, to make themselves look better, or to avoid getting into trouble. Lying can be about big things or small things.

Lies Can Hurt People

Lies can also hurt people. If you lie to someone, you might make them feel sad or angry when they find out the truth. Imagine if someone lied to you about something important. You would feel upset, right? That’s how others feel when we lie to them. Even if the lie seems small, it can still cause pain.

Lies Can Get Out of Control

Another problem with lying is that one lie often leads to another. To cover up the first lie, you might have to tell more lies. Soon, you can be caught in a web of lies. It’s like when you tell your teacher that your dog ate your homework when it didn’t. The next day, you might have to lie about why your dog is not sick from eating paper. It gets harder and harder to keep the story straight.

Lying Can Lead to Bad Habits

Always telling the truth.

Always telling the truth is the best way to live. You don’t have to remember what you said because it’s the truth. You don’t have to worry about being caught in a lie. And people will trust you and feel good about being your friend. Telling the truth might be hard sometimes, but it is the right thing to do.

In conclusion, lying is always wrong because it breaks trust, hurts people, can get out of control, and can turn into a bad habit. Telling the truth is a sign of respect to others and to yourself. It builds strong relationships and makes life simpler and happier. Remember, every time you are honest, you are doing something good for the world and for yourself.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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The New York Times

Opinionator | are these 10 lies justified.

Are These 10 Lies Justified?

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Most of us believe that lying is wrong. We teach our children that it is wrong, and hope or expect that value judgment is shared by our friends and family. In public, we decry politicians and public officials when they lie, which we have frequent occasion to do these days. But the truth about lying is more complicated.

We tell lies to one another every day. But when we commit other acts that are generally believed to be immoral, like cruelty and theft, we do not seek to justify them. We either deny that the acts we committed are appropriately described by these terms, or we feel guilt or remorse. But many of us are prepared to defend our lies: indeed, to advocate their general use. Of course the Nazi at the door inquiring about Jews within ought to be lied to.

But perhaps this example only shows that there is not an absolute prohibition on lying. Such cases are rare, the harm to the innocent clear, the wickedness of the aggressor obvious. I want to argue that the number and types of permissible lies are much wider than one might have thought.

I am not arguing for the view that lying is morally neutral. I accept the fact that there ought to be a strong presumption in favor of honesty. But it is a presumption that not only can be, but ought to be, overridden in many more cases than we assume.

Let me begin by defining what a lie is. If I defined lying so as to include failure to reveal the truth I would be making my case too easy. We all agree that there are many cases where the latter is permissible.

More From The Stone

Read previous contributions to this series.

John lies to Mary if he says X, believes X to be false, and intends that Mary believe X.

It should come as no surprise that philosophers have denied, or sought to clarify, each part of this definition. But I think this definition captures most of what people have in mind when they say lying is always, or almost always, wrong. It also captures the morally important feature that explains people’s aversion to lying — saying what you believe to be false in order to make other people believe something false. It is usually a bad thing for people to come to believe false things. Even when it is not a betrayal of trust.

Nevertheless, it is my claim that we could not lead our lives if we never told lies — or that if we could it would be a much worse life. But I would like to invite your own views on this to begin a dialog.

Here is a list of lies that I believe to be either permissible, or, in some cases, obligatory. Readers will certainly disagree with me about some, perhaps many, of these cases. But such disagreement should not be the end of the discussion. I invite your reflection on why you disagree. It may be that I am making some implicit assumption about the case that you are challenging. It might be that you think that there are bad consequences of the lie in question, but I do not, either because I do not think the consequences are likely, or because I do not think they are bad.

In other cases, you might be prepared to accept the verdict as justified lying, but argue it has a special feature that is not present generally. That raises the question of whether there are other such contexts, and how widespread they are.

NOW IN PRINT

The stone reader: modern philosophy in 133 arguments.

An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, published by Liveright.

Some cases may simply involve fundamental differences in judgment. “I can’t say why, but it’s just wrong.” These are much rarer than one might think and I doubt that any of my cases are like that. But we will see.

To participate:

— Read each lie scenario below.

— Beneath each one you may indicate whether you think it is permissible (click on yes) or impermissible (no) to lie in that case.

— At the bottom of the list, choose one or more lies you disapprove of (remember, I approve of all of them), and explain why you disagree as succinctly as you can, then submit your response.

I also welcome additions to my list; particularly if they have justifying features that seem different from those present in my examples.

Thank you for your responses. Submissions to the author via the form have been closed. You can still read the list of scenarios below and discuss them in the comments section of this post.

1. A man lies to his wife about where they are going in order to get her to a place where a surprise birthday party has been organized.

2. A young child is rescued from a plane crash in a very weakened state. His parents have been killed in the crash but he is unaware of this. He asks about his parents and the attending physician says they are O.K. He intends to tell the truth once the child is stronger.

3. Your father suffers from severe dementia and is in a nursing home. When it is time for you to leave he becomes extremely agitated and often has to be restrained. On the occasions when you have said you would be back tomorrow he was quite peaceful about your leaving. You tell him now every time you leave that you will be back tomorrow knowing that in a very short time after you leave he will have forgotten what you said.

4. A woman’s husband drowned in a car accident when the car plunged off a bridge into a body of water. It was clear from the physical evidence that he desperately tried to get out of the car and died a dreadful death. At the hospital where his body was brought his wife asked the physician in attendance what kind of death her husband suffered. He replied, “He died immediately from the impact of the crash. He did not suffer.”

5. In an effort to enforce rules against racial discrimination “testers” were sent out to rent a house. First, an African-American couple claiming to be married with two children and an income that was sufficient to pay the rent would try to rent a house. If they were told that the house was not available, a white tester couple with the same family and economic profile would be sent. If they were offered the rental there would be persuasive evidence of racial discrimination.

6. In November of 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, President Kennedy gave a conference. When asked whether he had discussed any matters other than Cuban missiles with the Soviets he absolutely denied it. In fact, he had promised that the United States would remove missiles from Turkey.

7. A woman interviewing for a job in a small philosophy department is asked if she intends to have children. Believing that if she says (politely) it’s none of their business she will not get the job, she lies and says she does not intend to have a family.

8. In order to test whether arthroscopic surgery improved the conditions of patients’ knees a study was done in which half the patients were told the procedure was being done but it was not. Little cuts were made in the knees, the doctors talked as if it were being done, sounds were produced as if the operation were being done. The patients were under light anesthesia. It turned out that the same percentage of patients reported pain relief and increased mobility in the real and sham operations. The patients were informed in advance that they either would receive a real or a sham operation.

9. I am negotiating for a car with a salesperson. He asks me what the maximum I am prepared to pay is. I say $15,000. It is actually $20,000.

10. We heap exaggerated praise on our children all the time about their earliest attempts to sing or dance or paint or write poems. For some children this encouragement leads to future practice, which in turn promotes the development–in some — of genuine achievement.

In the coming week or two, I will read the responses, and then choose some to respond to in a later post.

Gerald Dworkin is distinguished professor of philosophy, emeritus at University of California, Davis.

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Eight Ways in Which Lying Is Seen as Moral

• By Kasandra Brabaw
• September 14, 2022
• CBR - Behavioral Science
• Share This Page

A friend asks if you liked the soup she made. A colleague asks what you think of his suit. In moments such as these, telling the truth could harm someone’s feelings or self-esteem. Does that make lying seem like the right choice?

Research by Chicago Booth’s Emma Levine , focusing on this question, suggests that for many people, merely sparing someone’s feelings isn’t enough to justify lying. It is only when the truth causes “unnecessary harm” that most people find lying to be ethical.

“Unnecessary harm is a function of how much value the truth has in the long run, whether you can learn and grow from it, and how much emotional pain and suffering it will cost you,” Levine says. If telling the truth will cause someone emotional pain and suffering without leading to growth or long-term value, many think lying is justifiable.

For example, if your colleague in the ill-fitting suit is about to give an important presentation and cannot change first , many people think that answering truthfully would cause unnecessary harm. In situations such as this one, people believe lying is ethical, the research finds. What’s more, people also want to be lied to in these situations. “We think of deception as bad, but yet, we want people to deceive us all the time,” says Levine.

She conducted a series of experiments involving hundreds of participants to understand at a fundamental level how people make moral judgments about honesty and dishonesty. In one study, she gave participants a scenario in which a manager received a list of employees to lay off within the next month due to a company reorganization. When told that one of the employees on the list dropped in on a Friday afternoon for an update about the reorganization, just under 23 percent of participants said it would be acceptable for the manager to lie. But when told that the employee who dropped in was getting married the next day, the proportion endorsing deception more than doubled to 52 percent. In this case, they saw telling the truth—and disrupting the potential bliss of a wedding and honeymoon—as causing unnecessary harm, and therefore saw lying as ethical.

The research identifies eight “community standards of deception,” or situations in which the majority of respondents agreed it was ethical to lie. Many deemed it acceptable to lie to people who were emotionally fragile, near death, or would be confused by the truth. They also found it more ethical to lie when doing so would help others save face in public or concentrate on something important. Lies that were subjective or trivial were also considered in bounds, and those about a situation the recipient was ultimately unable to control.

The truth hurts, but it could be helpful

In a series of vignettes, study participants were more likely to approve of lying the lower the perceived value of telling the truth and the higher its perceived harm.

Participants in the experiments said they would value ethical deception both as the liars and as the people being lied to. In one study, Levine divided participants into three groups: communicators, third-party judges, and targets. No matter how participants were asked to view themselves—as the liar, the lied-to, or separate from the lie—a majority endorsed deception when the truth might cause considerable immediate harm and would have low long-term value. If telling the truth will hurt someone emotionally or physically and won’t encourage learning or growth, why be honest?

“I would want someone to lie to me when the alternative of telling the truth would make me feel worse off and I would have no control over what happens,” wrote one participant. “For example, if my beloved dog died after being hit by a negligent driver, I’d much rather my parents or friends have told me the dog died peacefully in its sleep than to tell me the facts.”

Others explained that they would want people to lie about something that couldn’t be changed, and one person gave the example of asking friends whether they “looked OK” for a night out. If the question was posed from home, “I hope they would tell me the truth, so I could change whatever looked bad (as best I could),” wrote the participant. But if the same person asked the same question when already out, and received an honest but negative response, “my night would be ruined and I would have to stay at the bar knowing I looked bad.”

Levine says that a lot of research in this area, including hers, documents cases where “communicators think it’s OK to lie and the targets don’t agree.” But when a lie clearly involves unnecessary harm, targets and communicators largely agree it’s preferable to the truth, she finds.

Works Cited

Emma Levine, “Community Standards of Deception: Deception Is Perceived to Be Ethical When It Prevents Unnecessary Harm,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, February 2022.

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First, lying corrupts the most important quality of my being human: my ability to make free, rational choices. Second, my lies rob others of their freedom to choose rationally.

"I don't dig into people's private lives. I never have." Ross Perot's brief statement on ABC News in July 1992 was meant to end allegations that he secretly investigated his presidential campaign volunteers. The allegations ended, but not the way Perot intended. Within hours, irrefutable evidence appeared that proved Perot had hired others to probe his people's pasts. By the next day, there was no question on anyone's mind: Ross Perot lied.

So what? It wasn't the first time a politician lied and it won't be the last. Sometimes a lie, a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive, seems the perfect response: a brother lies about his sister's where-abouts to the drunken husband threatening to harm her, a doctor tells a depressed patient that he has a 50-50 chance of long-term recovery when she is confident he'll live only six months, a son gives his late mother's estate to the poor after promising to honor her demand that the money be placed in her coffin. When trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation, perfect honesty may seem second best next to values like compassion, respect, and justice. Yet many philosophical and religious traditions have long claimed that rarely, if ever, is a lie permissible. What, then, is the truth about lying?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that lying was always morally wrong. He argued that all persons are born with an "intrinsic worth" that he called human dignity. This dignity derives from the fact that humans are uniquely rational agents, capable of freely making their own decisions, setting their own goals, and guiding their conduct by reason. To be human, said Kant, is to have the rational power of free choice; to be ethical, he continued, is to respect that power in oneself and others.

Lies are morally wrong, then, for two reasons. First, lying corrupts the most important quality of my being human: my ability to make free, rational choices. Each lie I tell contradicts the part of me that gives me moral worth. Second, my lies rob others of their freedom to choose rationally. When my lie leads people to decide other than they would had they known the truth, I have harmed their human dignity and autonomy. Kant believed that to value ourselves and others as ends instead of means, we have perfect duties (i.e., no exceptions) to avoid damaging, interfering with, or misusing the ability to make free decisions; in other words - no lying.

A second perspective, virtue ethics, also maintains that lying is morally wrong, though less strictly than Kant. Rather than judge right or wrong behavior on the basis of reason and what people should or should not do, virtue ethicists focus on the development of character or what people should be. Virtues are desirable qualities of persons that predispose them to act in a certain manner. Fairness, for example, is a virtue we may choose to strive toward in pursuit of fulfilling our human potential. In virtue ethics, to be virtuous is to be ethical.

Though the nature of virtue ethics makes it difficult to assess the morality of individual acts, those who advocate this theory generally consider lying wrong because it opposes the virtue of honesty. There is some debate whether a lie told in pursuit of another virtue (e.g., compassion: the brother's lie to his sister's drunken husband is motivated by compassion for her physical safety) is right or wrong. This apparent conflict between virtues is managed by most ethicists through a concept called the unity of the virtues. This doctrine states that the virtuous person, the ideal person we continuously strive to be, cannot achieve one virtue without achieving them all. Therefore, when facing a seeming conflict between virtues, such as a compassionate lie, virtue ethics charges us to imagine what some ideal individual would do and act accordingly, thus making the ideal person's virtues one's own. In essence, virtue ethics finds lying immoral when it is a step away, not toward, the process of becoming the best persons we can be.

According to a third perspective, utilitarian ethics, Kant and virtue ethicists ignore the only test necessary for judging the morality of a lie - balancing the benefits and harms of its consequences. Utilitarians base their reasoning on the claim that actions, including lying, are morally acceptable when the resulting consequences maximize benefit or minimize harm. A lie, therefore, is not always immoral; in fact, when lying is necessary to maximize benefit or minimize harm, it may be immoral not to lie. The challenge in applying utilitarian ethics to everyday decision making, however, is significant: one must correctly estimate the overall consequences of one's actions before making a decision. The following example illustrates what utilitarian decision makers must consider when lying is an option.

Recall the son and his dying mother described earlier. On careful reflection, the son reasons that honoring his mother's request to settle the estate and deposit the money in her coffin cannot be the right thing to do. The money would be wasted or possibly stolen and the poor would be denied an opportunity to benefit. Knowing that his mother would ask someone else to settle her affairs if he declared his true intentions, the son lies by falsely promising to honor her request. Utilitarianism, in this example, supports the son's decision on the determination that the greater good is served (i.e., overall net benefit is achieved) by lying.

Altruistic or noble lies, which specifically intend to benefit someone else, can also be considered morally acceptable by utilitarians. Picture the doctor telling her depressed patient that there is a 50 percent probability that he will recover, when in truth all tests confirm the man has only six months to live. The doctor knows from years of experience that, if she told this type of patient the truth, he would probably fall deeper into depression or possibly commit suicide. With the hope of recovery, though, he will most likely cherish his remaining time. Again, utilitarianism would seem to support the doctor's decision because the greater good is served by her altruistic lie.

While the above reasoning is logical, critics of utilitarianism claim that its practical application in decision making is seriously flawed. People often poorly estimate the consequences of their actions or specifically undervalue or ignore the harmful consequences to society (e.g., mistrust) that their lies cause. Following the examples above, the son's abuse of his mother's faith in him and the doctor's lie undermine the value of trust among all those who learn of the deceits. As trust declines, cynicism spreads, and our overall quality of life drops. In addition, suggesting that people may lie in pursuit of the greater good can lead to a "slippery slope," where the line between cleverly calculated moral justifications and empty excuses for selfish behavior is exceedingly thin. Sliding down the slope eventually kindles morally bankrupt statements (e.g., "Stealing this man's money is okay because I will give some to charity.") Those who disagree with utilitarianism believe that there is potentially great cost in tolerating lies for vague or subjective reasons, including lies in honor of "the greater good."

Critics of utilitarian justifications for lying further note how difficult it is for anyone, even honorable persons, to know that a lie will bring more good than the truth; the consequences of actions are too often unpredictable. Lies frequently assume "lives of their own" and result in consequences that people do not intend or fail to predict. Moreover, it is very difficult for a person to be objective in estimating the good and the harm that his or her lies will produce. We have a vested interest in the lies we tell and an equally vested interest in believing that the world will be better if we lie from one instance to the next. For these reasons, critics claim, lying is morally wrong because we cannot accurately measure lies' benefits and harms.

Clearly, lying is an issue worth examining, as many people believe it is a bigger problem today than it has ever been. A recent Time magazine cover story concluded, "Lies flourish in social uncertainty, when people no longer understand, or agree on, the rules governing their behavior toward one another." Maybe social uncertainty abounds because we are a mixture of Kantians, virtuists, and utilitarians who share no common ground. More likely, the problem is that too few persons adequately consider any ethical perspective when facing a situation that tempts a lie. Either way, it seems that the solution to our dissatisfaction begins with acknowledging the value of ethical reasoning and ends with a commitment to follow through with what we determine is the right thing to do.

Further Reading

Bailey, F. G. The Prevalence of Deceit , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Bok, Sissela. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life . New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Greenberg, Michael A. "The Consequences of Truth Telling." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 266 (1991): 66.

Revell Jean-Francois. The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. New York: Random House Books, 1992.

Thaler, Paul. "The Lies that Bind." The New York Times Magazine 140 (June 9, 1991), 16.

This article was originally published in Issues in Ethics - V. 6, N. 1 Fall 1993. 

The truth about lying

We're lied to 10 to 200 times a day, and tell a lie ourselves an average of 1 to 2 times in the same period. These talks will help you understand why — and will make you better at sussing out the truth.

Pamela Meyer

How to spot a liar

Jeff Hancock

The future of lying

Marco Tempest

The magic of truth and lies (and iPods)

Our buggy moral code

Michael Shermer

The pattern behind self-deception

Can you really tell if a kid is lying?

Honesty Isn’t Always the Best Policy in Relationships. Here’s When Experts Say It Might Be Better to Lie

Y ou were probably taught to never lie: Your parents likely preached the power of the truth . Your partner told you honesty matters most.

But researchers say there is a lot we get wrong about deception, truth-telling and trust—and that, if mastered, lying the right way can actually help build connections, trust and businesses. “I believe that we should be teaching our kids, students and employees when and how to lie,” says Maurice Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies deception and trust.

You’re more likely to be lied to (and told to lie) than you even realize, too—think of scenarios like your mom reminding you to tell your grandmother you enjoyed her meal, or you giving feedback to a co-worker that doesn’t capture the whole truth.

Still, the art of deception is more nuanced than you might think. Here, five scenarios where fibbing might be the best course of action, according to experts.

If you have someone’s best interests at heart

There are classic examples of lying being detrimental , and the most damaging kinds of lies tend to be those that promote your own self-interests at the expense of others.

But “prosocial” lies—fibs intended to benefit others—can actually build trust between people, according to research .

“People’s primary interest, at least when they receive information and build trust is in benevolence,” says Emma E. Levine, an assistant professor of behavioral science at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who studies honesty and trust. “People care about whether you have good intentions a lot more than whether the person is being honest per se.”

Just remember: Lies are most beneficial when they’re not selfish. If you tell your partner he or she looks great before a date to boost his or her self-esteem, that’s one thing, Schweitzer says. But saying it just to get your loved one out the door because you’re already late, he says, is where your motive can veer into selfish territory.

If there’s no time to change

Say your partner asks you how he or she looks right before walking on stage for a speaking event, or enquires about what you think of the speech just prior to reaching the podium. Even if you notice a stain on his or her outfit, or think the speech could use work, think about whether the person has the time to react to the information and control the situation, says Levine.

If there’s nothing your partner can do to improve or make a change in that moment, you might welcome deception, she says. Lying in this sense is likely seen as benefitting the other person because there’s truly nothing he or she can do in the moment.

Conversely, if your significant other does have the capacity to react to the information, honesty is the better choice, Levine says.

If you’re giving constructive criticism

When sharing feedback, honesty is important. And while it’s easy to use “I’m just being honest” as an excuse for “just being mean,” says Schweitzer, brutal honesty isn’t always the most effective way to get your message across.

Instead of telling a low-performing employee that he’s performing terribly, consider saying something like, “You’ve had a rocky start, but everyone struggles at the beginning,” then segueing into constructive criticism, says Schweitzer. Your feedback will likely be received better which in turn will benefit your business in the long run.

Get the latest career, relationship and wellness advice to enrich your life: sign up for TIME’s Living newsletter.

Right before a special occasion

The debate over lying is not only about whether honest information can help the situation, but also whether that information is delivered at the right time. “One thing people care about is whether honest information will distract them from something important,” says Levine.

An example: You hear your friend’s company is expecting layoffs right before she leaves for her wedding. Should you tell her?

“In these situations, people tend to appreciate withholding the truth until later,” says Levine.

It comes back to the idea of control—if your friend is about to leave for her wedding or honeymoon, she won’t be in a position to preemptively explore other job opportunities. And while every situation is different, consider asking yourself whether honesty in a situation like this would truly benefit the other person—or simply be a distraction, according to Levine.

If you’re not close with the person

Mild and well-intentioned deception can be even more beneficial in distant relationships, says Levine. “In more competitive relationships or first interactions, honesty is a lot more precarious, can damage relationships and reduce trust,” she says. That’s because both parties are less familiar with the other person’s true intentions and they each might wonder, is this person trying to undermine me?

Still, if you’re inclined to give honest feedback to a more distant acquaintance or a friend of a friend, Levine suggests providing the truth coupled with benevolence—something along the lines of, I really want you to do well, so I’m giving you this criticism.

Close relationships, on the other hand, can give way to more of an appreciation for honesty, she says, and confessing to friends is likely not as bad as you think. “We systematically overestimate how uncomfortable truth-telling will be,” Levine says.

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Triperspectival Theology for the Church

Why Lying Is Always Wrong: The Uniqueness of Verbal Deceit

April 30, 2013 By Vern Poythress

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Is It OK to Lie?

Sometimes we stretch the truth to be polite. But where should we draw the line?

Learning Objective: to identify and evaluate key points on both sides of a debate; to write an argument essay

• Purpose This debate has a clear purpose: to present arguments for and against the idea that lying is OK in certain situations.
• Structure The texts contains cause-and-effect and compare-and-contrast structures. Arguments for and against the idea that social media sites are responsible for encouraging dangerous behavior are woven throughout the article.
• Language Conventionality and Clarity Vocabulary: higher academic vocabulary (e.g., administers, colossal, hone) Figurative language: rhetorical questions
• Knowledge Demands The article refers to LeBron James and the television show Chopped Junior.
• Anchor Standards R.1, R.2, R.6, R.8, W.1, W.4, W.5, W.7, SL.1, L.4, L.6
• Grade 6 RI.6.1, RI.6.2, RI.6.6, RI.6.8, W.6.1, W.6.4, W.6.5, SL.6.1, L.6.4, L.6.6
• Grade 7 RI.7.1, RI.7.2, RI.7.4, W.7.2, W,7.4, W.7.5, SL.7.1, SL.7.2, L.7.4, L.7.6
• Grade 8 RI.8.1, RI.8.2, RI.8.6, RI.8.8, W.8.1, W.8.4, W.8.5, SL.8.1, L.8.4, L.8.6
• Grade 6 6.1; 6.2e; 6.11; 6.14; 6.18; 6.19; 6.26, 6.27
• Grade 7 7.1, 7.2e, 7.11; 7.14; 7.18a,b,c; 7.19; 7.26, 7.27
• Grade 8 8.1, 8.2e, 8.11; 8.14; 8.18a,b,c; 8.19; 8.26, 8.27
• Lesson Plan

Presentation View

Your best friend shows up at school with a new haircut. It is not a good haircut. In fact, it looks like he lost a wrestling match with a lawn mower.

“What do you think?” he asks, looking you straight in the eye.

Your heart races. Your mind swirls. It’s obvious your buddy feels insecure about his new look and is hoping for your approval. You don’t want to hurt his feelings. You should just tell him his hair looks great, right?

But wait. Wouldn’t that be lying?

And isn’t lying . . . wrong?

Living with Lies

Wrong or not, the fact is we all lie—a lot. Most Americans lie about twice a day.* In other words, we bend the truth about as often as we brush our teeth.

A lie is a statement that is deliberately meant to mislead. Some people feel that any lie—no matter how minor or well-intentioned—is morally wrong. We depend on each other to be honest, and deceiving those we care about can damage our relationships. Plus, if we can’t assume that others are telling the truth, how can we trust anything we hear or read?

What’s the Big Deal

You’ve probably told a few fibs that seemed harmless—but were they really? Telling tiny lies, experts say, makes us more likely to tell bigger, more harmful lies in the future.

“The problem with small lies is that they accumulate and we lose track of them,” says Howard Temple, who administers lie-detector tests.

Plus, once you tell a lie (say, claiming LeBron James is your cousin), you might have to tell more lies to keep up the charade (you’re going to Los Angeles to visit LeBron over winter break). Before you know it, you’ll be terrified of running into your friends over the holidays because you’re supposed to be in California hanging with LeBron.

Better to Be Polite

Still, lying may have its place—especially when it’s done to protect someone’s feelings. “Most of the time, being kind to someone is more important than telling the absolute truth,” says Jane Frank, a psychologist in New York City.

It turns out that lying might even be good for your social life. White lies can help you smooth out awkward situations and make others around you feel better, says Dr. Robert Feldman, a professor who researches lying. In this way, he says, lying could be seen as a valuable social skill.

Perhaps the key is to think about why you’re lying. There’s a difference between lying to spare yourself—like faking illness to miss a big test—and lying to spare someone else. Of course, even lying out of kindness can be complicated. It would be cruel to tell your sister she’s an awful cook. But if she plans to audition for Chopped Junior , being honest and telling her she needs to hone her skills first could save her from colossal disappointment.

So what do you tell your friend about his horrendous haircut? The truth or a lie?

Well, there is a third option: Don’t say anything. Instead, “accidentally” drop your books, have a sudden coughing fit, and change the subject.

Then go buy him a nice hat.

Writing Task

What Do You Think? Is it ever OK to lie? Go back to the article to find arguments that support each side of this debate. Write the information you find on a piece of paper. You can use the information in an argument essay on this topic . Need help getting started? Use this helpful guided-writing activity . 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue.

• The Core Skills Workout is a series of skill-based activities that will help your students "bulk up" in the comprehension skills they need most to become strong, analytical readers. The Core Skills Workout comes with every issue and will support your reading program no matter what your scope and sequence.

Close Reading, Critical Thinking, Skill Building

1. preparing to read.

Project the  Vocabulary and Definitions  handout and preview the vocabulary. 

2. READING AND TEXT MARKING

• Read the article once as a class. 
• On your whiteboard, model text marking as students mark their magazines: Use a red-colored pencil to underline details that support the “Yes” side of the debate. 
• Have students work in groups to underline details that support the “No” side of the debate, this time with a blue-colored pencil.

3. DISCUSSING AUTHOR BIAS

Have students discuss the following in their groups: Does the writer show bias—that is, a preference for one side of the debate or the other? How do you know?

4. DOING THE ACTIVITY

Have students fill in the “Yes/No” chart in their magazines using the strongest details that they underlined in the text.

5. DEBATING

Invite students to debate the topic at hand. Encourage them to use text evidence to support their opinions.

• Have students complete the  Guided Writing: Argument Essay  activity sheet and write their essays. 
• Students should revise their essays using the  Argument-Essay Checklist .

Wait, Lying Isn’t Inherently Bad?

The bright side of deceptive communication..

Posted June 10, 2021 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Despite popular opinion, deception isn't always bad.
• Lying can be functional when used in prosocial ways (e.g., a surprise party) or to help someone in need (e.g., staging an intervention).
• Whether deception is ultimately good or bad depends on the deceivers' intentions and motives.

Relationships are built on foundations of trust. When trust is broken, relationships suffer tremendously, and some won’t survive.

Some cultures, like those in North America, have an ideology of openness and honesty in our close relationships. In fact, Dr. Steve McCornack’s research explains how people expect truthfulness as a fundamental feature of conversations. People don’t enter interactions expecting others to lie to them—that would be too much cognitive effort.

Dr. Timothy Levine has devoted his life to deception and detection. His research on deception has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Defense, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)! Dr. Levine’s truth default theory explains how honesty is highly adaptive, and it enables efficient communication. However, the presumption of honesty makes us vulnerable to not noticing when people deceive us and inhibits our ability to detect deception.

Although we hope our friends and loved ones don’t just flat-out lie to us, research suggests that people engage in deception quite regularly in relationships. It’s not always just these obvious instances of intense fabrications of the truth that are considered deceptive.

Types of deception

Deception is any statement that someone makes to another person knowingly and intentionally distorting the truth. Dr. Levine’s work, alongside Dr. Judee Burgoon, emphasizes how deception is communicated through an assortment of façades, and lying is just one form of deception. From strategic ambiguity and insane fabrications to more subtle and mundane camouflages of truthful information, there are several forms of deceptive communication. The more ambiguous forms of deception, such as omission or avoidance, are actually the types of deception that occur most frequently in relationships. Yet, most people automatically attribute the word “lying” to a host of negative characteristics and assume that engaging in deception is a dark phenomenon that impedes and erodes our relationships.

The dark side perspective to deception

But let’s take a spin on this. Let’s consider how deceiving can actually be helpful. Welcome to the Dark Side! When I refer to the dark side perspective of deception, I’m referring to instances when deceiving could actually be beneficial . The founders of studying the dark side, Dr. Brian Spitzberg and Dr. William Cupach, developed this perspective to shed light on the paradoxical nature of some communication, like deception.

And let’s be honest—we’ve all lied. In fact, some research suggests that we lie about one to two times a day in relationships. With strangers, it's even worse. Some studies suggest that we lie 77 percent of the time to people we don't know! Don’t believe me? Well, have you ever….

Exaggerated a story to make it more exciting?

Told someone you’ve had a great week when, in fact, it was awful?

Made an excuse that wasn’t actually true?

Told your spouse your shirt was old, though you just bought it?

Told your significant other you were texting your friend when it was someone else they didn’t like?

Told a child that the Tooth Fairy was real?

Helped conceal a surprise party?

If you’ve said “yes” to any of these statements, you’ve lied. But like the last example, being part of throwing a surprise party and concealing it from the guest of honor… is that really a bad thing? Unless they hate surprise parties, like my second father (it’s a long story), most people would agree that lying in this situation, under this motivation , is completely and totally fine. Actually, you might be in trouble for telling someone about their surprise party because you’ve ruined it.

And that’s the spin: Deception isn’t always a bad thing. There can be benefits to deception as well. Let me fill you in on a little secret; sometimes, honesty isn’t the best policy.

4 situations when deception is probably the best and right approach

• To your parents. Sometimes Mom and Dad don’t need to know the details of everything you’ve done. Though this depends on your age, as you get older, keeping some information from your parents isn’t inherently a bad thing. Your parents don’t need to know about the most recent argument you got into with your spouse or the number of sex partners you’ve had. In fact, the latter would be a tad strange. Therefore, and don’t hate me, parents, but you don’t need to know everything.
• To someone who needs help. Sometimes, in order to get someone to comply, deception might be useful. Take, for instance, a situation with someone who suffers from addiction . Potentially lying to them to get them to go to an intervention could save their life.
• To an elderly person suffering from a cognitive disease. I remember when my grandfather was suffering from dementia . What good was it to tell him the spatula isn’t a griddle? Instances like these can actually make the dementia-suffering individual more aggressive, and with something so minuscule, why even bother?
• To yourself. Lying to yourself can actually be very productive. Some personal disclosure here, I suffer from severe attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). A professor at Arizona State University told me to start telling myself my ADHD made me a better person, and it would not hinder my academic performance. This professor told me to put it on a notecard, lay it on my nightstand, and tell myself this every night when I went to bed and every morning when I woke up for 30 days (emphasis on the 30 days). Why 30 days? Well, research says it takes about 30 days to form a habit. After 30 days, and I’m not even exaggerating, it transformed my life. That’s because it boosted my self-esteem and created a self-fulfilling prophecy: When you feel more confident, you might just work that much harder because of it.

If you haven’t noticed by now, what makes lying ethical are the deceivers’ intentions and motives. Our intentions and motives shape and highlight how deceptive communication lingers on the tightrope between ethical or unethical communication.

Keep finding the light in the dark!

—Dr. Samantha J. Shebib, Ph.D.

Burgoon, J. K., & Levine, T. R. (2010). Advances in deception detection. In S. W. Smith & S. R. Wilson (Eds.), New directions in interpersonal communication research (pp. 201-220). Sage.

McCornack, S. A. (1992). Information manipulation theory. Communication Monographs, 59 , 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759209376245

Spitzberg, B. H., & Cupach, W. R. (2007). The dark side of interpersonal communication (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum.

Samantha J. Shebib, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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Do You Believe In White Lies?

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White Lies vs. Real Lies

• Things to Consider

Why Do People Lie?

• Risks of Lies

Benefits of Honesty

When it’s necessary to lie.

Is it okay to lie? Or do you believe in white lies? A white lie is a lie that is considered harmless or trivial. Such lies are often told to spare hurting someone's feelings.

The term dates back to the 14th century and is linked to historical color associations that suggest that white symbolizes "morally pure" and that black symbolizes "sinister intent."

While most people agree that lies are damaging, destructive, and downright wrong, there are times when people tell what they think are harmless lies as a way to prevent further harm. If you’ve ever told a child that Santa Claus was on his way in his sleigh or that you loved the weird socks that your aunt sent as a gift, you lied. But you can let yourself off the hook.

These were more like white lies. With a real lie, the intent is malicious and the consequence is serious. While with a white lie, often more like a harmless bending of the truth, the intent is benign and positive, and usually, the consequence isn’t major.

The adage that you always should tell the truth is mostly right, but in some situations fibs or white lies have a purpose.

The question of whether it is okay to lie often comes down to whether you are telling a white lie or a real lie. White lies are often innocuous. We tell them to create a magical world for our children, or, more often, as a way to be polite and demonstrate social manners. Some examples of white lies include:

• Telling someone they look great in an outfit
• Saying that you are on your way to meet someone so you can't stay and chat
• Laughing at a joke that wasn't really funny
• Telling someone that you'll call them later
• Saying that you didn't see a text that someone sent you

Overall, white lies are for beneficial purposes. Being totally honest in some cases would create unpleasantness or be offensive. Some view white lies as a sign of civility.

Real lies tend to be more self-serving. They may result in negative consequences for yourself and others.

Told to protect others

Self-protective

Avoid awkward situations

Told to benefit the self

Self-serving

Create pain and discomfort for others

How White Lies Can Be Good for Us

If you believe in white lies, then you probably feel that such fibs serve an important purpose such as protecting someone's feelings. If we lie to benefit other people, these are considered white lies. Here’s a good illustration: A student had a hard time his first week at college and told his parents he was doing well so they wouldn’t worry.

In this situation, he was thinking about other people’s feelings and was guided by empathy and kindness. The second week he adjusted and was glad he didn’t upset his parents prematurely.

Scientists call these well-intended falsehoods prosocial lies . These differ from antisocial lies, which are told for personal gain. According to research, prosocial lies can actually build trust and a sense of benevolence between people.

How Real Lies Can Be Bad for Us

With real lies, the intent is often selfish. These are the most damaging kinds of lies. To find evidence of them, look for falsehoods that promote a person’s self-interests obviously at the expense of others.

To make it clearer, if your best girlfriend asks how she looks in her new dress and you think it’s too tight, but you say she looks great to boost her self-esteem, that’s a white lie. But complimenting her because you want to look better than her at the party, which is competitive and more indicative of selfish intent is a real lie.

When it comes to truth telling, deception and trust, real lies can be destructive. If things don’t add up or if you suspect someone of lying , there are ways to find out.

Before You Decide If It's Okay to Lie

Let's look at what you might want to think about before you decide to tell a white lie or a real lie.

Evaluate the Intention

When someone lies out of altruism to protect others or ease their pain, these lies are considered acceptable white lies. White lies usually benefit the person listening.

For example, if your neighbor is dying of cancer, rather than frighten your young son with his impending death, it’s okay to say he’s not feeling well right now.

This is an example of prosocial lying and reflects empathy and compassion . It also takes into account what is age appropriate for your son.

Consider the Long-Term Consequences

While white lies are often minor or inconsequential, real lies have far reaching effects. Real lies tend to initially benefit the liar, too.

For example, if Dan took the data his co-worker amassed and presented the project as his own, Dan blatantly lied and acted in a self-serving and clearly untruthful way. When his supervisor learned the truth, Dan was sent to human resources as a consequence.

Overall, it's important to look at the morality and societal acceptance of the type of life. White lies are acceptable and help our society function. Real lies are deemed to be universally wrong.

There are many reasons why people lie. Some common motives for lying include:

To Be Considerate

Lying out of consideration can mean protecting someone else’s feelings, for the sake of diplomacy, or to keep stability in our relationships. These are the common white lies that help us maintain harmony with our spouses, family, friends, and neighbors.

For example, if your child just began studying violin and is making a horrible racket, you might tell him he sounds fantastic to encourage him.

To Protect Our Ego and Self-Image

Another reason why we don’t tell the truth is based on psychological compensation: to protect how we're perceived by others. Rather than admit you lost your job, for example, you might tell your sibling that you quit because it was no longer challenging enough.

To Compensate for Our Sensitivity to Power

For example, rather than question your boss’s new plan which you find shaky, you feel compelled to support it. You respond by saying that you love the plan to protect your job.

People tell white lies to protect others, protect the self, and defer to those in power.

The Danger of Telling Too Many Lies

A 2016 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience showed that the brain adapts to dishonesty. The more participants engaged in self-serving dishonesty, the more likely that behavior would increase with repetition. Small acts escalated into bigger transgressions.

That’s as good a reason as ever to stop lying. Even seemingly innocuous lies can become a habit, like second nature. In fact, it may become easier than being honest. You get to spare people’s feelings and pretend you are less flawed than you are. That can be very enticing.

The second danger of telling too many lies might result in not getting the help you need. For example, saying "I'm fine," which seems like an innocuous fib, masks the fact that you are still struggling on many fronts. This may preclude others from suggesting you get mental health counseling or you yourself from realizing that you could benefit from therapy.

You must always be honest with yourself about what you’re doing and why. Then you must try to be as honest as you can be with loved ones. We are all human, but that should be the goal.

So is it ever okay to lie to your significant other? There are times when you might tell a white lie to protect your partner, but as in other cases, telling the truth is generally the best policy . Telling lies, particularly those that involve serious deception, can erode the trust and intimacy in your relationship.

After all, if your partner doesn’t know the truth and how you are evolving as a person, that person doesn’t know the real you. You are not experiencing real intimacy then.

Intimacy demands vulnerability and honesty. You might also be depriving your family of the chance to show you that they see you for all your foibles and accept and love you as you are.

Less Lying Has Been Linked to Better Health

Evidence shows that Americans average about 11 lies per week. Another reason to strive to tell the truth and reduce lies? Anita E. Kelly, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame discovered during her research that participants who reduced lies and tried to live more honestly actually reported improved relationships and better mental and physical health.

Participants stopped making excuses for being late or not completing tasks. They also figured out other ways to avoid lying and the results were significant.

So what is a good reason to lie? Sometimes the stakes are high and lies are necessary to safeguard someone’s well-being. In these types of situations, lying for the sake of protecting yourself or loved ones is deemed acceptable:

• Lying to an abuser to escape from or protect someone from domestic abuse.
• Lying to an abuser to protect children from child abuse.
• Lying to someone who is playing with weapons.
• Lying to someone who seems intoxicated or on drugs.
• Lying to someone who seems to be experiencing a mental health issue.

Is it OK to lie to protect yourself?

While honesty is usually the best policy, it is okay to lie to protect yourself or someone else. Such lies can help ensure your safety in the moment until you are in a safer situation.

Lying to Our Loved Ones

What if our relatives are grappling with mental health problems or impairment? And it’s not an emergency situation, but it’s clear there is an ongoing problem. Sometimes lies are necessary to help them.

Meredith Gordon Resnick , LCSW, says, “Studies show that for people with severe dementia, sometimes telling an untruth, and doing it carefully and mindfully so as not to undermine trust, may be appropriate."

"Challenging someone with severe memory impairment to 'face the truth' of certain situations—even those that seem benign to someone else—can cause agitation and fear, and can break trust, too. It’s a delicate, individual balance," she also notes.

A Word From Verywell

So while honesty is usually the best policy, there are exceptions. Just about all religions and belief systems, however, extol the virtue of honesty. So while it’s okay to lie, in most cases, it’s better to strive not to.

Columbia Journalism Review. The true origins of 'white lies .'

Levine E, Schweitzer M. Prosocial lies: When deception breeds trust . Org Behav Hum Decis Process . 2015;126:88-106. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.10.007

Garrett N, Lazzaro SC, Ariely D, Sharot T. The brain adapts to dishonesty .  Nat Neurosci . 2016;19(12):1727-1732. doi:10.1038/nn.4426

American Psychological Association. Lying less linked to better health, new research finds .

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Lying, speech acts, and commitment

• Open access
• Published: 18 December 2020
• Volume 199 , pages 3245–3269, ( 2021 )

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• Neri Marsili   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7853-7359 1  

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Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric commitment is analysed in terms of two normative components: ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’. The resulting definition of lying draws all the desired distinctions, providing an intensionally adequate analysis of the concept of lying.

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1 Introduction

Dishonest communication plays an important role in the spread of misinformation, often with dramatic consequences: recent, blatant examples are the false promises that supported the Brexit campaign (see e.g. Chappell 2016 ; Watson 2018 ), and the falsehoods (spread by Twitterbots and fake news websites) that plagued the US presidential elections in 2016 (Silverman 2016 ; Allcott and Gentzkow 2017 ) and 2020 (Ferrara et al. 2020 ). Given the social and moral significance of lying, it is not surprising that disciplines as diverse as sociology, linguistics, and psychology have displayed an increasing interest in its analysis. A fundamental philosophical question that cuts across these disciplines concerns how to define lying.

Several authors have attempted to offer an analysis of the concept of lying in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. A variety of different proposals have emerged in the literature, sparking a lively debate about which definition best captures our intuitions (for an overview, see Mahon 2015 ). This paper presents a puzzle for existing accounts of lying, showing that they are all unable to track our intuitions about whether a given utterance is a lie, and puts forward a definition of lying that is able to solve it.

With some approximation, extant definitions of lying can be grouped into three families: deceptionist definitions (according to which all lies are intended to deceive) assertion-based definitions (according to which all lies are assertions), and hybrid accounts (which incorporate both requirements). Let us briefly familiarise ourselves with each view.

According to deceptionist definitions (Isenberg 1964 ; Primoratz 1984 ; Mahon 2008 ; Lackey 2013 ), lying consists in saying (as opposed to implying) what you believe to be false, with the intention of deceiving your audience into believing what you said. More formally:

Deceptionist definitions :

S lies to A iff:

S utters a declarative sentence with content p Footnote 1

S believes that ¬ p

S intends to deceive A about   p

The distinctive feature of deceptionist definitions is the ‘intention to deceive’ requirement (c) (which can be phrased in slightly different ways, see Mahon 2008 ; Fallis 2018 ). Beyond the mere intuition that lying is a form of intentional deception, a key theoretical motivation for including this requirement is its ability to differentiate between genuine lies and other believed-false declarative utterances that are not lies, such as ironic, metaphorical, and fictional utterances, which are not meant to deceive the audience about their literal content.

In recent years an impressive case has been mounted against deceptionist accounts (Carson et al. 1982 , p. 17; Carson 2006 ; Sorensen 2007 , 2010 ; Arico and Fallis 2013 ; Fallis 2015 , 2018 ; Krstić 2018 , 2019 ; Marques 2020 ), prompting several authors to abandon condition (c). Scholars who reject (c) acknowledge that a definition featuring only (a) and (b) would be too broad, as it would include ironic, metaphorical, and fictional utterances. Typically, their solution is to replace (c) with a condition requiring that the speaker genuinely asserts that p . More formally:

Assertion-based definitions:

S utters a declarative sentence with content p

S believes that ¬p

In making the utterance, S is asserting that p

Scholars who endorse assertion-based definitions of lying Footnote 2 tend to agree that a speaker lies iff she asserts something insincerely , but disagree on what to count as an assertion for the purpose of defining lying. Footnote 3 In other words, assertion-based definitions of lying differ depending on how the ‘assertion-condition’ (d) is formulated. Hybrid accounts (the third family of definitions) incorporate both condition (c) and condition (d) in their definition of lying. Footnote 4

The next section (§ 2 ) introduces a new puzzle for definitions of lying: distinguishing between speech acts that can be lies and speech acts that cannot. It shows that deceptionist definitions are unable to make the right distinctions in this respect. The subsequent sections will review the most prominent assertion-based definitions (Stokke 2013a , b , 2018 ; Fallis 2012 , 2013 ; Carson 2006 ), showing that these proposals are either similarly unable to draw the required distinctions (§ 3.1 – 3 ) or vulnerable to further counterexamples (§ 3.4 ). Where these accounts have failed, I argue that a definition based on the notion of assertoric commitment can succeed. After introducing a novel account of assertoric commitment (§ 4 ), I show that the resulting definition of lying avoids the difficulties affecting other accounts, and provides an adequate analysis of the concept of lying (§ 5 ).

2 The puzzle of explicit performatives

One of the main contentions of this paper is that a good definition of lying should be able to draw a distinction between the speech acts that are ‘lie-apt’ and those that are not. I will argue that some explicit performative sentences can be used to lie (§ 2.1 ), while others can be used to deceive, but not to lie (§ 2.2 ). Footnote 5 The importance of this becomes apparent once we realise (§ 2.3 – 3 ) that most existing definitions are inaccurate, precisely because they are unable to draw this distinction.

2.1 Lying with explicit performatives

Explicit performative sentences (‘explicit performatives’ for brevity) are declarative sentences of the form “I (hereby) [performative verb] that Φ ”, in which the speaker performs a given illocution (promising, asserting, betting, etc.) by declaring that they are performing that illocution. Utterances (1) to (3) are examples of explicit performatives that can be lies. To simplify the discussion, I have marked the content of each speech act (what the speaker is promising, asserting, swearing, etc.) with an asterisk:

(1*) I received expressed consent from the patient

(2*) I will wear a blue dress at the wedding

(3*) I saw the defendant at the crime scene

Intuitively, (1), (2) Footnote 6 , and (3) can be lies under the right circumstances—whenever the speaker believes, respectively, that (1*), (2*) or (3*) is false (and aims to convince the interlocutor that these propositions are true). To put the same point differently: the fact that you are explicitly asserting, promising, or swearing that something is the case does not render you immune from the accusation of having lied.

It could be argued, however, that performative utterances can never be lies. Since assuming the opposite (i.e. that some performatives can be lies) is crucial to the main argument delivered in this paper, I will begin by reconstructing and dismissing the case against performative lies. The reader who already shares the intuition that (1–2–3) are genuine lies can jump to § 2.2 , where I proceed to expose the rest of my argument.

Let us call the view that performative utterances can never be lies the ‘ No - Performatives View’ . This view maintains that (1–2–3) cannot be lies, despite our pre-theoretical, naïve intuitions about them, and can be motivated by a ‘descriptivist’ semantic theory of the content of explicit performatives. A descriptivist semantics is one that identifies the propositional content of our explicit performatives with the full sentences (1, 2, 3), rather than the embedded that-clauses (1*, 2*, 3*). Footnote 7 On this view, if you utter (3), you assert that you are swearing that you saw the defendant at the crime scene. If we interpret performatives in this literal way, it becomes apparent that it is virtually impossible to lie by uttering them (cf. Searle 1989 , p. 539; Marsili 2016 , pp. 275–277).

To appreciate this point, recall that lying requires insincerity: you must believe that the content of your utterance is false (condition (b) in the definitions above). But whenever you proffer (3), you know that it is true that you are swearing that you saw the defendant at the crime scene (i.e. that (3) is true), because your saying so amounts to swearing it. Therefore, whenever you say (3) you know that (3) is true. If descriptivism is true, and the content of (3) is just (3), it follows that whenever you utter (3) you are sincere. The same diagnosis applies to any other explicit performative utterance, including (1) and (2). On a descriptivist reading, performative utterances can never be lies. Footnote 8

It is far from obvious that descriptivism is an adequate account of performative utterances; as a matter of fact, this view is subject to a number of compelling objections (see e.g. Harris 1978 ; Searle 1989 ; Reimer 1995 ; Jary 2007 ). If descriptivism is an inadequate account of performative utterances, then there is no strong reason to accept the No-Performatives View, nor its counterintuitive consequence that (1–3) cannot be lies. But even if we leave aside the shortcomings of descriptivism, there are compelling reasons to reject the No-Performatives View: its predictions are hard to square with our most basic intuitions about lying, with our moral judgements, and with our legal practices.

To illustrate, consider the following. Every existing definition of lying converges (and rightly so) on the prediction that, uttered alone, the starred statements (1*), (2*), and (3*) can be lies (as long as they are uttered insincerely). This is intuitive, but it exposes some counterintuitive implications of the No-Performatives View. A speaker who disbelieves (3*) lies if she plainly asserts that she saw the defendant at the crime scene with (3*); but if the same speaker chooses instead to swear that she saw the defendant (uttering (3) instead) she is sincere and is telling the truth according to the No-Performative View. While there may be a trivial, ‘technical’ sense in which these remarks are correct ( i.e. a descriptive, overly literal interpretation of what the speaker is saying), these assessments clearly do not reflect our real-world communicative practices. Clearly, choosing (3) over (3*) in court will not render you immune from a charge of perjury. By swearing, you are assuming more responsibility for what you say than by plainly making the same claim. Rather than freeing you from the accusation of having lied, choosing (3) over (3*) renders you liable to stronger criticisms if it turns out that (3*) is false. If lying is a concept designed to track a distinctively severe form of communicative dishonesty (Adler 1997 ; Williams 2002 , p. 197; Krauss 2017 ), then it is just not clear how we can plausibly maintain that the speaker of (3*) is lying and the speaker of (3), who undertakes even more responsibility for the same claim, is not.

Similar considerations apply to promises. Both by promising that you will wear a blue dress at the wedding (2) and by merely announcing that you will do it (2*), you create an expectation that you will show up at the wedding with a blue dress. The only difference is that when you promise you take on a stronger and more explicit responsibility to make it happen. Oddly, the No-Performatives View predicts that only when you assume less responsibility you are lying. Mutatis mutandis, the same point applies to the difference between simply stating that you have expressed consent from a patient (1*) and explicitly asserting it (1).

These counterintuitive predictions extend to many other performatives that are barely distinguishable from direct assertions: warning, admitting, insisting, agreeing, denying, guaranteeing, assuring, etc. For example, the No-Performative View predicts that under no circumstances (1a), (1b), and (1c) can be lies. And yet, these utterances are not significantly (practically, legally, morally, etc.) different from the plain assertion (1*):

Recapitulating, there are strong motivations to reject the No-Performatives View: it clashes with our pre-theoretical intuitions about performative utterances, and its predictions are difficult to reconcile with our moral judgments, our legal practices, and with our reactive attitudes to performative utterances in real-life situations. On the other hand, the positive case supporting the No-Performatives View is weak: the only theoretical motivation to accept it is that it is entailed by descriptivism, a view that is not exempt from objections. In what follows, I will therefore proceed on the assumption that the No-Performatives View is incorrect, and that a good definition of lying should accommodate the intuition that (1–2–3), (1a–1b–1c), and cognate utterances can be lies.

2.2 Explicit performatives that cannot be lies

Although some explicit performative utterances can be lies under the right conditions, not all performative utterances can be. Consider the following examples:

(4*) the blood on the blade is Reza’s

(5*) you try that quiche

(6*) you steal that chicken

In the previous section, we saw that (1, 2, 3) are lies whenever the speaker believes their respective content [(1*), (2*), (3*)] to be false. By contrast, it is not clear under which conditions (4), (5) or (6) could be lies. While they can surely be deceptive or misleading , it is not possible, strictly speaking, to lie by uttering them. For example, if I conjecture that the blood on the blade is Reza’s even though I know it is not (I disbelieve (4*)), it would be appropriate to criticise me for having been deceptive, but not for having lied, since I have merely conjectured that (4*) is true, and conjecturing something is not yet claiming that it is true. The advice (5) can be misleading in several ways: it may falsely imply that the quiche is delicious, or falsely suggest that the hearer can (and will) eat the quiche. Similarly, the command (6) may falsely imply that it is possible to steal the chicken (even though it is well guarded), or that the speaker has the authority to command its theft (even though she is merely impersonating someone with such authority). But even though (4), (5) and (6) can be deceptive in several different ways, it seems that under no circumstances could they be appropriately classified as lies. Footnote 9

It should now be clear that some speech acts can be lies, while some others cannot. This is important, because it has crucial implications for theorising about lying. It establishes two key desiderata for a definition of lying to which theorists have paid little attention so far: a good definition should be able to acknowledge (a) that some performative utterances (explicit assertions, promises, sworn statements, warnings, etc.) can be lies, but also (b) that some other performative utterances (like conjectures, advices, and orders) cannot be lies. To understand the importance of these considerations for our theorising about lying, let us consider their implications for what is perhaps the most influential philosophical view about lying: deceptionism.

2.3 The puzzle applied: deceptionism

Are deceptionist accounts able to draw all the desired distinctions? The answer can only be negative, since all deceptionist definitions classify (4, 5, 6) as lies. These sentences are all in the declarative mood, so that they all meet condition (a). Furthermore, we have just seen that it is possible to imagine scenarios in which the speaker believes that the content of any of these sentences is false, and intends to make the audience believe that it is true, so that conditions (b) and (c) can also be met. Against the desiderata, deceptionist definitions classify deceptive uses of (4, 5, 6) as lies. If this is correct, deceptionist definitions are not intensionally accurate.

Appealing to a descriptivist interpretation will not help the deceptionist, for reasons that were given above (§ 2.1 ). Admittedly, a descriptivist reading of deceptionist definitions would exclude (4, 5, 6), because (so interpreted) these sentences are true in virtue of the speaker’s saying so. But a descriptivist reading would also rule out every other performative lie . This is not a good trade-off for deceptionism, because it prevents it from counting explicit assertions, warnings, sworn statements, and other lie-apt speech acts as lies. Whichever semantics of performative utterances we favour, Footnote 10 deceptionist definitions will be able to accommodate one of the required sets of intuitions, but not both.

We will see that the challenge faced by deceptionist accounts applies to every other definition of lying. A good definition should be able to classify explicit performatives like (1, 2, 3) as lies, but also exclude performatives like (4, 5, 6), which under no circumstances can be correctly classified as lies. In the next sections, I will show that also assertion-based definitions are unable to meet these desiderata. While I will not discuss hybrid accounts, it should be noted that for any given assertion-based definition that is unable to rule out (4, 5, 6), so is the hybrid account built on that definition (because these accounts would only differ in their endorsement of the intention to deceive condition (c) which, we have seen, is unable to discard these cases). In other words: whenever an assertion-based account is proved to be too narrow, so is the hybrid account that it is built on it. Footnote 11

3 Testing extant definitions

Since assertion-based definitions differ primarily in how the ‘assertion condition’ (d) is fleshed out, in what follows I will only discuss how this condition is formulated by different proponents of assertion-based definitions, keeping the rest (condition (a) and (b)) fixed. Footnote 12 I will first discuss Fallis’ work.

3.1 Intentionally communicating something false

In a series of recent papers, ( 2009 , 2012 , 2013 ) Fallis delineates a number of ways to develop an assertion-based definition of lying. In Fallis ( 2012 ), Footnote 13 lying is defined as the intentional, explicit communication of something that the speaker believes to be false. The following assertion-condition (d) is adopted Footnote 14 :

(ACF1) S intends to communicate that p

Fallis acknowledges that the notion of ‘communication’ plays a key role in this proposal: “what counts as communication makes a difference for what counts as a lie [according to ACF1]”. Nonetheless, he controversially adds that no particular notion of communication is needed for his account to work: “for purposes of this paper, it will not be necessary to settle on one specific account of communication” ( 2012 , p. 572). It is hard to agree with this claim. Absent a clear criterion to determine whether an utterance is ‘intended to be communicated’, ACF1 is underdetermined: it does not provide a clear and univocal criterion to determine whether a given utterance is a lie—in other words, it fails to define what lying is (cf. Keiser 2016 , p. 476fn).

It could be argued, however, that failing to specify what is meant by ‘communication’ need not lead to this sort of indeterminacy. Fallis might not have specified what he means by ‘communication’ simply because he has in mind a rather ordinary notion. Footnote 15 Accordingly, we may assume that ACF1 is satisfied iff an ideal English speaker would agree that the speaker intended to communicate that p , in the ordinary sense of the term.

However, as the predictions of ACF1 become clearer, its structural problems become clearer too. Specifically, ACF1 is unable to rule out many performative utterances that are not lie-apt. This is because virtually any speech act (and not only the ones that are lie-apt) can be accompanied by the intention to communicate that their content is true. To illustrate, consider (4) once again:

Imagine a speaker (call her Luisa) who utters (4) with the intention to insinuate that the blood on the blade is indeed Reza’s. There is clearly a sense in which Luisa intends to communicate that the blood is Reza’s: if she believes that (4*) is false, Fallis’s definition would classify her conjecture as a lie. Footnote 16 But this verdict is incorrect. If Luisa were to be accused of lying, it would be perfectly appropriate for her to object that she has merely conjectured, but never affirmed, that the blood was Reza’s. Even in a court of law, (4) could not plausibly be regarded as a lie, precisely because it is flagged as a mere conjecture (cf. S. Green 2001 , pp. 176–82; Saul 2012 , pp. 95–97). This is not to deny that, by uttering (4) maliciously, Luisa can insinuate or imply that the blood was Reza’s: this is exactly what happens when Luisa intends to communicate that (4*) is true, satisfying ACF1. The point here is rather that insinuating or implying something falls short of lying—it falls on the ‘misleading’ side of the lying/misleading distinction. This objection to ACF1 is not limited to conjectures: similar considerations would apply if Luisa had suggested, hypothesised, bet or guessed that (4*) is the case.

It is also possible to imagine circumstances in which ACF1 would classify directive speech acts as lies. Imagine a conversation between two individuals, A and B; A has complete authority over B. A says “What shall I do next?”; B replies with (6):

(6*) you [will] steal that chicken

In this context, surely B’s communicative intention is to issue a command—to tell A what she must do. But given that A has asked what to do next, in uttering (6) B may conceivably intend not only to issue a command, but also to convey an answer to A’s question: to inform A of what she is doing next, namely (6*). If we postulate that B believes (6*) to be false (for instance, if B knows that the envisaged poultry theft is impossible), ACF1 would incorrectly classify this case as a lie.

Let me emphasise that the claim here is not that (4) or (6) conventionally or typically communicate contents like (4*) and (6*), but rather that there can be contexts in which it would not be blatantly irrational for the speaker to have the intention to communicate such propositions. Since both (4) and (6) can clearly meet this latter, weaker requirement, there are circumstances in which ACF1 incorrectly classifies them as lies, against our desiderata.

3.2 Representing yourself as believing

In a more recent paper, Fallis develops a different proposal; possibly, one that could be read as a refinement of ACF1. Drawing on some observations by Davidson ( 1985 , 2001 ), Fallis ( 2013 ) identifies the following assertion-condition for defining lying:

(ACF2) The speaker intends to represent herself (to her audience) as believing that p is true

To ‘represent yourself as believing something’ is to present yourself as having a particular property, namely the property of believing a proposition. Fallis correctly points out that we have an intuitive grasp of the notion of ‘representing yourself as having a certain property’, and this becomes evident when we think about familiar cases: when you sign a cheque, you represent yourself as having enough money in the bank to honour the cheque (Black 1952 , p. 31); by wearing a cross necklace, you represent yourself as being Christian, and so forth.

Even though ACF2 offers a more determinate criterion than ACF1, it is similarly unable to draw the right distinctions concerning which speech acts can be lies. This is evident when we consider conjectures. By uttering (4), Luisa can intend to represent herself as believing its literal content (4*) (that the blood is Reza’s): if she believes that the blood is someone else’s, ACF2 incorrectly predicts that her conjecture is a lie. To be sure: I am not claiming that whoever says (4) will ipso facto represent themselves as believing (4*), which is blatantly incorrect. I am merely claiming that there can be circumstances in which a speaker utters (4) with the intention Footnote 17 to represent themselves as believing that (4*), which is all that ACF2 requires.

Furthermore, as for ACF1, the problem is not limited to conjectures: there are several speech acts (like guessing, supposing, hypothesising) that one can use to represent oneself as believing something (Searle 1976 , p. 10), but not to lie. In sum, both ACF1 and ACF2 fail to draw the right distinctions between explicit performatives that can and cannot be lies. If lying is to be defined in terms of an insincere assertion, we need to identify an alternative account that avoids their difficulties.

3.3 Proposing to add to the official common ground

Stokke’s ( 2013a , b , 2018 ) assertion-based definition is based on the accounts of assertion and conversational common ground developed by Stalnaker ( 1978 , 2002 ). According to Stalnaker ( 2002 , p. 716), “it is common ground that p in a conversation if all members accept (for the purpose of the conversation) that p , and all believe that all accept that p, and all believe that all believe that all accept that p , etc.”. Assertion is understood by Stokke as a proposal to add a proposition (specifically, the content of the sentence one utters) to the ‘official’ common ground:

(ACS) S proposes that p become part of the official common ground

The notion of ‘official’ common ground is meant to exclude speech acts that are not assertions. Consider the following cases:

(7) Pushkin’s beard never grew

(8) Assume that             (8*) I can lift weights with my mind […]

(9) Let us suppose that  (9*) there is a demon that systematically deceives us

Although (8) and (9) are invitations to add a proposition ((8*) and (9*) respectively) to the common ground (what is accepted as true for the purpose of the conversation ), they are not assertions. The distinction between official and unofficial common grounds (Stokke 2013a , b , 2018 ) handles these cases effectively. Unofficial common grounds are ‘provisional’ common grounds that open up in order to store information that is used for some temporary conversational purpose; by contrast, official ones are, so to say, ‘permanent’ common grounds. ACS only captures proposals to add a proposition to the official, permanent common ground. This means that it correctly rules in assertions like (7) (since (7*) is meant to be stored in the official common ground) and correctly discards assumptions like (8) and suppositions like (9) (since (8*) and (9*) are stored in the unofficial , temporary common ground).

Although this distinction helps with assumptions and hypotheses, it seems unable to draw all the desired distinctions. Consider commands:

Here the distinction between official and unofficial common grounds is less helpful, because it is not clear how it applies to (6): without a systematic account of what qualifies as a contribution to the official common ground, the predictions of ACS in this sort of case are unclear. And if we attempt to extrapolate from ACS a criterion for dealing with these examples, it emerges that ACS struggles to make the required distinctions.

There are various ways to extrapolate a criterion from ACS. For the purpose of this paper, I will limit my discussion to a criterion that is explicitly defended by Stokke in his book ( 2018 ) (I pursue a more thorough analysis in Marsili 2020b ). Here he suggests that we can test whether a proposition has been added to the common ground (and therefore captured by ACS) by attending to whether it can be felicitously presupposed. Footnote 18 To verify whether uttering (6) adds (6*) to the common ground, for instance, one needs to verify whether (6*) can be felicitously presupposed after the speaker has uttered (6). To test this, imagine a conversation between three individuals: Adriano, Beppe, and Carmen. Adriano orders Beppe to steal a chicken by uttering (6), and then Carmen utters (10), which presupposes (6*):

(10) When you steal the chicken, you can use my cutters

For ACS to pass the test, there must be no circumstances in which (6*) can be felicitously presupposed as a result of Adriano’s command, because the possibility of felicitous presupposition would indicate that (6*) can enter the common ground as a result of Adriano’s utterance. Clearly, such circumstances are possible: whenever Beppe and Carmen take Adriano to have the authority to command (6), it is possible for Carmen to presuppose (6*) (that Beppe will steal the chicken) felicitously via (10). Footnote 19 This is a problem for ACS, because it means that Stokke’s assertion-based definition counts (6) as a lie whenever Adriano successfully commands (6) and believes (6*) to be false. Perhaps there is a way to revise ACS so that it avoids these predictions. Absent major revisions, however, Stokke’s current proposal is unable to acknowledge that commands cannot be lies. Footnote 20 For a definition that draws the right kinds of distinctions, it is better to look elsewhere.

3.4 Warranting as true

Carson ( 1988 , 2006 , 2010 , followed by Saul 2012 ) takes a different approach: he defines a lie as an insincere statement that you intend to warrant as true. In other words, he adopts the following assertion-condition:

(ACC) S intends to warrant the truth of p

Carson defines ‘warrant’ as follows: “if one warrants the truth of a statement, then one promises or guarantees, either explicitly or implicitly, that what one says is true” ( 2006 , p. 294). According to this view, every time a speaker asserts something, they also implicitly promise that what they say is true (cf. Hawley 2019 ).

As I will argue in the next section, drawing the right distinctions between speech acts that can and cannot be considered lies requires adopting a view along these lines—one that links the act of asserting to the acceptance of a distinctive kind of responsibility. Nonetheless, ACC is known to be vulnerable to counterexamples, such as proviso - lies (Fallis 2009 ; Arico and Fallis 2013 ): lies in which the speaker makes it explicit that they are not promising that what they say is true. Here is a (slightly revised) example from Arico and Fallis ( 2013 ):

Last night, after a particularly wild party, Chris found her swimming trophy broken. Today Chris is trying to figure out who broke her trophy. Chris says to Jamie, “So, somebody was in my room last night and broke my trophy. Did you see anything?”. Jamie clearly remembers that she was the one who broke Chris’s trophy. Since everyone knows that Mel is always breaking stuff, Jamie responds to Chris: (11): Yeah, um, Mel broke your trophy. (11’): But I was kinda drunk, and there were lots of people in there, so don’t take my word for it.

In this example, Jamie’s statement (11) is followed by a ‘proviso’, (11’). The proviso is meant to rectify the previous statement, and to clarify that Jamie does not intend to warrant that (11) is true. As a result, Jamie does not warrant that (11) is true, and Carson’s assertion-condition ACC is not met. Nevertheless, Jamie is clearly lying: this scenario is a counterexample to Carson’s definition.

Carson has since replied that, given that “warranting comes in degrees of strength, a moderately strong assurance of truth is all that is required for lying” ( 2010 , pp. 36–39): the proviso (11’) reduces the assurance of truth that comes with (11), but does not eliminate it. If this is right, (11–11’) does satisfy ACC. However, the problem with this reply is that it is inconsistent with Carson’s account of warrant (Fallis 2013 , pp. 347–348). Warrant is analysed as an implicit promise, and promises cannot be mitigated or downgraded. There is no sense in which they can give a “moderately strong” assurance of truth: either they guarantee that the speaker will do something, or they do not. To see this, consider the difference between adding a proviso to an assertion and adding a proviso to a promise:

I will wake up at 7AM tomorrow, but you know that I am really unreliable in the morning, so don’t take my word for it

# I promise that I will wake up at 7AM tomorrow, but you know that I am really unreliable in the morning, so don’t take my word for it

While (12a) is a mitigated assertion, (12b) is not a mitigated promise: it is not a promise at all. More generally, it seems that promising that p requires an outright (as opposed to “moderately strong”) assurance that p is true. Footnote 21 Pace to Carson, ACC fails to capture proviso - lies .

These difficulties could be resolved by amending the notion of warrant in a way that avoids the parallel with promises. But it should be clarified from the outset that avoiding the parallel with promises would represent more than an amendment of ACC, because Carson’s original contribution to the literature resides precisely in having constructed an analogy between the breach of trust involved in unfulfilled promises and the one involved in lying (elaborating on Ross 1930 ; Fried 1978 ). Without such an analogy, ACC would no longer draw the moral parallelism that motivates Carson’s overarching philosophical project. In the next section, I will present an alternative way to formulate the assertion condition, which also links assertion to a distinctive kind of responsibility, while avoiding the problematic analogy with promises. Footnote 22

4 Assertoric commitment

Before Carson, several authors have argued that asserting involves accepting some kind of responsibility for the truth of a proposition (Peirce CP 2.315, 5.29-31,543-547, MS 280.25-26, 517.42-44, 36.104-5; Searle 1969 , 1975 ; Brandom 1983 , 1994 ; Searle and Vanderveken 1985 ; Green 1999 , 2000 , 2007 , 2017 ; Alston 2000 ; MacFarlane 2003 , 2005 , 2011 , Rescorla 2009a , Krifka 2014 ; Tanesini 2016 , 2019 ). I have elsewhere developed (Marsili 2020b ) an account of assertion in terms of commitment that falls within this tradition. Simply put, my proposal is to define assertion in terms of the acquisition of this specific kind of commitment, and lying as an insincere assertion:

Definition of Assertion

A speaker S asserts that p iff:

S utters a sentence with content p

S thereby commits herself to p being the case

Definition of Lying

S lies iff S asserts that p insincerely

Some preliminary qualifications are needed. The first is that all conditions are taken to be satisfied intentionally by the speaker. This is common in speech act theoretic analyses (Searle 1969 ; Alston 2000 ; but cf. Alston 2000 , pp. 137–141), and it is especially uncontroversial for defining lying, as virtually every author agrees that there can be no such thing as unintentional lying. Footnote 23 The second is that the notion of ‘insincerity’ at play in the definition of lying is meant to be the one I advocated for in earlier work (Marsili 2014 ; 2018a , b , 2019 ): in standard cases, Footnote 24 I take a speaker to be insincere iff they take themselves to believe that what they are saying is more likely to be false than true. Footnote 25

Condition (b) does the lion’s share in the definition, and calls for some substantive elaboration. The notion of commitment is meant to capture the normative consequences of asserting something: it refers to a change in the speaker’s normative status that happens in virtue of the speaker’s act of asserting. While it has been pointed out in previous work that the notion of commitment could be helpfully put to work to define lying (Marsili 2014 , pp. 165–170, 2018a , b , pp. 178–179; Leland 2015 ; Viebahn 2019 ), I am not aware of any attempt to provide a systematic proposal in this sense. Building on previous work on assertion, I will try  to fill this gap by providing a fine-grained characterisation of what assertoric commitment is, and then proceed to show how this account of commitment can be put to work to draw the right distinctions about lying.

I take assertoric commitment to involve two distinct normative dimensions. The first dimension is what I call ‘accountability’. In making an assertion, the speaker becomes reproachable if the proposition turns out to be false (a point also highlighted in Carson’s analysis). An early formulation of this idea is found in Pierce: “an act of assertion […] renders [the speaker] liable to the penalties of the social law (or, at any rate, those of the moral law) in case [the asserted proposition] should not be true, unless he has a definite and sufficient excuse” (CP 2.315). Alston ( 2000 , p. 55) offers a more accurate definition of this distinctive kind of responsibility: a speaker accepts responsibility for p [being the case] iff the speaker “knowingly takes on the liability to (lay herself open to) blame (censure, reproach, being taken to task, being called to account), in case of not - p ”. Footnote 26 Arguably, accountability plays an important role in motivating communicators not to make false claims, ensuring that assertion maintains its role as a valuable tool for sharing and acquiring information (cf. Green 2007 , 2009 ).

In what follows, I will use the term ‘accountability’ to refer, more specifically, to the speaker’s prima facie Footnote 27 liability to be criticised if what they said turns out to be false. To verify if a given speaker is accountable for the propositional content of a given utterance, we need to ask ourselves: if that proposition turns out to be false, would the speaker be prima facie criticisable for the falsity of what they have said?

However, the deontic effects of assertions are not exhausted by the speaker’s liability to sanctions. By making an assertion, a speaker also becomes committed to act in certain ways, if the relevant conditions arise. More specifically, asserting something commits the speaker to make certain conversational steps, such as making statements that do not contradict their previous ones, or justifying their claims with adequate evidence, when they are challenged to do so (cf. Brandom 1983 , 1994 , pp. 172–175, MacFarlane 2003 , 2005b , pp. 227–229, 2011 ).

Let us call this second normative component discursive responsibility, since it has to do with the conversational moves that a speaker is expected to make in the context of a rational discourse. Discursive responsibility has been modelled in different ways and within different theoretical frameworks (Toulmin 1958 ; Hamblin 1970a , b , chap. 8; Brandom 1983 , 1994 , pp. 172–175; MacFarlane 2003 , 2005b , pp. 227–229, 2011 ). Within this literature, authors tend to agree that you are responsible to defend your claims (e.g. by providing evidence in their support) if appropriately challenged (or else take it back). To ‘challenge’ an assertion, in this sense, is to perform a speech act (typically a question Footnote 28 ) that disputes the veracity of the speaker’s claim, such as ‘How do you know that?’, or ‘Is that true?”. In turn, a challenge to p is ‘appropriate’ only if it is not already a settled issue in the conversation that p is true. Footnote 29 I will come back on these notions and distinctions in the next section, as I discuss some examples of conversational challenges.

Since making an assertion inevitably involves undertaking both accountability and discursive responsibility, assertoric commitment is best characterised as the conjunction of both normative effects. You are committed to a proposition if you are prima facie liable to be criticised in case the proposition is false, and prima facie expected to back up your claim in response to appropriate challenges (or else take it back). In sum:

Assertoric commitment

S is (assertorically) committed to p being the case iff

S is ‘accountable’ for p

S is ‘discursively responsible’ for p.

In light of this characterisation, the commitment-based definition of lying presented at the beginning of this chapter can now be expounded, to display more clearly which conditions need to be satisfied for a speech act to count as a lie:

Commitment-based Definition of Lying

In virtue of doing (a), S is accountable and discursively responsible for p

S’s utterance is insincere

5 Drawing the right distinctions

The commitment-based definition of lying meets the desiderata that have been identified so far. First, it differentiates between lies and other statements whose content is believed to be false but that are not lies, such as ironic and metaphoric utterances. This is because ‘accountability’ clearly does not obtain in these cases: it would be patently inappropriate, for instance, to criticise an ironic or metaphoric utterance on the grounds that its literal content is false.

Second, unlike Carson’s ACC, the proposed definition correctly identifies proviso-lies as genuine lies. While the notion of warrant cannot admit of degrees (because warranting is understood as an implicit promise), the notion of commitment can. The possibility of strengthening or diminishing the speaker’s degree of commitment to a proposition is widely acknowledged and discussed in the speech act theoretic literature (Searle 1976 , p. 5; Holmes 1984 ; Searle and Vanderveken 1985 , pp. 98–99; Coates 1987 , p. 112; Sbisà 2001 , pp. 1805–1806; Simons 2007 ; Thaler 2012 ; Marsili 2014 , pp. 165–170), Footnote 30 and plays an important role in explaining the relations of ‘illocutionary entailment’ between different speech acts (Searle and Vanderveken 1985 , pp. 130-131). For instance, most authors who employ the notion of commitment agree that by choosing to use the performative ‘swear’ in (13a) (instead of plainly asserting (13)) the speaker (call her Peppa) reinforces her commitment to the proposition (13*), whereas in choosing the performative ‘conjecture’ in (13b) she removes such commitment.

(13) Emma was drunk last night

(13a) I swear that           (13*) Emma was drunk last night

(13b) I conjecture that   (13*) Emma was drunk last night

Since swearing (as in 13a) involves a stronger commitment than asserting (as in 13), its utterance is said to ‘illocutionarily entail’ the performance of an assertion, meaning that it cannot be performed without also asserting that (13*) is true. By contrast, the speaker of (13b) is merely making a conjecture, which does not commit her to the truth of (13*): (13b) is not an assertion (Searle and Vanderveken 1985 , pp. 129–130; cf. Marsili 2015 , pp. 124–125, 2016 , pp. 277–278).

The test for discursive responsibility draws the right distinctions here. If we were to challenge (13b) with questions like “How do you know?” or “Is that true?”, Peppa would not be expected to provide evidence that (13*) is actually true. She could appropriately reply: “I don’t know, I just made a conjecture”. Footnote 31 Contrast this with Peppa’s sworn statement (13a): the same questions (“How do you know?”, etc.), when raised in response to (13a), would indeed generate an expectation that Peppa defend her claim (e.g. “I saw her stumbling around and slurring her words”). In this case, unlike with her conjecture, Peppa is discursively responsible for the truth of (13*).

This shows that commitment can be reinforced (as in the sworn statement (13a)) or removed (as in the conjecture (13b)), but not yet that it can be mitigated while still asserting, which is what we need to show in order to prove that the definition can capture proviso lies. Cases of this sort are not uncommon, and typically emerge from the use of some modifiers, such as evidentials or epistemic modals. For example, suppose Peppa says:

Apparently     (13*) Emma was drunk last night

With (13c), Peppa undertakes responsibility for the truth of what she has said—although less responsibility than she would have undertaken, had she uttered the unguarded assertion (13*) instead (see e.g. Caffi 1999 ; Sbisà 2001 , 2014 ). This is intuitive, but we can be more precise. In which sense is Peppa accepting ‘less responsibility’ in making the mitigated assertion (13c) in lieu of (13)? To answer this question, let us consider each component of commitment in turn.

Accountability has to do with the social sanctions faced by the speaker if the proposition turns out to be false. Clearly, these sanctions can be more or less severe; the claim here is that mitigated assertions warrant less severe sanctions. This much is uncontroversial: any competent speaker knows that, ceteris paribus, an unguarded statement like (13) warrants more severe criticisms than a guarded statement like (13c), if (13*) turns out to be false. In fact, it is often to diminish their liability to criticisms that speakers prefer using a mitigated assertion over an unguarded one (cf. Holmes 1984 ; Fraser 2010 ).

A similar point applies to discursive responsibility. Speakers can be required to substantiate their claims with adequate evidence, but mitigation devices can affect which kind (and amount) of evidence counts as adequate . Evidentials such as ‘apparently’ can set the epistemic bar of adequacy to a lower standard of evidence (Sbisà 2014 ). In fact, it is natural to use a guarded assertion like (13c) instead more direct ones like (13) when one has some evidence in support of what they say, but not quite enough to license a direct assertion.

This should clarify in which sense accountability and discursive responsibility are mitigated in (13c): (13c) licenses less severe sanctions than (13), and binds the speaker to a less demanding standard of evidence. The same is not true of the conjecture (13b), where neither condition is satisfied: it would be unfair to criticise Peppa for saying (13b) in case (13*) turns out to be false, or to demand her to provide evidence in support of the truth of her conjecture.

Back to proviso-lies, the reason why they do not pose a threat to the commitment-based definition is that they behave like mitigated assertions (and unlike conjectures). In (11b) both accountability and discursive responsibility are met, although to a lesser extent:

Mel broke your trophy. But I was kinda drunk, and there were lots of people in there, so don’t take my word for it

By uttering (11b), Jamie signals that he is not willing to accept full responsibility for the proposition being true. Like the mitigated assertion (13c), and unlike the conjecture (13b), it is appropriate to inquire about the epistemic grounds for Jamie’s assertion (What evidence does he have to support the claim that Mel broke the trophy? Does he remember seeing him?). However, given the qualification added by Jaime, we will be satisfied with non-conclusive evidence in favour of the claim (e.g. he remembers seeing him , but cannot be sure). That said, the expectation that Jaime defend his claim is nonetheless clearly present: it would be inappropriate for Jaime to simply reply: “I don’t see why you’re asking these questions, I never claimed that Mel broke the trophy”. A reply of this kind would be appropriate, by contrast, if Jaime had simply made a conjecture, as in (13b). Similarly, it would be appropriate to reproach Jamie if the assertion turns out to be false (we may say: ‘You shouldn’t have accused Mel!’), although we would not be entitled to the same sort of reactive attitudes than an unguarded assertion would have warranted (after all, he invited us not to take his word for it). Like for (13c), both ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’ are mitigated, but satisfied. This shows that, unlike Carson’s ACC, the proposed definition counts proviso-lies as mitigated assertions (and therefore as lies). Footnote 32

Lastly, the commitment-based definition seems able to draw the right distinctions about explicit performatives. Since betting and swearing were discussed above (13a, 13b), we only need to consider the following cases:

(8*) I can lift weights with my mind […]

(9*) there is a demon that systematically deceives us

The predictions of the commitment-based definition are rather straightforward here. By asserting or promising that p in (1–2), the speaker becomes accountable and discursively responsibile for their content, namely (1*–2*), so that these utterances are counted as lies when they are uttered insincerely. On the other hand, by uttering (5), (6), (8) and (9) the speaker does not become committed to the corresponding propositions (5*), (6*), (8*) and (9*), so that these utterances cannot be classified as lies by the definition. For instance, in response to (8) it would be inappropriate to reproach the speaker if it turns out that she has not telekinetic powers, or to challenge the speaker by asking “How do you know that you have these powers?”. It is apparent that the same tests are passed by all the other explicit performatives that cannot be lies (namely (4), (6), and (9)).

It could be objected that it is not clear that in promising (2) the speaker becomes assertorically committed to (2*), as I have claimed above. Promissory commitment and assertoric commitment differ in important respects: promising involves being responsible for making something true, while asserting involves being responsible for something being true (Watson 2004 ). Perhaps (2) commits the speaker to (2*) ‘promissorily’, but not ‘assertorically’. The test for discursive responsibility seems to corroborate this hypothesis: asking “How do you know?” or “What makes you think that?” in response to (2) is simply inappropriate, and it does not seem that one would be expected to support their claim with evidence in response to this sort of challenges.

Although I agree that there is more to promissory commitment than just assertoric commitment, this does not mean that the former is incompatible with the latter. Within the speech-act theoretic framework that I am adopting (Searle and Vanderveken 1985 , p. 184), the relation between promissory and assertoric responsibility can be explained in terms of the notion of ‘illocutionary entailment’ introduced earlier. The underlying idea is that, if I promise that (2*) (“I will wear a blue dress at the wedding”), I am also thereby claiming that it will be true, at time of the wedding, that I will wear a blue dress: whenever promissory responsibilities arise, assertoric ones have to arise too. Footnote 33 At closer inspection, this objection is rather based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes discursive responsibility in (2).

Recall (§ 4 ) that discursive responsibility only requires the speaker to answer appropriate challenges (cf. MacFarlane 2005b ). Challenges are not appropriate (in the relevant sense) if they are infelicitous for reasons that have obviously nothing to do with the force of the original utterance. A typical example is when a challenge is infelicitous because the answer is already common knowledge in the conversation. If I claim “My tooth hurts”, it would be inappropriate to challenge my claim by asking me “How do you know?”, because it is already obvious how I know that my tooth hurts—but this clearly should not be taken as evidence that my utterance is not an assertion. Similarly, since whether I wear a blue dress at the wedding will depend primarily on my decisions, asking “How do you know?” in response to (2) would not be an appropriate challenge. In both cases, the challenge is inappropriate , because it is obvious that the challenger already knows the answer to the question, so that considering its availability is irrelevant to determining whether the speaker is committed to the proposition. Footnote 34

How should we test for discursive responsibility in these cases? Since in these contexts the speaker’s reasons for believing (2*) are already common ground, we should consider challenges that put into question the veracity of the utterance more directly: for example, “Is that true?”, “Does it really [hurt]?”, or “Will you really [bring a blue dress]?”. Just like ‘How do you know’ challenges, these questions are appropriate only when the speaker is assertorically committed to the relevant proposition, so that they still constitute a reliable test for discursive responsibility. And these questions are clearly available in response to (2), showing that also in this case the speaker is bound by the relevant discursive obligations. In addition to this, in (2) ‘accountability’ clearly obtains: if I eventually wear a red dress to the wedding, I can be criticised for (2*) being false, and appropriately so. The right verdict is thus given also in the case of insincere promises.

It seems that the proposed account avoids all the counterexamples that affect other views. Unlike the other definitions considered so far, it deals correctly with a wide range of performative utterances, distinguishing speech acts that can be used to lie from speech acts that cannot. It captures not only standard assertions, but also assertions uttered by means of explicit performatives (e.g. ‘I hereby assert that p ’) and explicit performatives that illocutionary entail an assertion, such as acts of promising or swearing. It is able to rule out illocutionary acts that are not assertions, including speech acts belonging to the class of assertives (like bets, conjectures, and suppositions), and directives (like commands, advice, and suppositions). The proposed definition brings together two philosophical traditions that analyse (respectively) assertion in terms of accountability and discursive responsibility, to deliver a fine-grained account of the distinctive responsibilities that emerge in virtue of asserting a given proposition, improving on previous attempts to characterise the distinctive responsibilities that all liars undertake. Due to its intensional accuracy, it provides a potentially insightful analysis of two concepts (assertion and lying) that are central to many contemporary philosophical inquiries in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.

Condition (a) can be formulated in slightly different ways: some authors phrase it as “S says that p” (e.g. Saul 2012 ; Stokke 2013a ), others as “S states that p” (e.g. Chisholm and Feehan 1977 ; Mahon 2015 ). I adopted this formulation because it is neutral about the semantics of performative utterances, a topic discussed at length in the next section (§2.1). Different formulations aside, condition (a) tracks the requirement that a locutionary act with content p must be performed, as opposed to the requirement (set by condition (d), cf. p. 3) that a specific illocutionary act (i.e. assertion) is performed. My phrasing of (a) is not meant to rule out subsentences (“For you!” indicating a letter) and elliptical signs (nodding in response to a question); I am leaving aside these complications merely for ease of exposition, as it is customary in the literature.

This label was first introduced by Stokke ( 2013a ). Proponents of this view include Carson ( 2006 , 2010 ); Sorensen ( 2007 , 2010 ); Fallis ( 2009 , 2012 , 2013 ); Stokke ( 2013a , 2018 ).

Carson ( 2006 , 2010 ) and Saul ( 2012 ) suggest that a further condition might be required, namely that the asserted proposition be actually false—but neither commits to this further requirement (for compelling empirical reasons not to include this condition, see Wiegmann et al. 2016 ). Also, different authors take (d) to have different significance. Some (e.g. Chisholm and Feehan 1977 , p. 142; Fallis 2009 , p. 33; Meibauer 2014 ) take their proposed phrasing of (d) to be a definition of assertion. Others do not wish to “[commit themselves] to a view of the final analysis of the phenomenon of assertion” (Stokke 2013a , b , p. 46, cf. Carson 2006 , p. 300).

The label ‘hybrid’ is mine. Defenders of this view include Simpson ( 1992 ); Mannison ( 1969 ); Chisholm and Feehan ( 1977 ); Kupfer ( 1982 ); Newey ( 1997 ); Williams ( 2002 ); Meibauer ( 2005 , 2014 ); Faulkner ( 2007 , 2013 ). Many of these authors are motivated to endorse both (c) and (d) by Gricean considerations about the nature of communicative acts and testimony (cf. fn 10).

In what follows, my discussion will inevitably be limited to a few examples, since it is practically impossible to discuss every performative verb of the English language. The chosen linguistic sample, however, is significant: my token utterances are representative of classes of speech acts (assertives, commissives, directives) on which we have straightforward intuitions. I will not consider other classes, such as declarations and expressives , because I do not take our intuitions about them to be straightforward enough to establish whether a given definition should count them as lies or not.

For experimental evidence that ordinary speakers overwhelmingly classify insincere promises like (2) as lies, and a more general defence of the view that you can lie by promising, see Marsili ( 2016 ). Relatedly, authors like Ross ( 1930 ), Fried ( 1978 ) and Carson ( 2006 , 2010 ) take all lying to involve the breach of an implicit promise to tell the truth; on this view, “every lie is a broken promise” (Fried 1978 , p. 67).

Descriptivism is advocated by Hedenius ( 1963 ); Lewis ( 1970 ); Bach ( 1975 ); Ginet ( 1979 ); Bach and Harnish ( 1979 ).

According to descriptivism, performative utterances can at most be ‘misleading’. Descriptivists will concede that with (3) the speaker can perform an indirect speech act with content (3*) (Bach and Harnish 1979 , p. 208). On this view, (3) can be used to imply that the speaker saw the defendant at the crime scene, but not to directly claim it – so that (3) is at most deceptive or misleading. I discuss at length the implications of descriptivism for the lying/misleading distinction in Marsili ( 2016 , pp. 275–278). For more on the distinction and its importance, see e.g. Adler ( 1997 ), Saul ( 2012 ), Stokke ( 2013b ), Berstler ( 2019 ).

In a recent paper, Viebahn ( 2019 ) has argued that one can lie by presuppositions. If this is right, insofar as any speech act can trigger a presupposition, any speech act can be used for lying: e.g. (5) could be a lie if the speaker knows that there is no quiche that the hearer can try. Viebahn’s view can be disputed, but I do not wish to enter the debate on presuppositional lying here. If one is moved by Viebahn’s arguments, my claim should be read as follows: that (4), (5), (6) cannot be used to lie about their content (4*), (5*) and (6*), and that a good definition of lying should predict so. For the sake of simplicity, I will assume this conditional qualification to be implicit throughout the paper.

Another ‘semantic’ strategy would be to argue that (4, 5, 6) cannot meet condition (b) because they do not possess truth-evaluable content. However, parallel problems apply. While some linguists have in fact challenged (in one way or another) the idea that every speech act possesses truth-evaluable content, what is needed here is a theory that both excludes (4, 5, 6) and includes (1, 2, 3). Proving that such a theory of content cannot be developed goes beyond the ambitions of this paper, but there are at least two reasons to suspect that this solution is not viable. First, despite the vast literature on explicit performatives, no theory that draws these distinctions has been defended before (see Recanati 2013 for an overview). Second, a plausible theory should employ either syntactic features or direction of fit to set apart performative sentences that have truth-evaluable content from those who don’t, but neither of these features can be used to set apart the two groups of sentences under consideration (1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6) (see fn 20 for an example).

Matters are slightly more complex for ‘Gricean’ hybrid views, according to which a speaker S asserts that p iff S intends her audience A to accept that p at least partly on the basis of the fact that A recognises S’s intention to make A accept that p (endorsed, slightly amended, by Meibauer 2005 , 2014; Faulkner 2007 , 2013 ). Here the deception condition (c) and the assertion condition (d) impose virtually the same constraint. I will not discuss these views here because they have already been criticised at length elsewhere (e.g. Fallis 2010 , 2018 ), but it is worth noting that (beyond known counterexamples) they will have trouble accommodating the examples discussed in § 3.2 (bets, conjectures and suppositions) and in § 3.4 (proviso-lies).

The recurring acronym “AC” will be meant to remind the reader that, for each view, I am reporting the'assertion condition' (d) rather than the whole definition, which includes also (a) and (b).

I will not discuss Fallis’ ( 2009 ) proposal: it has been shown to be incorrect, because it counts most ironical utterances as lies (Stokke 2013a , b ), and was rejected by Fallis himself ( 2012 ).

Fallis ( 2012 ) never presents conditions (a)–(b)–(d) separately, but rather packs them together in a single sentence. Nonetheless, he is committed to ACF1 being a necessary condition for lying in addition to (a) and (b). For ease of exposition, I will ignore this complication.

Although it would be a natural move, note that we cannot interpret ACF1 as appealing to Gricean communicative intentions. Gricean communication requires (broadly) that the speaker intends to make the audience believe what they say; pairing this requirement with the insincerity condition (b) amounts to reintroducing an intention to deceive condition (c). Since Fallis’ project is to provide an alternative to deceptionism, this interpretation is not available. Furthermore, since Gricean definitions have been defended elsewhere (see fn 12), interpreted in this way ACF1 would no longer represent an original proposal. To be sure: another, more modestly ‘Gricean’ reading (according to which ‘communicating’ means ‘expressing a belief’) could work for ACF1; I discuss it in § 2.3 .

Remember that what is at stake here is whether the speaker would be lying about (4*), not about (4). As we saw in (§ 2.1 ), accepting the opposite view, according to which the proposition to be evaluated is rather (4) (descriptivism), would force us to conclude that no performative utterance can be a lie. This is incorrect: a good definition must acknowledge that (among others) explicit assertions, sworn statements and promises can be lies.

Note, further, that whether this intention is successful is irrelevant to whether ACF2 is satisfied.

A felicitous presupposition is one that does not elicit “the kinds of repair strategy that are typically prompted by unfamiliar presuppositions”. Stokke ( 2018 , p. 66), a identifies two repair strategies: accommodation (as defined by Lewis 1979 ), and ‘questions and rejections’—that is, (appropriate) replies of the form: “What are you talking about?”; “What makes you think p ?” or “I never said p ”.

To be sure, further conditions have to obtain for (6*) to be felicitously presupposed; for instance, it should be common knowledge that stealing the chicken is physically possible. Listing them would lead us astray and is unnecessary. As long as it is possible for these further conditions to obtain, the point stands: there are situations in which (6*) can be felicitously presupposed.

A referee points out that, since the embedded that-clause (6*) could be rewritten as an infinitive to-clause (I command you to steal that chicken ), it could be argued that (6) has no truth-evaluable content: “to steal that chicken” is not truth-apt, and therefore cannot be believed to be false. If this is right, (6) is ruled out by every definition. I offer a response to this sort of worries in Marsili ( 2020a ). Simply put, as anticipated in footnote 9, this manoeuvre would prove too much: also “I promise/swear/guarantee THAT ƒ” can be translated into “I promise/swear/guarantee TO ƒ”, but we want to be able to count these utterances as lies. Appealing to accounts à la Portner ( 2004 ), which differentiate between the speech acts that update the common ground and those that update to-do-lists (cf. Roberts 2012 ), will not help for similar reasons: both promises and commands, on this view, update to-do-lists rather than the common ground.

Here’s a more precise way to put the same point: the force of promises cannot be mitigated. Content-mitigation (‘bushes’, in Caffi's 1999 terminology), by contrast, is possible in promises: the content of “I promise that [ I will p ]” can be mitigated into “I promise that [ if q, I will p ] and (for some but not all p s) [I promise that I will p a little ]; cf. Holton ( 2008 ). But the possibility of content-mitigation is irrelevant to our discussion: proviso-lies are puzzling precisely because they involve the mitigation of the force of the utterance, not its content .

To be sure: accounts in terms of commitment like the one that I am about propose are in a very important sense in agreement with Carson’s view. Crucially, they share the idea that lying requires the assumption of a distinctive kind of responsibility. But it is equally important that they take a different stance on which kind of responsibility is involved. Note, further, that it would be incorrect to regard commitment-based proposals as mere refinements of Carson’s view: commitment-based analyses of assertion represent a rich, independent tradition, whose roots go back Peirce’s writings, penned at the beginning of the XXth century, long before Carson proposed his alternative view in terms of warrant and promises.

This requirement has the advantage of ruling out cases of misspeaking (Sorensen 2011 ) and may help to deal with some other puzzling cases (cf. Pepp 2018 ). Note that if philosophers are wrong, and there can be as unintentional lying, it does not follow that my definition is wrong: it just follows that some lies and assertions fall out of my envisaged explanandum. For theoretical and empirical support for the claim that unintentional lies are not lies, cf. discussion of the confused politician example in Carson ( 2006 , p. 296) and Arico and Fallis ( 2013 ).

By ‘non-standard’ cases I mean promises like (2), and more generally assertoric speech acts about one’s future actions. In Marsili ( 2016 ) I argued (on both theoretical and empirical grounds) that a promisor can be insincere (and lie) if she intends not to fulfil her promise, even if she believes that she will end up fulfilling it against her will (for instance: S promises not to ƒ, intends to ƒ at all costs, but believes that she will almost surely fail to ƒ). We need not dwell on these complications here, but the interested reader can find a definition of insincerity that makes justice to both standard and non-standard cases in Marsili ( 2016 , 2017 , pp. 148–151).

A final and perhaps less urgent qualification is that in this paper I will leave aside the issue of whether (a) needs to be expanded. While the formulation that I adopt is quite standard, it rules out presuppositional lies (Viebahn 2019 ) and non-literal lies (Viebahn 2017 ), and it may rule out non-declarative lies (Viebahn et al. 2018 ), depending on how the notion of ‘content’ is construed. If one is moved by some (or all) the examples presented by Viebahn, condition (a) can be expanded as required. For some further qualifications about (a), see my footnote 1.

Alston reviews different accounts of taking responsibility for the truth of a proposition (in his terminology, “R’ing”), eventually landing on a different view that, unlike the one quoted in the main text, entails that it is only permissible to assert p if p is true (cf. Alston 2000 , pp. 54–64). This requirement, also endorsed by “truth-norms” of assertion (Weiner 2005 ; Whiting 2012 ) and, indirectly, by “knowledge-norms” of assertion (Williamson 1996 ), is one that my notion of ‘accountability’ carefully avoids (for reasons discussed in Marsili 2018a ). Accountability, as I define it here, only has to do with downstream normativity (the normative effects of asserting p ), which is to be distinguished from (the related, but distinct notion of) upstream normativity (whether you are entitled to assert that p—i.e. the kind of normativity invoked by ‘norms of assertion’ ). For more on the irreducibility of these notions to one another, cf. Rescorla ( 2009a ) and MacFarlane ( 2011 ).

The “prima facie” qualification is meant to specify that falsity only determines a defeasible right to criticise the speaker. As noted by Peirce (see above), a speaker can be excusable for asserting something false: for instance, if their false claim was uttered under coercion, or if they had excellent reasons to think that what they said was true. Of course, if I excuse someone for not ƒ-ing, I am still presupposing that that person was responsible for ƒ-ing in the first place. This complicates matters: when excuses apply, responsibility for ƒ-ing and criticisability for not ƒ-ing can come apart, so that we cannot determine if the speaker is responsible for ƒ-ing just by considering whether she is criticisable for not ƒ-ing. The notion of prima facie accountability allows us to overcome this difficulty by pushing excuses out of the picture: this helpful notion captures both the cases in which the speaker is actually criticisable for saying something false, and the cases in which such criticism would be warranted, if it hadn’t been defeated by extenuating circumstances. Thanks to this qualification, we can define assertoric accountability in terms of one's (actual or counterfactual) criticisability for the falsity of a proposition.

Authors like Brandom adopt a narrower view: challenges can only be assertions that are incompatible with what the speaker said ( 1994 , p. 178, 238, Wanderer 2010 ). I take Brandom’s view to be unduly restrictive (cf. Toulmin 1958 ; Rescher 1977 , pp. 9–11; Rescorla 2009a ), as it seems to me that questions are a paradigmatic example of challenges to the veracity of someone else’s assertion.

Or, at least, if the speaker hasn’t already done all that she could to prove that p is true. In argumentation theory there is considerable disagreement as to what makes a challenge legitimate, and it would be overambitious for this paper to attempt to settle the issue once and for all; for further refinements, I defer to the relevant literature (see e.g. Rescorla 2009b ).

To be sure, there are many accounts of commitment on the market, and some authors (like Geurts 2019 ) adopt a different, binary conception that does not admit of degrees. Clearly, this alternative conception will not do for our purposes.

At most, we may expect Peppa to explain why she made the conjecture, but this clearly falls short of expecting her to provide evidence that (13) is true, which is what discursive responsibility requires. After all, questions like “ Why did you [performative verb] that p?” can be appropriately asked in response to virtually any speech act. Their availability is irrelevant to determining whether the speaker is committed (assertorically) to p : only the availability of challenges to the veracity of p reliably indicates that the speaker is discursively responsible for p. For more on the appropriateness of challenges to assertions, conjectures, and other assertive speech acts, see Green ( 2017 , §2).

A referee points out that proviso-lies like (11) do not invite belief in their unmitigated content (Mel broke your trophy), and asks whether this is compatible with generating a commitment towards that content. My answer is positive. Simply put, the proviso at most prevents the realisation of a perlocutionary effect (making the hearer believe that p), which is logically (and pragmatically) compatible with bringing about an illocutionary one (committing yourself to p). Assertors typically intend to achieve the perlocutionary goal of convincing the hearer (usually, we aim to convince our interlocutors), but they can make assertions even if they do not have this intention (Davis 1999 ; Alston 2000 ; Green 2007 ; Sorensen 2007 ; MacFarlane 2011 ). If this is right, explicitly denying that you have a perlocutionary intention (“you don’t have to believe me”, “don’t take my word for it") does not prevent you from bringing about your assertion’s illocutionary effect (committing yourself to p ). For a discussion of some other species of provisos that threaten my view more directly, in particular in response to Rudy Hiller's examples ( 2016 , pp. 38–51), see Marsili ( 2020b ).

I defend this claim in more detail in Marsili ( 2016 , pp. 277–278).

Although this explanation will do for our present purposes, a further clarification may be of interest. In Marsili ( 2018b ) I consider these issues in more depth, and distinguish between a challenge being inappropriate (which depends on whether the answer to the challenge is already in the common ground) and illegitimate (which depends on whether the speaker was committed to p in the first place). Only when a challenge is ‘illegitimate’ we have evidence that the speaker is not discursively responsible for p. Of course, challenges to promises like (2) are only ‘inappropriate’ in this sense, whereas challenges to non-assertoric acts like (6) or (8) are genuinely ‘illegitimate’.

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Marsili, N. Lying, speech acts, and commitment. Synthese 199 , 3245–3269 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02933-4

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