Considering the ethics of truth telling

In response to last week's column, a regular reader of my column emailed me to note that President Obama made statements that were not true with respect to the proposed Affordable Care Act, among them statements that suggested that if folks liked their current health insurance, they could keep it. The reader is right about that.

It was not clear whether President Obama was ignorant about what the impact of the proposed legislation would be or if he knew what it would be and simply flat out lied about it. Neither spin on what he said is particularly flattering to him. Many, myself included, had diminished respect for him because of the misleading statements that he made.

With rare exception, all of us have had the experience of being lied to. I know no one who has liked this experience. On the other hand, I know many people who have been angered and deeply hurt by the experience of being lied to.

But is it always wrong to tell a lie? In an essay entitled "On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives," the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that lying is inherently immoral and there are no conceivable circumstances in which telling a lie is morally justifiable – not even to a murderer at the door asking for the where abouts of an intended victim. I use this example in my ethics classes, putting it in a contemporary format in which a guy with a gun knocks at the door and asks if the student's younger brother, who is in the family room downstairs watching television, is home. The guy with the gun states that the younger brother has not paid back money he was lent and "I am here to shoot him."

I ask my students to raise their hand if they would lie to the guy with the gun, telling him that the younger brother had left that morning to go to Chicago to get tickets for the Cubs home opener. With rare exception, they all raise their hands.

(The one exception was a student who didn't raise her hand. When I asked her if that meant that she wouldn't lie to the guy at the door with the gun, she responded, "That would depend on how I happened to feel about my brother that day.")

The Scottish philosopher W.D. Ross (1877-1971) had a solution to this problem. He suggested that we often have competing prima facie (literally "first look") obligations and have to establish priorities among them. In the case of the gunman at the door, we have an obligation to tell the truth. However, we also have an obligation to protect our family members, which is the stronger obligation and takes priority over our obligation to tell the truth.

In short, it is arguable that in some situations, telling a lie might be the lesser of evils. But does that mean that it is just fine to lie with abandon whenever it would be advantageous to us to tell a lie? Not at all. It is only to suggest that in limited circumstances, lying might be the lesser of evils.

Unfortunately, in our ethically challenged society today, politicians and many others lie with abandon whenever they think that it is to their advantage to do so. This includes the members of Congress who voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill but are claiming credit for the benefits of this particular piece of legislation that accrue to their districts. Hypocrisy, it is worth noting, is a form of lying.

It is a sad state of affairs when people say, "Your candidate tells more lies than my candidate does." But that is where we seem to be today.

In a book published nearly 50 years ago entitled "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life," Sissela Bok observes, "Political lies, so often assumed to be trivial by those who tell them, rarely are ... When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily."

Unfortunately, she is right about that.

Dan Lee, a regular columnist, is the Marian Taft Cannon Professor in the Humanities at Augustana; danlee@ augustana.edu.