Episode #248 ... What philosophers say about lying.

Introduction to Lying

0:00Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophco writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today. So as you no doubt noticed when you saw the title of this podcast, there's going to be an episode about the philosophy of lying. What were the thoughts of some of the greatest philosophers who have ever lived about lying? And what are their thoughts on whether it's a good thing for people to do or not? Now, for some people, this may seem like there's a really obvious answer to it. Why even talk about any of this stuff? But I think this is a good example of something where philosophy

0:31can deepen the way that you see the world by taking a minute to look at some of the less common sense ways of thinking about it. So I think it's worth noting here at the very start of this, a fairly typical way that people like to think about lying. There's no doubt going to be plenty of people listening to this that assume a few different things about it. That what a lie is, is when somebody knowingly makes a false statement trying to deceive someone else. That lying is deeply wrong at its core. That I live my life 99.9% of the time not telling lies like this. And that as a general principle, living in alignment

1:01with the truth about the world is clearly superior to having a view of anything that's based on stuff that is false. I mean, what kind of person would you have to be to not want to be living in the truth? This person might ask. And these may seem like very reasonable assumptions to make about how we go through life. But again, I want to start this episode by using the work of some philosophers to introduce a healthy level of doubt, even a joyous level of doubt into these otherwise very common ways of looking at things. And the first thing that needs to be questioned, I think, is this idea that the truth is something that is always superior to a falsehood in every situation. Is that something that most people actually believe in when they

Nietzsche on Truth

1:36say it? Well, of all people, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche actually talks about this idea at multiple points throughout his work. The way he sees it, this is one of those idols that he smashes from the history of Western philosophy. He says that philosophers have essentially always done their work, just assuming that better human thought is always going to be centered around getting closer and closer to the truth. But he points out how, even if you just think about that statement a little bit, the fact that a belief is false is not automatically an argument against it. That there's tons of things that are false, that are necessary for us to organize our

2:07lives. Tons of things that aren't true, and yet we deeply enjoy them. Point is, there's plenty of situations where we'd absolutely rather be living in a useful fiction than in the cold, hard truth, no matter what it could possibly be. Some examples of this. How about the idea that there is a stable, unified self that is you, that you have privileged access to and control over? I mean, every layer of what I just said there becomes impossible to truly verify, and yet to question these sorts of things on a moment-to-moment basis, when you're buying food at the store, when you're asking for a

2:38raise at work. This would be a ridiculous place for most people to live their life in, because behaving as though this is true about our identity makes a lot of what we do even possible. It's a useful fiction, you could say. But how about the artwork you like to take in on a given day, where maybe you watch a movie, and for two hours of your day, you're thinking about something that at one level is completely made up, and yet sometimes these are the things that are the most meaningful to us when it comes to actually living. You know, something like a song can help shape a person's entire future sometimes. How about the useful fiction? That tomorrow's going to be a better day. Do you really

3:11know that to be true? Or that tomorrow's action is going to redeem you for today's action. The placebo effect comes to mind here as an example. See, a key question that should come up in anyone's mind who thinks that human thought should just be nothing but the truth is what if the truth in a particular moment was something that, in practice, was going to completely destroy any desire you had to participate in anything heading into the future? What you immediately see, Nietzsche thinks, is that truth clearly does matter to us, but it's not the only thing we're considering as human beings. And while certainly it might make it easier for some

3:43people to have this ideal of truth in their thinking, it might make it feel simpler for them to have a blanket policy like that. But the interesting fact to Nietzsche is that there's so many cases where we actually live where it's based on interpretations of things, appearances, stories. The fact is we sometimes arrange the way we see the world with things that may not be literally true, but nonetheless these are things that make life feel possible, or a firm life is something that's worth continuing. This is his point. And while the truth may directly align with that cause most of the time, to turn most of the time into some bizarre conviction you have towards the

4:16truth, no matter what the cost of it is. Well, to Nietzsche, he thought this is a hangover relic from older religious ways of thinking that turns the truth into an ideal where we renounce the complexity of a human life in service to it. You don't always want the absolute truth 100% of the time. And that's maybe the first thing we need to question about that set of assumptions we began the episode with. Now the second, again, joyous piece of doubt about those that I want to bring

Defining a Lie

4:42in here, is the idea that the definition of a lie is just when somebody knowingly makes a false statement in an attempt to try to deceive someone else. Not a good enough description for what we're talking about here today. So for anyone interested, there's an absolutely fantastic article on lying that you can find in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where in this article, they break down just how incomplete your picture of lying would be if you only thought about it in this way. Because sure, some people are knowingly saying things that are false when they lie. But then there's plenty of lies out there. When somebody says something where they think they're

5:14lying, but then what they said happens to end up being true. The thing is, this isn't a person knowingly making a false statement anymore. This is them unknowingly making a true statement, where nobody was actually misled because of it consequentially. But yet it's still a lie. More than that, though, consider the fact that there are times when, for example, somebody is asked to describe what happened in a situation. And in their response, nothing but the truth ever leaves their mouth. I mean, in their response, they give partial descriptions of things that are all technically true. And yet the entire point of everything they just said was to mislead the

5:46other person who was asking the question. This is also a kind of lie. There's bald face lies, as they're called, usually in politics, where the expectation is someone says this kind of lie is that nobody's going to believe this thing I'm saying anyway. It's not really the point of me lying here. And yet even when the intent isn't to mislead anyone, the lie still serves a greater function as it becomes something that people repeat over and over. How about the kind of lies that function simply like a bluff? You know, the kind of thing that goes on in a poker game or in business or in war, where everyone involved in the situation knows that everyone else might be deceiving each other,

6:18but it becomes a type of default communication style of the environment we're in. See, these are all very different kinds of lies. And the point is, what we'll get to by the end of the episode, is that lying is not as simple as it may be tempting to first think about it. The kind of lie that something is really does matter more than we often give it credit for. And then understanding the differences between lies and whether they're going to be morally justifiable in the eyes of a particular philosopher or not, is almost always going to come down to acknowledging two things. That one, lies are always mediating some kind of relationship, which then importantly

6:51means that two, understanding the lie is going to involve understanding what piece of reality was stolen from somebody else with this lie. We'll definitely get into all of this today.

Consequences of Lying

7:01But I think to remain responsible here, the first thing we got to do in a discussion like this is to take a second and pay the proper amount of respect to all the arguments throughout history that say that lying is clearly not something that we should all be doing. Because it needs to be said, that definitely is the majority of the arguments you will find from philosophers that have commented on this stuff. I mean, to put it very simply, it is mostly believed by philosophers that lying is one of the most corrosive things you can do when it comes to basically every scale that human life exists on. And different philosophers will specialize when it comes to

7:31different scales of this. But maybe a good place to start is at the most individual level. And then we can branch our way outward from there. Let's start by asking what is so wrong about when a person decides to lie to themselves? Well, one of my own favorite voices in this area, and we talked about this years ago on the podcast and the episode we did on him, is in the work of the philosopher Saint Augustine. He has a quote from his book On Lying, where he lays the premise of this out pretty simply. He says, quote, that man lies who has one thing in his mind and utters another in words or by signs of whatever kind. And he says, whence also the heart of him who lies is said to be double,

8:05end quote. And this can sound overly basic at first, like, you know, thanks, Augustine, for telling the whole class what a lie is. You're a genius. What would we do without you? But again, there's different scales that you could describe a lie from. And when he frames it in this very personal sort of way, you can start to see why this particular scale matters to him so much. His point is that when you decide you're going to tell a lie to someone, it instantly takes whatever level of unity or togetherness you might have felt inside you about the person you say you are to everyone. And it effectively splits you into two different people. And the more you lie, it then splits you

8:36into 10 different people or 100. I mean, it's hard enough to just try to be one person consistently every day. What happens when now you got to keep up with this story you told this person, and then the compounding effects of keeping up with all the stories you've told everyone in your life. So first of all, just think of all the stress you invite into your life when you have to put on all these little performances. But for Augustine, he says the real point here is that learning to live in this double nature that lying creates internally, it trains you at some level that it's okay for you to be lying to yourself. He says the liar themself is deceived precisely

9:09because they think the lie doesn't do them any harm. They think the lie is just managing the situation. I'm going to control what somebody else believes here, make things a little bit easier for me. But the reality is, he says, the lie is always doing real damage to the liar as well. And it becomes damage that's harder and harder for the liar to even notice is going on to them as they become more and more used to lying. This split he talks about, where there's a separation you're okay with between your private feelings and some public act you're putting on for people, this is deeply corrosive to your relationship with yourself, just as much as it's corrosive to others.

9:42But okay, let's zoom out a bit and talk about how lying messes with another scale of our reality. Montaigne always talked about how the biggest cost of lying, he thought, is when it comes to our ability to operate socially. He thinks that to live in a society amongst other people is to be able to trust that what other people say is what they actually believe. I mean, in the sense we can't go through our whole life having everyone we talk to sign a contract about what they just said. To Montaigne, there's just a necessary social bond that we need to be able to function, that when it gets broken down, it also breaks down our ability to do most basic stuff.

10:15And it's interesting, the way he grounds this is in acknowledging just how complicated lying can get. Like it'd be one thing if lying was just, you know, I say the opposite of what I actually believe all the time, where I know the truth. And lying is just when somebody says the inverse of the truth. That'd be pretty simple. You just believe the opposite of whatever a liar tells you. But no, as Montaigne puts it, the real insidious part about lying and the true level that it corrodes our relationships is that a falsehood has a hundred thousand faces, he says. Meaning a liar can be

10:45dishonest in ways that are pretty subtle sometimes. And they may not even be aware of all the ways that they're misleading you. And this complicates things for people thinking about communication at this greater level. Because once I know you're willing to say something that you don't actually think, how am I now supposed to navigate anything we try to do together after that? Maybe the story you just gave me is only half true. Maybe the words you're saying right now are true, but you're framing it in terms of things that you've lied to me about in the past. What, am I supposed to dress you down every time you speak to try to figure out what's real or not? His point is that nobody can live their

11:17life every day, constantly needing to go around investigating every little thing that people say. You need the ability to trust the people around you that you have to work with. And when it comes to what binds us together in a society, lying destroys people's ability to form these sorts of bonds in the first place. Which brings me to another famous point in this area that's usually attributed to the work of Immanuel Kant, though I think Montaigne may have set this one up years before him. But the idea is that one of the reasons you shouldn't lie is because it's fundamentally rooted in a kind of contradiction. The only way the liar ever has their lies get off the ground in the

11:50first place is because they hijack the trust that's formed by people that tell the truth every day. And then their lies gain a kind of unearned power by taking advantage of the fact that people are going to expect most people to be truthful. In other words, lies wouldn't be nearly as effective if we lived in a society where everybody lied all the time. And think about it, the liar wants people to keep their promises to them. They'd feel wronged if the contracts they signed with people weren't carried out. And yet to someone like Kant, the real hypocrisy of this is that they want there to be an exception to this rule made just for them whenever they decide it's convenient. It's a level of

12:24discounting other people that Kant later in his work will say that when you decide to lie someone, the thing that's really wrong about it is you're effectively robbing this other person of their very right to agency. You rob these people you lie to of a picture of the world where they can even make decisions in their life based on what's actually going on. I mean, you may remember from the episodes we did on Kant, to him, a person shouldn't be thought of as a means to an end ever. People are ends in themselves to Kant, which means to make a free decision about anything, a person has to be able to know what's really going on. They have to be able to deliberate about

12:55it. And then they have to be able to consent to some action they want to take. But if the people around you never know the reality they're actually in, then they can't possibly deliberate, let alone consent to what they're really engaging in. I mean, when you lie to someone, you essentially decide for this other person that I'm going to give you a selective picture of your life, you know, of this minefield that you're walking forward in every day as you make your decisions. And you just go ahead and keep making choices about where you want to go next, not knowing the risk you're actually taking. Like, how could you possibly put a person in that situation, knowing that you're doing it to them

13:27every day? And to Kant, while this certainly corrodes a person's ability to even be making choices in the world, it also importantly is something that goes on when it scales up to a public level as well. I mean, when Lyon starts to become standard at the level of the court system, testimony, contracts people sign. His point is that this eventually starts to corrode the fundamental rights of the people that entire societies are based on. And this is where the scale that Kant's talking about ladders up almost perfectly into the arguments made about lying by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. See, she's interested in the scale of all this, where a lie becomes so

13:59embedded, so repeated by the places where people get their information about the world, that it erodes people's ability to know what reality is and what reality isn't. At the most basic level for Hannah Arendt, this is an argument really about the erosion of political choice. I mean, for her, what good is allowing people to disagree and have freedom of opinion if the reality that they have an opinion about is so impossible to read that we can't even agree on what we're talking about? Like, it's one thing if somebody in media or in a position of power tells a lie, so now we know we can't trust them specifically. That might be manageable. But she's talking about the kind of lying where it becomes so

14:33ubiquitous that now people stop being able to believe in anything with any real confidence. How can I ever be sure that this reality I'm being told about is actually going on? And you can imagine the absolute horror film this causes at the level of coordination at the scale of society. I mean, if you knew a pathological liar personally, and you had to try to make plans to have brunch with them two weeks from now, you know, what level of confidence would you have that in two weeks you're not just going to be sitting in that restaurant alone, you know, by yourself drinking bottomless mimosas at 10 a.m.? How can anyone plan anything even two weeks from now, when they can't even trust that what they're

15:08hearing is not a lie being used for some kind of political benefit? So from disinformation to AI generated stuff posing as real to propaganda, how about at the very least highly selective coverage on news shows that technically is only saying stuff that's true? Lying at this scale to Hannah Arendt corrodes our very ability to live in a shared reality together. So from the individual all the way up to social coordination like this, lying is something that philosophers argue is incredibly corrosive, which maybe makes this a good point in the episode to pause and ask, what is the real crime that's

15:40being committed when somebody lies to somebody else? And of course, there's not going to be a single rule here that captures every point a philosopher's ever made perfectly. But if we wanted some kind of a diagnostic that could help us consider what harmful lies are really doing, it might be useful to start with the fact that a lie at every single one of these scales we just talked about is robbing some sort of future reality from somebody else. Depending on the scale, it's the shared reality of the society or the picture of reality required for agency or the social bonds required to function at a basic level. Lies are no doubt doing harm to our ability to judge

16:13reality in these areas. But what about when lies are told to people where it's done in order to preserve something greater rather than just for some immediate benefit to the person doing the lying? The famous example here at the broadest scale is going to be Plato's concept of the noble lie.

Plato's Noble Lie

16:28And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today, NordVPN. A VPN is a virtual private network. It's a tool that protects your internet connection by encrypting your data and routing it through secure servers. This, in turn, hides your IP address and makes your online activity much more private and secure, whether you're browsing at home or on public Wi-Fi. NordVPN is the fastest VPN in the world. It allows you to watch sporting events, shows, things that aren't available in your region. And it does this by switching your virtual location to a country where the content is available. More than that,

17:00if you're traveling abroad, you can access all your streaming services just like you were at home. It also protects your sensitive data and protects little Timmy in his nursery as he discovers his addiction to screens one day at a time. And don't get me started on the deals you can get by VPNing to other regions to buy whatever it is you're buying. To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash philo this. Our link will give you four extra months on the two-year plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. And now, back to the podcast. See, Plato would say that sometimes the rulers

17:35of a society need to promote certain stories that are not necessarily true, but they still function as what he calls a kind of medicine. Meaning, like medicine, it's dangerous if it's put into the wrong hands. It's not for everyone to be handing out to whoever they want without restriction, but that in some specific cases, certain lies can be absolutely formative for the health of a community. The example that he gives in The Republic is about a sort of classic origin story of a group of people. In this case, it's going to be where the rulers tell the people that the citizens of this land were born out of the earth that built the city itself. The land is their mother, their fellow

18:11citizens are their brothers and sisters. And in this story, they're even told that different metals from the earth have been mixed into all the different kinds of souls that make up the city. Gold has been infused into the souls of the rulers, silver into the soldiers, bronze and iron into the craftsmen. Now, this is clearly not a true story. This is a kind of lie. And even Plato says, you know, it's likely that the first generation of people that hear this story are never going to believe it anyway, that it'll likely take the children and the grandchildren of the people in school being taught this stuff when they're young and impressionable. That's the only way this story

18:45will catch on. And yet at some other level, he says, this is a lie that gives people access to something that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have. It's a lie that makes possible certain things that people traditionally have a really hard time with, but yet we need these things for our communities to do well. How about caring for the lives of complete strangers? Not something that comes natural to us. How about feeling a connection to people that you don't really know? I mean, the cold, hard truth of the matter, if that's all you wanted in life, is that you're born between two arbitrary lines in the sand. There's nothing really that's connecting you to these

19:17other people born around you. But it's through stories like this we tell that are no doubt blown out of proportion, no doubt highly selective and are glamorizing a time that never really existed in the way it's being presented anyway. But this type of origin story for a group of people can make otherwise complete strangers feel like brothers and sisters together, like your people united under certain values that define something of your essence, like you guys were the ones that fought the original oppressors together. Think of any group of people that builds a shared identity out of a story like this. I mean, it's false, technically. But to Plato, in very selective circumstances,

19:53it can become a big part of what makes the truth even possible. It is a noble lie, as he puts it. For whatever it's worth, it may be useful to run this through our diagnostic we were just talking about from before. What future does this noble lie rob these people of? And what future might it potentially create for them? And this is one of the really interesting things about some lies out there, if we're just going to look at them from every angle we can. Sometimes lies become the things that are constructive of arguably some of the greatest leaps forward in our cultures. Now, sure, as we just talked about, lies sometimes give people the unity that's required to fight for

20:26causes that matter to them. Okay, that's one example. But think about a lie that's told at another level. Imagine somebody forges a famous painting, some classic Van Gogh or something that everybody used to think was lost to history. But this person that forges the painting says they found it in their basement last week. You know, grandma just couldn't let go of those old paintings that she won at the county fair that year. And let's say it's a really good forgery. Well, that painting is a lie. But when it gets put up in the museum, all of a sudden there are real journalists who are writing real articles about that painting. It drives real tourism for people to come and see the painting. The curator of the

21:01museum gets more work. Maybe this allows for their kid to go to a real college. Other artists who see the painting are really inspired to do more in their work after seeing it. See, sometimes a lie creates the environment that new things are born from. Think of the person that deludes themselves a little bit to get past some kind of mental block, some insecurity they have. In other words, it's important to remember that a lie becomes a cultural force that can change things just as much as the truth does. And don't get me wrong, this is not intended to be an argument saying that people should have license to lie whenever they want. But it does start to seem weird at some level to be so

21:34stuck in this ideal of the truth that we don't acknowledge how much lying just is a real part of any of our lives and what actually happens. See, there's plenty of thinkers from history that would acknowledge that all these arguments we've heard so far that talk about how corrosive lying is are probably correct. But some philosophers would then make the further point that they're only correct within certain narrow parameters of quote unquote normal life, where you're usually living in a very privileged, easy spot where nothing too extreme is ever really going on in your world. But life is not always so peaceful, they might want to point out.

22:07Machiavelli, for example, might say that we can't have some blanket policy against lying because there are just times in the world when you're dealing with bad people who don't play by the rules, or in his case, a leader may need to lie sometimes in order to keep things held together. The classic axe murderer dilemma comes to mind here. Murderer comes to your door and asks where your children are. Do you have an obligation to tell them the truth? And all this we're talking about is just the basic level of a conversation that I think is developed in a really interesting way by a philosopher named Max Stirner, who certainly makes a pretty strong case for why it's okay to lie

22:39sometimes. Or he might start by asking the question, who exactly is it that I owe the truth to with every single moment of my existence? Like seriously, who or what is it that I owe that to? Some quick context here. Max Stirner was an egoist, and he believed that most of the stuff that people treat as sacred over them, whether that's a god, society, or in this case, truth as an ideal that we need to always be beholden to. These things are what he calls spooks in his work, kind of like ghosts, meaning these are ideas that were ultimately created by some person somewhere, maybe on a random Tuesday. And then

23:11people forget the fact that a person created them and start to bow to these things like they're magic or something. But to Stirner, the truth is just something that human beings use sometimes. It's not some god that you owe something to. So when somebody like a Kant comes along and says, hey, the only reason lies ever get off the ground in the first place is because most people tell the truth, and then the liar takes advantage of that fact. Max Stirner would be like, yeah, and that's exactly the point of lying. He'd say it's effective to lie sometimes. He might say, look, I know Kant may have this higher ambition

23:43to make morality into something that's universal. But if we're just being accurate, I mean, you know, the categorical imperative is not actually a real thing, right? Like if you tell somebody a lie, you aren't really willing that everyone in the universe is also going to lie too. I mean, unless you had the moral ambitions of Kant, why would you ever try to take what you might do in any single complex moment of decision making and try to turn it into a law of the universe? In probably his most popular book, it's called The Ego and His Own, Stirner says that there is no truth above him that he needs to direct himself by, meaning the truth is something that he only likes to

24:16keep underneath him in a sense, which then means that whether he chooses to use the truth in a particular moment or not will come down to closely examining the situation and deciding whether the truth is actually beneficial to him. So from this perspective, the idea that you owe every single person out there the truth all the time just starts to seem ridiculous. For him, the more relevant questions when it comes to lying are going to be more along the lines of, who is the person asking this question of me where they demand the truth out of me? What kind of relationship am I in with this person? What will this person do with this truth once I give it to them? And would these become the

24:48questions that you start asking instead? As you can imagine, yeah, this applies to something like the axe murder on your doorstep, but how about the tyrant that's asking where the enemies of the state are hiding? How about the abusive person that'll use your honest answer against you if you give it to them? Do you owe the truth to someone who's already destroyed any trust that could possibly exist between the two of you? Once again, it may be more simple for someone to live their life where their policy is that they just never lie. But to Sterner, this is often an attempt by someone to reduce the real complexity of the decision to something like a religious handbook that takes

25:21away all the ambiguity that responsible action requires. And by the way, he might say, all these people that supposedly live by this policy that they just never lie to anyone in their life? Ironically, they just lied to you when they told you that. All those people lie as they go throughout their lives too. They just have certain exceptions they make that they usually don't even think of as lies and usually haven't thought through their exceptions very much. They even usually have situations where they think telling the lie makes somebody a better person than telling the truth. But again, they just never have to examine these moments very closely, he thinks,

25:53because they hide behind this religious veneer. For Max Sterner in particular, all of this ultimately comes down to the importance of real self-ownership. Because he thinks when you're obsessed with the truth and you treat it every day like it's some sacred object, you don't have rule over yourself anymore then. The truth now owns you. And this will extend for him, by the way, to why this argument has not given people a free pass to just lie whenever it's convenient for them. The type of lie matters to him. Because there's tons of situations out there where you can lie about something, and you're just becoming owned by some other thing that the lie is designed to avoid.

26:26People lie out of fear, vanity. They tell a lie that avoids doing something difficult out of laziness. They tell a fake story they can profit from driven by greed. I mean, whatever it is, the real assessment that has to go on for Sterner is whether the lie is actually something that's good for you. Which, as you can imagine, that isn't an easy calculation to make a lot of the time. It takes real work every day, a lot of self-awareness, and then not to mention good judgment on the other side of it, the kind of things a blanket policy about lying allows for people to get away from. So for Sterner, lying is going to come down to the specific kind of person

26:59that you are. Say you're a really powerful person in some big position of leadership, where the words you say every day, you know, the fact that you're lying in this moment, say it has a huge impact on people's ability to judge reality. Well, then from a Sterner perspective, you probably shouldn't be lying there because you're corroding the very conditions you need to continue living. In other words, it's not wrong to lie there because you're violating some truth ideal or a law of the universe. It's bad for you to be misleading everybody because it destroys the world you live in. But then take another situation. Say you're somebody that's fighting for your own

27:31freedom and say someone in uniform pulls you aside and asks you who all your friends are, what you guys talk about in private, what your plans are tomorrow. Then to Sterner, it's totally defensible for you to tell a lie in that case. Because as he says, these people have no claim and no right to your sincerity anyway. Why would you owe them that? Once again, the truth is simply something that human beings use sometimes. And it's critical to do the work to know when to use it and when not to. But what about those lies we talked about earlier at the level that

Lying in Social Bonds

27:58Montaigne wrote about. Lies that are corrosive to the social bonds that make basic functioning even possible. Well, now that we're on this side of the episode, there's another thinker named Bernard Mandeville that invites people to think about a whole different take when it comes to these kinds of lies. Mandeville has a book called The Fable of the Bees, where in it, he explains the philosophy behind a poem he once wrote about a hive full of bees. He tells a story in the poem about one of the most prosperous hives you could ever imagine. These bees are massively successful as far as bees go. But the social life of these bees that helps keep the whole thing going is filled with all kinds of

28:32different falsehoods that they use. There's cheating and flattery and fake politeness and all the supposedly darkest parts of social life that people do all the time in our world. But then in the book, the bees look around them at their world. And when they see this corruption going on, corruption that they think is caused by all this dishonesty and vice, well, they start to complain about it. So the god figure of the poem, Jove, grants all the bees a wish. He makes it so that every bee from here on out is going to be nothing but honest and virtuous. And from this point in the story, the hive is certainly blessed with a kind of contentment and honesty, Mandeville says. But it

29:07becomes a smaller hive, it becomes a less prosperous one, and it becomes simpler in many different ways. See, without all the vices that drive the bees, lies being an important one among them, the bees eventually find themselves living in a much different kind of hive than they began the book in. Now, his point is this. It's easy to think that everything that's good about humanity comes from moments where people are being totally honest and totally virtuous. And Montaigne may be right that we cannot operate if we can't trust what each other says. But something that can be a tough reality to accept, Mandeville thinks, is that sometimes part of what makes this whole thing

29:40function is a kind of strategic insincerity that people put on sometimes. It requires lies to consider just how elaborate human relationships can get in these giant networks of people that we live in. Sometimes what you got to do is let the other person save face in a conversation, even though they were wrong and are still wrong about whatever it is they're yapping about. Sometimes it's about not saying something exactly how you're thinking about it in your own head. Sometimes you got to act more interested than you actually are, more patient than you actually are. Mandeville's point is that sometimes private vices lead to public benefits, which is something he actually believes in so much

30:15that it became the subtitle of this entire book. He forces us to consider just how easy it is to publicly condemn all this reprehensible behavior that these people engage in, but then to privately enjoy the benefits of it at a level that you practically take for granted. That, like it or not, lying just is a part of the way we communicate that sometimes leads to real benefits that we wouldn't want to give up. I guess all this talk we're doing about the more common places that lying goes on points us to one of the most well-known concepts when it comes to exceptions for lying. The white lie, as it's called. And it should be said, for many of the philosophers

30:50we've already talked about today, something being a white lie doesn't give it some special status where now lying is totally fine for them. I mean, for many of these thinkers, white lies can still be incredibly harmful to a person's future. And a few of them will even say that, you know, whatever damage is done to a relationship by telling someone the truth, the relationship's either better off for it, or that the more important thing to do is to phrase the truth to a person in a way where it's not going to destroy them. That tact is something that can be done in several different ways, not all of which require lying to someone. That point aside, still, though, I think there's

31:22at least some case to be made here for lies that we tell people that don't seem to rob them of any sort of meaningful future. And they're lies that feel like the right thing to do. They feel almost merciful to tell a lie like this to certain people in the moment. Take an example of what I'm talking about. Your kid walks up to you holding a toy in their hands that's clearly yellow. They hold it up to your face and they say, look, dada, blue. And you say back to them, nah, buddy, nah, I think that's yellow. They come back at you and they say with a bit of force, brew! They furrow their brow. They do that thing where it's like they're offended. And you say, no, look, look, it's yellow. Brew! It's

31:56brew! You say, okay, fine, fine. The toy is blue. They smile, they instantly calm down, and they move on with their day. Now, I just lied to that child. But as a parent, knowing that this child isn't colorblind, I know that this is just an obsessive moment out of a two-year-old, rather than something that's a life lesson that's going to shape the rest of their future. So is this really a moment for me to get sanctimonious about how I refuse to ever lie to my children? You know, they may not believe in Santa Claus, but at least they'll know at some level their father never lies to them. Like, who can live by that

32:29policy who's ever really had to care for kids, sometimes multiple kids, for days or weeks on end? Is this really a moment for me to get down on the floor and dedicate some time here to their inaccurate usage of the concept of yellow? The answer's no. In fact, if I did that, it's likely most people would think that I was being a bit immoral. Probably think I'm being a little too wrapped up in myself, rather than reading the room and recognizing that this is a toddler. And maybe this showcases something important about this whole conversation. That our interactions with other people are not always in this pristine

32:59environment of two totally equal rational agents that owe each other absolute honesty all the time. Outside of the world of thought experiments, we live in an actual world where relationships are far more complicated than that. And again, maybe the question's more along the lines of, what future is being robbed from this person by lying? And also, what could this person reasonably have done with the truth if I had given it to them? If your significant other is horrible at singing, and it pains you to tell them that they sound like a dying beluga whale when they're in the shower, that they are the reason for the world's collective insomnia when they sing. And say you decide to

33:33tell them a white lie, say they're actually really great at singing, and say this inspires them to quit their job, and they're going to start their new career as a traveling musician now. Well, this is a lie that is absolutely robbing this person of a real future, meaning you probably owe it to them to have a difficult conversation. But say in another moment there's a person who's terminally ill, they're fading from existence, hours to live, there's no more medical decisions that need to be made for this person. And in a moment of vulnerability, they look up at you, and they ask, was I a burden to everyone? You know, for the last several years, as everyone around me has rearranged their lives to

34:07care for me? You know how you completely drained all your savings, you spent whole days of your life scared, even resentful at the process of dealing with hospice? You know how you almost lost your career and many of your other loved ones because of this whole thing? Was I a burden to you? Now, the cold truth to tell this person, if that's all you think is valuable in life, is that yes, Grandpa, in every way it is possible to be a burden on this planet. You were one here, absolutely. But nobody would say that that's the right thing to do here. And most of us would say that to not tell them that is you being the mature person in this whole exchange, rather than someone who's just a

34:41liar, you know. And I think it's important to notice what was just admitted there. Because it's something that no doubt many people listening to this have noticed throughout the entire second half of this episode. That if you're going to be willing to lie to someone, you may be able to argue that the lie is not robbing a significant future from this other person. You may be able to say that this kind of lie seems to do far less harm than this other kind of lie. But something you cannot avoid is that when you lie, you are deciding to appoint yourself as the person that gets to make the decision about reality on behalf of somebody else. Now, when this is a parent that's talking to their child,

35:16there's a paternalism sort of baked into the relationship there, where people often give you more of a free pass to lie to them in that case. But who is anyone to consider themselves in a paternalistic role over a fellow person who isn't their child? I mean, you'd have to place them as someone that's beneath you somehow. You'd have to think that you're the one that's qualified to decide what level of truth they get to have in a moment. And for whatever it's worth, maybe this is why manipulative, narcissistic people tend to gravitate towards lying as a form of communication. They're just far more likely to feel qualified to think of themselves as the exception to the rule.

35:49Like this other person needs me to be the steward of what they can actually handle. And what sort of person, if any, is qualified to make that choice? Well, maybe one answer to this is that the person that's most qualified to make that choice is the person that's least excited to believe that they're qualified to do it. Someone who's really thought through just how corrosive lying can be to the world at every scale. Someone who understands that even a lie that's told out of mercy to someone else is still you exercising a kind of power over them. And that somebody who doesn't care to even consider the complexity of what lying is when we do it, someone who doesn't

36:22have time for any of this conversation we just had, probably isn't someone who's thinking too much about what kind of a world their lies are going to leave behind them. If you value the show as an educational resource, thanks for anything you do to support the podcast. Thanks for letting me know what you think about some of these arguments in the Patreon comments section. Just don't lie to me about what you think this time. I can't handle it right now after writing this, after writing all this. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this format. Hope you have a great rest of your week. Most of all, though, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.