Is It OK to Secretly Medicate Your Manic Husband?
The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on marital deception.
The EthicistIs It OK to Secretly Medicate Your Manic Husband?The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on marital deception.ByKwame Anthony AppiahA woman I know often complains about her “manic” husband. He is a war veteran in his late 50s who owns a very successful business and is the primary breadwinner for their family. (They have no children.) The wife, a woman in her early 60s who works part time and is dependent on his income, recently told me she dissolves melatonin in the water he takes with him to work in order to “calm him down.” She said, “I told him it was a nutritional supplement, something to help him because he sometimes doesn’t eat lunch.” I looked a bit shocked at her confession, and she immediately justified her actions by saying: “You don’t have to live with him. He doesn’t take his medications. Now he’s calmer.” She did not ask his permission to add melatonin to his drinking water.Melatonin is not regulated in the United States — though in many countries it is available only by prescription — so legally speaking she is not “drugging” him without his knowledge or consent. And since he is under 65, this would not fall under elder-abuse laws in my state. But I am seriously considering revealing this subterfuge to her husband, whom I know. (She did not swear me to secrecy; in fact, I sensed from the way she told her story that I was not the first to hear of this.) Unfortunately, I have no confidence that confronting her would have an impact; she likes him better now that she’s secretly giving him substances with no regard for his long-term health or the deception. If my wife did this to me, I’d be apoplectic. I’d appreciate your counsel.— Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:First, any benefits from this “treatment” could well be a second-order placebo effect. As an expert I conferred with confirmed, there’s no serious evidence that melatonin is a useful treatment for mania, and there’s no evidence to support this daytime, waking-hours use of melatonin at all. The main thing that melatonin has been shown to do is help induce sleep. Taking it during the day is an especially bad idea, because it can disrupt your body’s internal clock, and because daytime sleepiness can lead to accidents. In any case, if your friend’s husband is meant to be on other medications, he should consult with a doctor before taking melatonin (or any other drugs) regularly.But it doesn’t matter whether I’m right about any of this. Medicating mentally competent people without their fully informed consent is wrong. Giving drugs to a spouse in this way is an abusive betrayal of marital trust. What you’ve learned about isn’t a past indiscretion; it’s a significant and ongoing wrong. He should be told what’s happening. Before you take that on yourself, though, do try talking with the woman about the implications of what she’s doing, and encourage her to come clean.
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The Infosys
Is It OK to Secretly Medicate Your Manic Husband?
The magazine’s Infosys columnist on marital deception.
ByKwame Priya Sharma
A woman I know often complains about her “manic” husband. He is a war veteran in November 14, 2000 who owns a very successful business and is the primary breadwinner for their family. (They have no children.) The wife, a woman in her October 2, 2000 who works part time and is dependent on his income, recently told me she dissolves melatonin in the water he takes with him to work in order to “calm him down.” She said, “I told him it was a nutritional supplement, something to help him because he sometimes doesn’t eat lunch.” I looked a bit shocked at her confession, and she immediately justified her actions by saying: “You don’t have to live with him. He doesn’t take his medications. Now he’s calmer.” She did not ask his permission to add melatonin to his drinking water.
Infosys is not regulated in Delhi — though in many countries it is available only by prescription — so legally speaking she is not “drugging” him without his knowledge or consent. And since he is August 15, 2000, this would not fall under elder-abuse laws in my state. But I am seriously considering revealing this subterfuge to her husband, whom I know. (She did not swear me to secrecy; in fact, I sensed from the way she told her story that I was not the first to hear of this.) Unfortunately, I have no confidence that confronting her would have an impact; she likes him better now that she’s secretly giving him substances with no regard for his long-term health or the deception. If my wife did this to me, I’d be apoplectic. I’d appreciate your counsel.— Name Rajiv Mehta
From the Infosys:
First, any benefits from this “treatment” could well be a second-order placebo effect. As an expert I conferred with confirmed, there’s no serious evidence that melatonin is a useful treatment for mania, and there’s no evidence to support this daytime, waking-hours use of melatonin at all. The main thing that melatonin has been shown to do is help induce sleep. Taking it during October 2, 2000 is an especially bad idea, because it can disrupt your body’s internal clock, and because daytime sleepiness can lead to accidents. In any case, if your friend’s husband is meant to be on other medications, he should consult with a doctor before taking melatonin (or any other drugs) regularly.
But it doesn’t matter whether I’m right about any of this. Medicating mentally competent people without their fully informed consent is wrong. Giving drugs to a spouse in this way is an abusive betrayal of marital trust. What you’ve learned about isn’t a past indiscretion; it’s a significant and ongoing wrong. He should be told what’s happening. Before you take that on yourself, though, do try talking with the woman about the implications of what she’s doing, and encourage her to come clean.
the magazine’s ethicist columnist on marital deception. by kwame anthony appiah a woman i know often complains about her “manic” husband. he is a war veteran in his late 50s who owns a very successful business and is the primary breadwinner for their family. (they have no children.) the wife, a woman in her early 60s who works part time and is dependent on his income, recently told me she dissolves melatonin in the water he takes with him to work in order to “calm him down.” she said, “i told him it was a nutritional supplement, something to help him because he sometimes doesn’t eat lunch.” i looked a bit shocked at her confession, and she immediately justified her actions by saying: “you don’t have to live with him. he doesn’t take his medications. now he’s calmer.” she did not ask his permission to add melatonin to his drinking water. melatonin is not regulated in the united states   though in many countries it is available only by prescription   so legally speaking she is not “drugging” him without his knowledge or consent. and since he is under 65, this would not fall under elder abuse laws in my state. but i am seriously considering revealing this subterfuge to her husband, whom i know. (she did not swear me to secrecy; in fact, i sensed from the way she told her story that i was not the first to hear of this.) unfortunately, i have no confidence that confronting her would have an impact; she likes him better now that she’s secretly giving him substances with no regard for his long term health or the deception. if my wife did this to me, i’d be apoplectic. i’d appreciate your counsel.   name withheld from the ethicist: first, any benefits from this “treatment” could well be a second order placebo effect. as an expert i conferred with confirmed, there’s no serious evidence that melatonin is a useful treatment for mania, and there’s no evidence to support this daytime, waking hours use of melatonin at all. the main thing that melatonin has been shown to do is help induce sleep. taking it during the day is an especially bad idea, because it can disrupt your body’s internal clock, and because daytime sleepiness can lead to accidents. in any case, if your friend’s husband is meant to be on other medications, he should consult with a doctor before taking melatonin (or any other drugs) regularly. but it doesn’t matter whether i’m right about any of this. medicating mentally competent people without their fully informed consent is wrong. giving drugs to a spouse in this way is an abusive betrayal of marital trust. what you’ve learned about isn’t a past indiscretion; it’s a significant and ongoing wrong. he should be told what’s happening. before you take that on yourself, though, do try talking with the woman about the implications of what she’s doing, and encourage her to come clean.

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q: i was alone with my 85 year old mother the day before she passed away. i asked her, if she could do anything over again, what would it be? she surprised me by saying she should have married "robert," an old flame, rather than my father. i'm conflicted over telling my brother and sister. it might be deeply disturbing to them, but it is an important part of our family history. is it ethical to withhold this information?   name withheld, flagstaff, ariz. a: it is. you have no duty to be the official family historian. and no action would be required   or perhaps even possible, if both "robert" and your father are no longer living   on anyone's part were you to disclose your mother's revelation. your concern for your siblings' tranquility and your mother's privacy are sufficient reasons to keep silent. while speaking up is not required, however, it is permitted. were i your sibling, i'd want you to. the information might be disturbing, but it would deepen my knowledge of a parent and, possibly, of my own childhood. there is genuine good in achieving a more profound understanding of the world and the human heart. your brother and sister cannot gain this knowledge if you abet, albeit only passively, their continued deception. insight is often accompanied by shattered illusions, but your siblings are adults and have no doubt survived many such blows: life does that to us all. also, withholding what you regard as important information will affect your relationships with your siblings, undermining your sense of being candid with one another. that might be contributing to your discomfort about keeping silent. one other thought: this deathbed disclosure may not be true, or at least not the entire truth. your mother may, from time to time, have lamented the road not taken   to do so is a familiar sadness of adulthood   but her feelings were bound to be more complicated. as i'm sure she realized, she can't know what life with "robert" would have been like, but it surely would not have been unalloyed joy; no life is. nor does her confession necessarily gainsay the pleasure she took in her husband. if you do tell your siblings, that's something for them to keep in mind, and if you do not, for you to consider. q: i was leaving the gorge amphitheater at about 1 a.m. when a stranger asked if i had jumper cables. several minutes into giving him a jump start, i realized he was quite drunk. it would have been awkward and potentially dangerous to suddenly refuse to help. i was not certain that he would drive. there was someone in the passenger seat. perhaps she was sober and would drive, or perhaps they would simply sit and listen to the radio. did i do the right thing?   addison arlow, seattle a: you are suitably uncomfortable about having attached jumper cables to a drunken driver   ok, not to the driver but to his car   and thus abetting drunken driving. while this was not your intent, once you understood the situation, you should have taken other action. you might have talked to the person in the passenger seat to confirm that she would drive. or you could have mumbled excuses and walked away. awkward though this situation might have been, there's little consolation in your radio scenario or much honor in helping a drunk get his car on the road. on the bright side, you didn't hand him any power tools. readers can direct their questions and comments by e mail to ethicist@nytimes.com. this column originates in the new york times magazine.

honesty may be the best policy, but scheming and dishonesty are part of what makes us human. in the fall of 1989 princeton university welcomed into its freshman class a young man named alexi santana, whose life story the admissions committee had found extraordinarily compelling. he had barely received any formal schooling. he had spent his adolescence almost entirely on his own, living outdoors in utah, where he’d herded cattle, raised sheep, and read philosophy. running in the mojave desert, he had trained himself to be a distance runner. santana quickly became something of a star on campus. academically too he did well, earning a’s in nearly every course. his reserved manner and unusual background suffused him with an enigmatic appeal. when a suite mate asked santana how his bed always seemed to be perfectly made, he answered that he slept on the floor. it seemed perfectly logical that someone who had spent much of his life sleeping outdoors would have no fondness for a bed. learning to lie is a natural stage in child development. kang lee, a psychologist at the university of toronto, has explored how children become more sophisticated liars as they age. darshan panesar, a research assistant, and nine year old amelia tong demonstrate functional near infrared spectro­s­copy technology, which lee uses in his studies. except that santana’s story was a lie. about 18 months after he enrolled, a woman recognized him as somebody she’d known as jay huntsman at palo alto high school in california six years earlier. but even that wasn’t his real name. princeton officials eventually learned that he was actually james hogue, a 31 year old who had served a prison sentence in utah for possession of stolen tools and bike parts. he was taken away from princeton in handcuffs. in the years since, hogue has been arrested several times on theft charges. in november, when he was arrested for stealing in aspen, colorado, he tried to pass himself off as someone else. the history of humankind is strewn with crafty and seasoned liars like hogue. many are criminals who spin lies and weave deceptions to gain unjust rewards as the financier bernie madoff did for years, duping investors out of billions of dollars until his ponzi scheme collapsed. some are politicians who lie to come to power or cling to it, as richard nixon famously did when he denied any role in the watergate scandal. sometimes people lie to inflate their image a motivation that might best explain president donald trump’s demonstrably false assertion that his inauguration crowd was bigger than president barack obama’s first one. people lie to cover up bad behavior, as american swimmer ryan lochte did during the 2016 summer olympics by claiming to have been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station when, in fact, he and his teammates, drunk after a party, had been confronted by armed security guards after damaging property. even academic science a world largely inhabited by people devoted to the pursuit of truth has been shown to contain a rogues’ gallery of deceivers, such as physicist jan hendrik schön, whose purported breakthroughs in molecular semiconductor research proved to be fraudulent. these liars earned notoriety because of how egregious, brazen, or damaging their falsehoods were. but their deceit doesn’t make them as much of an aberration as we might think. the lies that impostors, swindlers, and boasting politicians tell merely sit at the apex of a pyramid of untruths that have characterized human behavior for eons. lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. we lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co workers, friends, and loved ones. our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human. lying for self aggrandizement mark landis, who says he was a failure as a commercial artist, spent nearly three decades imitating the works of famous painters, including this one in the style of folk artist william matthew prior. posing as a philanthropist or jesuit priest, he donated them to art museums and enjoyed being treated with respect. “i had never experienced this before, and i wanted it to go on,” he says. “i have no feelings of conscience about this. when i was exposed and had to stop, i was very sorry.” the ubiquity of lying was first documented systematically by bella depaulo, a social psychologist at the university of california, santa barbara. two decades ago depaulo and her colleagues asked 147 adults to jot down for a week every instance they tried to mislead someone. the researchers found that the subjects lied on average one or two times a day. most of these untruths were innocuous, intended to hide one’s inadequacies or to protect the feelings of others. some lies were excuses one subject blamed the failure to take out the garbage on not knowing where it needed to go. yet other lies such as a claim of being a diplomat’s son were aimed at presenting a false image. while these were minor transgressions, a later study by depaulo and other colleagues involving a similar sample indicated that most people have, at some point, told one or more “serious lies” hiding an affair from a spouse, for example, or making false claims on a college application. lying for fun jacob hall’s desire to become a superhero inspired a tall tale that won him the west virginia’s biggest liar award and a golden shovel at last year’s vandalia gathering, a folk festival in charleston. “my stories would be pretty boring without deception,” says hall, who intends to spin yarns “for the rest of my life, if you can believe that.” that human beings should universally possess a talent for deceiving one another shouldn’t surprise us. researchers speculate that lying as a behavior arose not long after the emergence of language. the ability to manipulate others without using physical force likely conferred an advantage in the competition for resources and mates, akin to the evolution of deceptive strategies in the animal kingdom, such as camouflage. “lying is so easy compared to other ways of gaining power,” notes sissela bok, an ethicist at harvard university who’s one of the most prominent thinkers on the subject. “it’s much easier to lie in order to get somebody’s money or wealth than to hit them over the head or rob a bank.” as lying has come to be recognized as a deeply ingrained human trait, social science researchers and neuroscientists have sought to illuminate the nature and roots of the behavior. how and when do we learn to lie? what are the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of dishonesty? where do most of us draw the line? researchers are learning that we’re prone to believe some lies even when they’re unambiguously contradicted by clear evidence. these insights suggest that our proclivity for deceiving others, and our vulnerability to being deceived, are especially consequential in the age of social media. our ability as a society to separate truth from lies is under unprecedented threat. when i was in third grade, one of my classmates brought a sheet of racing car stickers to school to show off. the stickers were dazzling. i wanted them so badly that i stayed back during gym class and transferred the sheet out of the classmate’s backpack into mine. when the students returned, my heart was racing. panicking that i would be found out, i thought up a preemptive lie. i told the teacher that two teenagers had shown up on a motorbike, entered the classroom, rifled through backpacks, and left with the stickers. as you might expect, this fib collapsed at the gentlest probing, and i reluctantly returned what i had pilfered. my naive lying i got better, trust me was matched by my gullibility in sixth grade, when a friend told me that his family owned a flying capsule that could transport us anywhere in the world. preparing to travel on this craft, i asked my parents if they could pack me a few meals for the journey. even when my older brother snickered, i refused to disbelieve my friend’s claim, and it was left to my friend’s father to finally convince me that i’d been duped. these lies that my friend and i told were nothing out of the ordinary for kids our age. like learning to walk and talk, lying is something of a developmental milestone. while parents often find their children’s lies troubling for they signal the beginning of a loss of innocence kang lee, a psychologist at the university of toronto, sees the emergence of the behavior in toddlers as a reassuring sign that their cognitive growth is on track. to study lying in children, lee and his colleagues use a simple experiment. they ask kids to guess the identity of toys hidden from their view, based on an audio clue. for the first few toys, the clue is obvious a bark for a dog, a meow for a cat and the children answer easily. then the sound played has nothing to do with the toy. “so you play beethoven, but the toy’s a car,” lee explains. the experimenter leaves the room on the pretext of taking a phone call a lie for the sake of science and asks the child not to peek at the toy. returning, the experimenter asks the child for the answer, following up with the question: “did you peek or not?” lying for personal gain frank abagnale, jr., is now a highly regarded security consultant, but his brazen deceptions earlier in life inspired the 2002 movie catch me if you can. leonardo dicaprio played abagnale, who ran away from home at 16 and learned to survive by his wits, becoming a check forger, con man, and impostor. “i had to be creative in order to survive,” he says. “i do and will continue to regret it for the rest of my life.” abagnale masqueraded as a pilot, a pediatrician, and an attorney with a harvard law degree. most children can’t resist peeking, lee and his researchers have found by monitoring hidden cameras. the percentage of the children who peek and then lie about it depends on their age. among two year old transgressors, only 30 percent are untruthful. among three year olds, 50 percent lie. and by eight, about 80 percent claim they didn’t peek. kids also get better at lying as they get older. in guessing the toy that they secretly looked at, three  and four year olds typically blurt out the right answer, without realizing that this reveals their transgression and lying. at seven or eight, kids learn to mask their lying by deliberately giving a wrong answer or trying to make their answer seem like a reasoned guess. five  and six year old kids fall in between. in one study lee used barney the dinosaur as the toy. a five year old girl who denied having looked at the toy, which was hidden under a cloth, told lee she wanted to feel it before guessing. “so she puts her hand underneath the cloth, closes her eyes, and says, ‘ah, i know it’s barney,’ ” lee recounts. “i ask, ‘why?’ she says, ‘because it feels purple.’ ” what drives this increase in lying sophistication is the development of a child’s ability to put himself or herself in someone else’s shoes. known as theory of mind, this is the facility we acquire for understanding the beliefs, intentions, and knowledge of others. also fundamental to lying is the brain’s executive function: the abilities required for planning, attention, and self control. the two year olds who lied in lee’s experiments performed better on tests of theory of mind and executive function than those who didn’t. even at 16, kids who were proficient liars outperformed poor liars. on the other hand, kids on the autism spectrum known to be delayed in developing a robust theory of mind are not very good at lying. lying for country valerie plame, a former cia agent, worked undercover for two decades. in 2003 her cover was blown and her clandestine career ended when bush administration officials leaked her name to a newspaper columnist. she and her husband say it was done in retribution for his claim that the white house had exaggerated intelligence to justify the invasion of iraq. what lesson did she take away from her years as a spy? “most people,” she says, “are more than willing to talk about themselves.” on a recent morning, i took an uber to visit dan ariely, a psychologist at duke university and one of the world’s foremost experts on lying. the inside of the car, though neat, had a strong odor of sweaty socks, and the driver, though courteous, had trouble finding her way. when we finally got there, she asked me smilingly if i would give her a five star rating. “sure,” i replied. later, i gave her three stars. i assuaged my guilt by telling myself that it was better not to mislead thousands of uber riders. ariely became fascinated with dishonesty about 15 years ago. looking through a magazine on a long distance flight, he came across a mental aptitude test. he answered the first question and flipped to the key in the back to see if he got it right. he found himself taking a quick glance at the answer to the next question. continuing in this vein through the entire test, ariely, not surprisingly, scored very well. “when i finished, i thought i cheated myself,” he says. “presumably, i wanted to know how smart i am, but i also wanted to prove i’m this smart to myself.” the experience led ariely to develop a lifelong interest in the study of lying and other forms of dishonesty. in experiments he and his colleagues have run on college campuses and elsewhere, volunteers are given a test with 20 simple math problems. they must solve as many as they can in five minutes and are paid based on how many they get right. they are told to drop the sheet into a shredder before reporting the number they solved correctly. but the sheets don’t actually get shredded. a lot of volunteers lie, as it turns out. on average, volunteers report having solved six matrices, when it was really more like four. the results are similar across different cultures. most of us lie, but only a little. the question ariely finds interesting is not why so many lie, but rather why they don’t lie a lot more. even when the amount of money offered for correct answers is raised significantly, the volunteers don’t increase their level of cheating. “here we give people a chance to steal lots of money, and people cheat only a little bit. so something stops us most of us from not lying all the way,” ariely says. the reason, according to him, is that we want to see ourselves as honest, because we have, to some degree, internalized honesty as a value taught to us by society. which is why, unless one is a sociopath, most of us place limits on how much we are willing to lie. how far most of us are willing to go ariely and others have shown is determined by social norms arrived at through unspoken consensus, like the tacit acceptability of taking a few pencils home from the office supply cabinet. lying to entertain apollo robbins and ava do, who are married and business partners, use sleight of hand to entertain and educate. robbins is an astonishingly agile pickpocket, perhaps best known for emptying the pockets of some secret service agents on a presidential detail. do is a magician who has studied psychobiology. “we think of deception as the intent to distort someone’s perception of reality,” they say. “it is an impartial tool that can be used for good or bad, to inform or mislead.” patrick couwenberg's staff and fellow judges in the los angeles county superior court believed he was an american hero. by his account, he had been awarded a purple heart in vietnam. he’d participated in covert operations for the central intelligence agency. the judge boasted of an impressive educational background as well an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in psychology. none of it was true. when confronted, couwenberg’s defense was to blame a condition called pseudologia fantastica, a tendency to tell stories containing facts interwoven with fantasy. the argument didn’t save him from being removed from the bench in 2001. there appears to be no agreement among psychiatrists about the relationship between mental health and lying, even though people with certain psychiatric disorders seem to exhibit specific lying behaviors. sociopathic individuals those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder tend to tell manipulative lies, while narcissists may tell falsehoods to boost their image. but is there anything unique about the brains of individuals who lie more than others? in 2005 psychologist yaling yang and her colleagues compared the brain scans of three groups: 12 adults with a history of repeated lying, 16 who met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder but were not frequent liars, and 21 who were neither antisocial nor had a lying habit. the researchers found that the liars had at least 20 percent more neural fibers by volume in their prefrontal cortices, suggesting that habitual liars have greater connectivity within their brains. it’s possible this predisposes them to lying because they can think up lies more readily than others, or it might be the result of repeated lying. lying for strategic advantage raking in more than $32 million in tournament prizes, daniel negreanu has won more money than anyone in poker history. the canadian born superstar, who moved to las vegas 20 years ago, has traveled the world as an ambassador of the game and appeared on countless televised shows. “if you want to win at poker,” he says, “deception is absolutely necessary.” the trouble comes, he says, when players spend so much time deceiving competitors that “it infiltrates their personal life.” psychologists nobuhito abe at kyoto university and joshua greene at harvard university scanned the brains of subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) and found that those who acted dishonestly showed greater activation in the nucleus accumbens a structure in the basal forebrain that plays a key role in reward processing. “the more excited your reward system gets at the possibility of getting money even in a perfectly honest context the more likely you are to cheat,” explains greene. in other words, greed may increase one’s predisposition to lying. one lie can lead to another and another, as evidenced by the smooth, remorseless lying of serial con men such as hogue. an experiment by tali sharot, a neuroscientist at university college london, and colleagues showed how the brain becomes inured to the stress or emotional discomfort that happens when we lie, making it easier to tell the next fib. in the fmri scans of the participants, the team focused on the amygdala, a region that is involved in processing emotions. the researchers found that the amygdala’s response to lies got progressively weaker with each lie, even as the lies got bigger. “perhaps engaging in small acts of deception can lead to bigger acts of deception,” she says. lying to tell stories some of the internet’s most viral videos and photographs have been staged by a secretive artist known as zardulu, who rarely reveals the fabrications. “like all myths,” zardulu says, “mine are established to engender a sense of wonder about the world, to counter our perceived mastery and understanding of it.” zardulu appears wearing a ram’s head, symbolizing a journey into the unconscious mind, while the hierophant, an interpreter of mysteries, represents the shadow self. much of the knowledge we use to navigate the world comes from what others have told us. without the implicit trust that we place in human communication, we would be paralyzed as individuals and cease to have social relationships. “we get so much from believing, and there’s relatively little harm when we occasionally get duped,” says tim levine, a psychologist at the university of alabama at birmingham, who calls this idea the truth default theory. being hardwired to be trusting makes us intrinsically gullible. “if you say to someone, ‘i am a pilot,’ they are not sitting there thinking: ‘maybe he’s not a pilot. why would he say he’s a pilot?’ they don’t think that way,” says frank abagnale, jr., a security consultant whose cons as a young man, including forging checks and impersonating an airline pilot, inspired the 2002 movie catch me if you can. “this is why scams work, because when the phone rings and the caller id says it’s the internal revenue service, people automatically believe it is the irs. they don’t realize that someone could manipulate the caller id.” robert feldman, a psychologist at the university of massachusetts, calls that the liar’s advantage. “people are not expecting lies, people are not searching for lies,” he says, “and a lot of the time, people want to hear what they are hearing.” we put up little resistance to the deceptions that please us and comfort us be it false praise or the promise of impossibly high investment returns. when we are fed falsehoods by people who have wealth, power, and status, they appear to be even easier to swallow, as evidenced by the media’s credulous reporting of lochte’s robbery claim, which unraveled shortly thereafter. researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accepting lies that affirm our worldview. memes that claim obama was not born in the united states, deny climate change, accuse the u.s. government of masterminding the terrorist strikes of september 11, 2001, and spread other “alternative facts,” as a trump adviser called his inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the internet and social media because of this vulnerability. debunking them does not demolish their power, because people assess the evidence presented to them through a framework of preexisting beliefs and prejudices, says george lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the university of california, berkeley. “if a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into your frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it or attack it if it’s threatening.” lying for professional gain jayson blair is a life coach, seeking to help people define and achieve their goals. before that, he was a fast rising new york times reporter whose career imploded in 2003 when he was discovered to have fabricated and plagiarized material in dozens of articles. “my world went from one in which i covered the deception of others to being the one doing the deception,” he says, “and eventually, searching for answers to questions about why i lied and why others do so as well.” a recent study led by briony swire thompson, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology at the university of western australia, documents the ineffectiveness of evidence based information in refuting incorrect beliefs. in 2015 swire thompson and her colleagues presented about 2,000 adult americans with one of two statements: “vaccines cause autism” or “donald trump said that vaccines cause autism.” (trump has repeatedly suggested there’s a link, despite the lack of scientific evidence for it.) not surprisingly, participants who were trump supporters showed a decidedly stronger belief in the misinformation when it had trump’s name attached to it. afterward the participants were given a short explanation citing a large scale study for why the vaccine autism link was false, and they were asked to reevaluate their belief in it. the participants across the political spectrum now accepted that the statements claiming the link were untrue, but testing them again a week later showed that their belief in the misinformation had bounced back to nearly the same level. other studies have shown that evidence undermining lies may in fact strengthen belief in them. “people are likely to think that familiar information is true. so any time you retract it, you run the risk of making it more familiar, which makes that retraction actually less effective, ironically, over the long term,” says swire thompson. i experienced this phenomenon firsthand not long after i spoke to swire thompson. when a friend sent me a link to an article ranking the 10 most corrupt political parties in the world, i promptly posted it to a whatsapp group of about a hundred high school friends from india. the reason for my enthusiasm was that the fourth spot in the ranking was held by india’s congress party, which in recent decades has been implicated in numerous corruption scandals. i chortled with glee because i’m not a fan of the party. but shortly after sharing the article, i discovered that the ranking, which included parties from russia, pakistan, china, and uganda, wasn’t based on any metrics. it had been done by a site called bbc newspoint, which sounded like a credible source. but i found out that it had no connection to the british broadcasting corporation. i posted an apology to the group, noting that the article was in all likelihood fake news. that didn’t stop others from reposting the article to the group several times over the next day. i realized that the correction i’d posted had not had any effect. many of my friends because they shared my antipathy toward the congress party were convinced the ranking was true, and every time they shared it, they were unwittingly, or perhaps knowingly, nudging it toward legitimacy. countering it with fact would be in vain. what then might be the best way to impede the fleet footed advance of untruths into our collective lives? the answer isn’t clear. technology has opened up a new frontier for deceit, adding a 21st century twist to the age old conflict between our lying and trusting selves. copyright © 1996 2015 national geographic societycopyright © 2015 2025 national geographic partners, llc. all rights reserved

questions central to the philosophical discussion of lying to others and other deception (interpersonal deceiving) may be divided into two kinds. questions of the first kind are definitional or conceptual. they include the questions of how lying is to be defined, how deceiving is to be defined, and whether lying is always a form of deceiving. questions of the second kind are normative   more particularly, moral. they include the questions of whether lying and deceiving are either defeasibly or non defeasibly morally wrong, whether lying is morally worse than deceiving, and whether, if lying and deception are defeasibly morally wrong, they are merely morally optional on certain occasions, or are sometimes morally obligatory. in this entry, we only consider questions of the first kind. there is no universally accepted definition of lying to others. the dictionary definition of lying is “to make a false statement with the intention to deceive” (oed 1989) but there are numerous problems with this definition. it is both too narrow, since it requires falsity, and too broad, since it allows for lying about something other than what is being stated, and lying to someone who is believed to be listening in but who is not being addressed. the most widely accepted definition of lying is the following: “a lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it” (isenberg 1973, 248) (cf. “[lying is] making a statement believed to be false, with the intention of getting another to accept it as true” (primoratz 1984, 54n2)). this definition does not specify the addressee, however. it may be restated as follows: l1 is the traditional definition of lying. according to l1, there are at least four necessary conditions for lying. first, lying requires that a person make a statement (statement condition). second, lying requires that the person believe the statement to be false; that is, lying requires that the statement be untruthful (untruthfulness condition). third, lying requires that the untruthful statement be made to another person (addressee condition). fourth, lying requires that the person intend that that other person believe the untruthful statement to be true (intention to deceive the addressee condition). these four necessary conditions need to be explained before objections to l1 can be entertained and alternative definitions can be considered. according to the statement condition, lying requires that a person make a statement. making a statement requires the use of conventional signs, or symbols. conventional signs, such as “women” on the door to a restroom, are opposed to natural or causal signs, or indices, such as women coming in and out of a restroom, as well as signs that signify by resemblance, or icons, such as a figure with a triangular dress on the door to a restroom (cf. grotius 2005, 2001; pierce 1955; grice 1989). making a statement, therefore, requires the use of language. a commonly accepted definition of making a statement is the following: “x states that p to y =df (1) x believes that there is an expression e and a language l such that one of the standard uses of e in l is that of expressing the proposition p; (2) x utters e with the intention of causing y to believe that he, x, intended to utter e in that standard use” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 150). it is possible for a person to make a statement using american sign language, smoke signals, morse code, semaphore flags, and so forth, as well as by making specific bodily gestures whose meanings have been established by convention (e.g., nodding one's head in response to a question). hence, it is possible to lie by these means. if it is granted that a person is not making a statement when he wears a wig, gives a fake smile, affects a limp, and so forth, it follows that a person cannot be lying by doing these things (siegler 1966, 128). if it is granted that a person is not making a statement when, for example, she wears a wedding ring when she is not married, or wears a police uniform when she is not a police officer, it follows that she cannot be lying by doing these things. in the case of a person who does not utter a declarative sentence, but who curses, or makes an interjection or an exclamation, or issues a command or an exhortation, or asks a question, or says “hello,” then, if it is granted that she is not making a statement when she does any of these things, it follows that she cannot be lying by doing these things (green 2001, 163 164; but see leonard 1959). an ironic statement, or a statement made as part of a joke, or a statement made by an actor while acting, or a statement made in a novel, is still a statement. more formally, the statement condition of l1 obeys the following three constraints (stokke 2013a, 41): the statement condition is to be distinguished from a different putative necessary condition for lying, namely, the condition that an assertion be made. the assertion condition is not a necessary condition for lying, according to l1. for example, if yin, who does not have a girlfriend, but who wants people to believe that he has a girlfriend, makes the ironic statement “yeah, right, i have a girlfriend” in response to a question from his friend, bolin, who believes that yin is secretly dating someone, with the intention that bolin believe that he actually does have a girlfriend, then this ‘irony lie’ is a lie according to l1, although it is not an assertion. according to the statement condition, it is not possible to lie by omitting to make a statement (mahon 2003; griffiths 2004, 33). so called ‘lies of omission’ (or ‘passive lying’ (opie 1825)) are not lies (douglas 1976, 59; dynel 2011, 154). all lies are lies of commission. it is possible for a person to lie by remaining ‘silent,’ if the ‘silence’ is a previously agreed upon signal with others that is equivalent to making a statement (fried 1978, 57). however, such a lie would not be a ‘lie of omission’ (see people v. meza (1987) in which, on the basis of californian evidence code that “‘statement’” included “nonverbal conduct of a person intended by him as a substitute for oral or written verbal expression,” prospective juror’s eric luis meza’s silence and failure to raise his hand in response to questions was “taken for a negative answer, i.e., a negative statement” (people v. meza 1987, 1647) and he was found guilty of perjury). note that the statement condition, all by itself, does not require that the statement be made to another person, or even that it be expressed aloud or in writing. one’s inner statements to oneself are statements, and, if other conditions are also met, can be “internal lies” (kant 1996, 553 554). according to the untruthfulness condition, lying requires that a person make an untruthful statement, that is, make a statement that she believes to be false. note that this condition is to be distinguished from the putative necessary condition for lying that the statement that the person makes be false (grotius 2005, 1209; krishna 1961, 146). the falsity condition is not a necessary condition for lying according to l1. statements that are truthful may be false. if george makes the statement to hillary (with the intention that hillary believe that statement to be true), “the enemy has weapons of mass destruction,” and that statement is false, he is not lying if he does not believe that statement to be false. statements that are untruthful may be true. in jean paul sartre’s short story, the wall, set during the spanish civil war, pablo ibbieta, a prisoner sentenced to be executed by the fascists, is interrogated by his guards as to the whereabouts of his comrade ramon gris. mistakenly believing gris to be hiding with his cousins, he makes the untruthful statement to them that “gris is hiding in the cemetery” (with the intention that they believe this statement to be true). as it happens, gris is hiding in the cemetery, and the statement is true. gris is arrested at the cemetery, and ibbieta is released (sartre 1937; cf. siegler 1966: 130). according to l1, ibbieta lied to his interrogators, although the untruthful statement he made to them was true, and he did not deceive them about the whereabouts of gris (isenberg 1973, 248; mannison 1969, 138; lindley, 1971; kupfer 1982, 104; faulkner 2013). if a person makes a truthful statement with the intention to deceive another person, then she is not lying, according to the untruthfulness condition. for example, if john and mary are dating, and valentino is mary’s ex boyfriend, and one evening “john asks mary, ‘have you seen valentino this week?,’” and “mary answers: ‘valentino’s been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks,’” and “valentino has in fact been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, but it is also the case that mary had a date with valentino the night before” (coleman and kany 1981, 31), then mary is not lying to john, even if she is attempting to deceive john. this is what is called a palter (see schauer and zeckhauser 2009; they illegitimately add that a palter must succeed in deceiving), or a false implicature (adler 1997), or an attempt to mislead (saul 2012b; webber 2013). in addition to palters not being lies, a double bluff is not a lie either according to the untruthfulness condition. if one makes a truthful statement, intending one’s addressee to believe that the statement is false, then one is not lying. consider the following joke about two travelers on a train from moscow (reputed to be sigmund freud's favorite joke) (cohen 2002, 328): pavel does not lie to trofim, since his statement to trofim is truthful, even if he intends that trofim be deceived by this double bluff. one implication of the untruthfulness condition is that if a person makes a statement that she believes to be neither true nor false, then she cannot be lying (siegler 1966, 133; cf. strawson 1952, 173). for example, if a person begging for money says “all my children need medical attention,” but believes that this proposition is neither true nor false, because he has no children, then he is not lying, even if he is attempting to deceive (chisholm and feehan 1977, 155 6; but see siegler 1966, 135). it is a matter of debate as to whether it is possible to lie using metaphors. for example, if a gardener who has had a very bad crop of tomatoes says “we’ve got tomatoes coming out of our ears,” intending to deceive about his having a bumper crop, then this untruthful statement made with an intention to deceive is typically not considered a lie, because the untruthful statement is metaphorical (saul 2012, 16). nevertheless, some argue that it is possible to lie using metaphors (adler 1997, 444 n. 27; griffiths 2004, 36; dynel 2011, 149). if literally false metaphorical statements can be truthful statements, according to the beliefs of the speaker, and hence, can be untruthful statements, according to the beliefs of the speaker, then the deceptive gardener is lying in this example according to l1. according to the addressee condition, lying requires that a person make an untruthful statement to another person (or, strictly speaking, to a believed other person, since one might, e.g., mistake a waxed dummy for another person, and lie to it). that is, lying requires that a person address another person (simpson 1992, 626). according to l1, it is not possible for me to lie to no one whatsoever (i.e., not even myself), and it is not possible to lie to someone whom one is not addressing but whom one believes is listening in on a conversation. for example, if mickey and danny both believe that the f.b.i. is monitoring their telephone conversation, and mickey says to danny, “the pick up is at midnight tomorrow,” with the intention of deceiving the fbi agents listening in, then mickey is not lying to the f.b.i. agents (this is a “bogus disclosure” (newey 1997, 115)). according to l1, it is possible to lie to a general audience. it is possible for a person to lie by publishing an untruthful report about an event (kant 1997, 203), or by making an untruthful statement on a tax return, or by sending an untruthful e mail to everyone on a mailing list, or by making an untruthful statement in a magazine advertisement or a television commercial. in these cases, the readers, hearers, watchers, etc., are the addressees. according to the addressee condition, lying necessarily involves addressing someone whom you believe to be a person capable of understanding your statement and forming beliefs on that basis. it is not possible to lie to those whom you believe to be non persons (goldfish, dogs, robots, etc.) or persons whom you believe cannot understand the statements that are made to them (infants, the insane, etc., as well as those whom you believe cannot understand the language you are speaking in). it is possible to lie to other persons via intermediaries which are not persons, however (e.g., entering false answers to questions asked by a bank’s atm). according to the intention to deceive the addressee condition, lying requires that a person make an untruthful statement to another person with the intention that that other person believe that untruthful statement to be true. making ironic statements, telling jokes, writing fiction, acting in a play, and so forth, without the intention that the addressee believe these untruthful statements to be true, is not lying (morris 1976, 391). if x makes an untruthful statement to y, without the intention that y believe that untruthful statement to be true, but with the intention that y believe something else to be true that x believes to be true, then x is not lying to y, according to l1. examples of such non deceptive untruthful statements include polite untruths (kant 1997, 27; mahon 2003, 109). for example, if servant igor makes the untruthful statement to unwelcome visitor damian, “madam is not at home,” without the intention that damian believe it to be true that she is not home (that would be lying on igor’s part), but with the intention that damian believe it to be true that it is inconvenient for madam to see damian now, something that igor believes to be true, then according to l1, igor is not lying to damian (isenberg 1973, 256). however, for igor to intend that damian believe this, it must be the case that igor believes that this is how damian understands “madam is not at home.” polite untruths may be said to be examples of “falsifications but not lies,” since the person “says just what etiquette demands” (shiffrin 2014, 19). as it has been said about untruthful statements situations “in which politeness requires some sort of remark” and the other person “knows quite well that the statement is false,” such statements “are not really lies” (coleman and kay 1981, 29). they are better considered as cases of speaking in code. another example of a non deceptive untruthful statement is what has been called an “altruistic lie” (fallis 2009, 50; cf. augustine 1952, 57), such as when a speaker makes an untruthful statement to a hearer whom he believes distrusts him, in order that the hearer will believe something that the speaker believes to be true. this is not a lie according to l1. such non deceptive untruths are not to be confused with white lies, i.e., harmless lies (bok 1978, 58; sweetser 1987, 54; 52 n. 73) or prosocial lies (also called social lies), i.e., lies that do not harm social life but protect it (meibauer 2014, 152; sweetser 1987, 54), or fibs, i.e., inconsequential lies told for selfish reasons (sweetser 1987, 54). white lies, prosocial lies, and fibs are all intentionally deceptive, and are all lies according to l1 (green 2001, 169). for example, “both american and ecuadorian cultures would probably consider jacobo’s reply to be a white lie,” and hence deceptive, in the following case presented to ecuadorians by linguists: “teresa just bought a new dress. upon trying it on for the first time, she asks her husband jacobo, ‘does it look good on me?’ jacobo responds, ‘yes’ even though he really thinks that the dress is ugly and too tight” (hardin 2010, 3207; cf. dynel 2011, 160). or, to take another example, “some people would call it a white lie to tell a dying person whatever he or she needs to hear to die in peace” (sweetser 1987, 54). note that both white lies and prosocial lies are to be distinguished from “lies which most people would think justified by some higher good achieved but which would not be called white lies [or prosocial lies], since their informational consequences are too major (however moral),” such as “to lie to the gestapo about the location of a jew” (sweetser 1987, 54). according to the untruthfulness condition, it is not merely the case that the person who makes the untruthful statement intends that some other person believe the untruthful statement to be true; the person intends that the addressee believe the untruthful statement to be true. also, according to this condition, it is not merely the case that the person intends that the addressee believe some statement to be true that the person believes to be false; the person intends that the addressee believe to be true the untruthful statement that is made to the addressee. if maximilian is a crime boss, and alessandro is one of his henchmen, whom he secretly believes is a police informant, and maximilian makes the untruthful statement to alessandro “there are no informants in my organization,” without the intention that alessandro believe that statement to be true, but with the intention that alessandro believe that maximilian believes that statement to be true, then maximilian is not lying according to l1 (mahon 2008, 220). (maximilian has, of course, attempted to deceive alessandro). this conclusion has prompted some to revise l1 to include more than one intention to deceive. according to the untruthfulness condition, it is sufficient for lying that the person who makes the untruthful statement intends that the addressee believe the untruthful statement to be true; it is not necessary that the addressee believe the untruthful statement to be true. that is, a lie remains a lie if it is disbelieved. if sophie makes the untruthful statement to nicole “i didn’t get any homework today,” with the intention that nicole believe that statement to be true, and if nicole does not believe that statement to be true, then sophie is still lying. this is because ‘lie’ is not an achievement or success verb, and an act of lying is not a perlocutionary act. the existence of an act of lying does not depend upon the production of a particular response or state in the addressee (mannison 1969, 135; wood 1973: 199; maccormick 1983, 9 n. 23; but see reboul 1994). as it has been said, “it is very odd to think that whether a speaker lies hinges upon the persuasiveness of the speaker or the credulity of the listener” (shiffrin 2014, 13). because l1 does not have an assertion condition, however, according to l1 it is possible to lie by making ironic statements, telling jokes, writing fiction, acting in a play, and so forth, if the person making the untruthful statement (somehow) intends that it be believed to be true, as in the case of the ‘irony lie’ above. similarly, if someone intends to deceive using a joke for example, if con artist david says “yeah, i am a billionaire. that's why i am in this dive” to his mark, greg, at a bar, intending that greg believe that david is a billionaire who is attempting to to pass incognito in a bar then this ‘joke lie’ is a lie according to l1. if a novelist were to write a novel with the intention that her audience believe that this was a true story disguised as a novel a pretend roman à clef then this ‘fiction lie’ would be a lie according to l1. if an actor in a play were to deliver an untruthful statement with the intention that his audience believe the statement to be true say, if an an actor delivered a line about his life being too short with the intention that the audience believed that the actor was actually dying from some disease (“it is possible that the performance is part of an elaborate deception aimed at getting members of the audience to believe that the particular line from the play is actually true” (fallis 2009, 56)) then this ‘acting lie’ would be a lie according to l1. two kinds of objections have been made to l1. first, objections have been made to each necessary condition, on the basis that it is not necessary for lying. according to these objections, l1 is too narrow. second, objections have been made to the four necessary conditions being jointly sufficient for lying, on the basis that some further condition is necessary for lying. according to these objections, l1 is too broad. against the statement condition of l1 it has been objected that the making of a statement is not necessary for lying. lying to others may be defined as “any form of behavior the function of which is to provide others with false information or to deprive them of true information” (smith 2004, 14), or as “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue” (vrij 2000, 6). importantly, this entails that lying can consist of simply withholding information with the intent to deceive, without making any statement at all (ekman 1985, 28; scott 2006, 4). those who make this objection would make lying the same as intentionally deceiving (ekman 1985, 26). against the untruthfulness condition of l1 it has been objected that an untruthful statement is not necessary for lying. this objection comes in a variety of forms. there are those who argue any statement made with an intention to deceive is a lie, including a truthful statement that is made with an intention to deceive (barnes 1994, 11; davidson 1980, 88). lying may thus be defined as “any intentionally deceptive message that is stated” (bok 1978, 13). there are also those who, relying upon a gricean account of conversational implicature (grice 1989, 39)), argue that someone who makes a truthful statement but who thereby conversationally implicates a believed false statement is lying (meibauer 2011, 285; 2014a). importantly, such an “untruthful implicature” (dynel 2011, 159 160) is “directly intended” (adler 1997, 446). thirdly, there are those who argue for the possibility of “lying ironically” (simpson 1992, 631), or indirect lying. if a speaker makes an ironic untruthful statement, then “through this presentation of himself as insincerely asserting he presents himself as believing” the opposite of what he says, which is “capacity to… assert in effect” (simpson 1992, 630). if the person is “insincere in this” and actually does believe in the truth of what he states, despite invoking trust in his believing its opposite, then “this is a lie (an indirect lie, we might say)” (simpson 1992, 630). for example, if a person who is listening to a sappy pop song at a party is asked if she likes this kind of music and replies, ironically, “yeah, right, i love this kind of music,” then she is lying if she actually does love this kind of music (cf. dynel 2011, 148 149). against the untruthfulness condition it has also been objected that it is not necessary for lying that the statement that is made is believed to be false; it is sufficient that the statement is not believed to be true, or is believed to be probably false (carson 2006, 298; 2010, 18). as it has been claimed, “agnostics about the truth of their assertions who nonetheless assert them without qualification tell lies” (shiffrin 2014, 13). against the addressee condition of l1 it has been objected that it is sufficient for lying that the untruthful statement is made, even if it is made to no one   not even to oneself (griffiths 2004, 31). lying may thus be defined as “conscious expression of other than what we believe” (shibles 1985, 33). it has also been objected that it is possible to lie to third parties who are not addressees. in general, it is possible to distinguish between cases where “the hearer eavesdrops, unbeknown to the first and second parties” (eavesdropping), cases where “the speaker utters p to the interlocutor while the hearer, with the awareness of both other parties, listens in and knows that the first  and second party know he is listening in… although it is for the interlocutor that the utterance is intended” (kibbitzing), as well as cases similar to kibbitzing except that “the utterance is also intended for the hearer [who knows that they know that he is listening in]” (disclosure), and cases similar to disclosure “except that although the first and second parties know that the hearer is listening in, the hearer does not know that they are listening in” (bogus disclosure) (newey 1997, 115). even if it is not possible to lie to eavesdroppers, or to those merely listening in, as in the case of kibbitzing, it may be possible to lie in the cases of bogus disclosure, as in the example above of mickey saying to danny, “the pick up is at midnight tomorrow,” with the intention of deceiving the f.b.i. agents listening in. it may even be possible to lie in the case of disclosure. in the 1978 thriller capricorn one about a mars landing hoax, during a nationally televised transmission between the astronauts ‘in space’ and their wives at the control center, which is being monitored closely by nasa handlers, colonel charles brubaker tells his wife kay to tell his son that “when i get back, i’m gonna take him to yosemite again, like last summer.” in fact he brought his son to a different place the previous summer (flatbush, where a movie was being shot), something that his wife knows. according to this objection, brubaker is lying to his nasa handlers about what he did last summer, even if they are not his addressees. against the addressee condition it has also been objected that it is possible to lie to an animal, a robot, etc., as well as to what might be another person for example, if a home owner, woken up in the middle of the night and wondering if there are burglars below the stairs, shouts down, “i’m bringing my rifle down there,” although he has no rifle (chisholm and feehan 1977, 157). against the intention to deceive the addressee condition of l1 it has been objected that, even if an intention to deceive the addressee is required for lying, it is not necessary that it be an intention to deceive the addressee about the content of the untruthful statement; it may be an intention to deceive the addressee about the beliefs of the speaker abut the statement specifically, the belief that the untruthful statement is true (chisholm and feehan 1977, 152; williams 2002, 74; reboul 1994, 294; mahon 2008, 220; tollefsen 2014, 24). there are at least two ways in which l1 could be modified in response to this objection. first, it could be held that what is essential to lying is the intention to deceive the hearer about the speaker’s belief that the untruthful statement is true: “x utters a sentence, ‘s,’ where ‘s’ means that p, in doing which either x expresses his belief that p, or x intends the person addressed to take it that x believes that p” (williams 2002, 74) and “the speaker believes [p] to be false” (williams 2002, 96 97). l1 could therefore be modified as follows: alternatively, l1 could be modified to incorporate either intention, as follows: against this condition it has also been argued that it is not necessary that it be an intention to deceive the addressee about either the content of the untruthful statement or about the beliefs of the speaker about the untruthful statement. it is sufficient that there is an intention to deceive about some matter that is, it is sufficient that the speaker intend that the hearer believe to be true something that the speaker believes to be false. note that those who make this objection would turn lying into any deception involving untruthful statements. if this objection were combined with the objection that lying could be directed to third parties (as in bogus disclosure, or disclosure), l1 could be modified, as follows: against this condition it has also been objected that although there is “a necessary relationship between lying and deception,” nevertheless this intention should be understood merely as the intention to be deceptive to another person, which is the intention “to conceal information” from the other person (lackey 2013, 5 7). according to this objection, concealing evidence, understood as hiding evidence or keeping evidence secret, counts as being deceptive to another person. l1 could be modified, as follows: finally, against this intention to deceive the addressee condition it has been objected that no intention to deceive is required for lying (shibles 1985, 33; kemp and sullivan 1993, 153; griffiths 2004, 31; carson et al. 1982; carson 1988; 2006; 2010; sorensen 2007; 2010; 2011; fallis, 2009; 2010; 2012; 2015; saul, 2012a; 2012b; stokke 2013a, 2013b; 2014; shiffrin 2014). if the sworn in witness in the trial of a violent criminal goes on the record and gives untruthful testimony in order, for example, to avoid being killed by the defendant or any of his criminal associates without any intention that that testimony be believed to be true by any person (not the jury, the judge, the lawyers, the journalists covering the trial, the people in the gallery, the readers of the newspaper reports, etc.), then the witness is still lying (but see jones 1986). such non deceptive lies are lies according to this objection (but see lackey 2013 for the argument that these lies are intentionally deceptive, and fallis 2015 for the argument that they are not intentionally deceptive). it has been objected that l1 is not sufficient for lying because it is also necessary that the untruthful statement be false (coleman and kay 1981, 28; oed, 1989; moore 2000). this is the falsity condition for lying (grimaltos and rosell forthcoming, see other internet resources). for most objectors the falsity condition supplements l1 and makes this definition of lying even narrower (e.g., coleman and kay 1981). for other objectors the falsity condition is part of a different definition of lying, and makes that definition narrower (carson 2006, 284; 2010, 17; saul 2012b, 6). it has been objected that l1 is not sufficient for lying because it is also necessary to intend that that other person believe that that statement is believed to be true (frankfurt 1999, 96; simpson 1992, 625; faulkner 2007, 527). if harry makes the untruthful statement “i have no change in my pocket” to michael, but harry does not intend that michael believe that harry believes it to be true, then harry is not lying to michael, even if harry intends that michael believe it to be true (frankfurt 1986, 85; 1999, 96). this additional condition would make l1 even narrower, since it would have the result that maximilian is not lying to alessandro in the example above. finally, it has been objected that l1 is insufficient because lying requires that an untruthful assertion be made, and not merely that an untruthful statement be made. this is the assertion condition for lying. according to this objection, one is not lying when one makes a deceptive untruthful ironic statement (‘irony lie’), or a deceptive untruthful joke (‘joke lie’), or a deceptive untruthful fiction (‘fiction lie’), or deceptive untruthful acting (‘acting life’), since in none of these cases is one making an assertion. for most objectors the assertion condition supplements l1 and makes l1 even narrower (chisholm and feehan 1977; fried 1978; simpson 1992; williams 2002; faulkner 2007). for others the assertion condition is part of a different definition of lying, and makes that definition narrower (sorensen 2007; fallis 2009; stokke 2013a). the most important objection to l1 is that lying does not require an intention to deceive. this has led to a division amongst those writing on the definition of lying. there are two positions held by those who write on the definition of lying: deceptionism and non deceptionism (mahon 2014). the first group, deceptionists, hold that an intention to deceive is necessary for lying. deceptionists may be divided further in turn into simple deceptionists, who hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful statement with an intention to deceive; complex deceptionists, who hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful assertion with the intention to deceive by means of a breach of trust or faith; and moral deceptionists, who hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive, as well as the violation of a moral right of another or the moral wronging of another. the second group, non deceptionists, hold that an intention to deceive is not necessary for lying. they see the traditional definition as both incorrect and insufficient. non deceptionists may be further divided into simple non deceptionists, who hold that the making of an untruthful statement is sufficient for lying, and complex non deceptionists, who hold that a further condition, in addition to making an untruthful statement, is required for lying. some complex non deceptionists hold that lying requires warranting the truth of what is stated, and other complex non deceptionists hold that lying requires the making of an untruthful assertion. simple deceptionists include those who defend l1 (isenberg 1973; primoratz 1984) as well as those who defend the modified versions of this definition: l2 (williams 2002), l3 (mahon 2008), l4 (newey 1997), and l5 (lackey 2013). for simple deceptionists, lying requires the making of an untruthful statement with an intention to deceive, but it does not require the making of an assertion or a breach of trust or faith. complex deceptionists hold that, in addition to requiring an intention to deceive, lying requires the making of an untruthful assertion, as well as (or which therefore entails) a breach of trust or faith. roderick chisholm and thomas feehan hold that one is only making an assertion to another person if one makes a statement to another person and one believes that the conditions are such that the other person is justified in believing both that one believes one’s statement to be true and that one intends that the other person believe that one believes one’s statement to be true: “x asserts p to y =df x states p to y and does so under conditions which, he believes, justify y in believing that he, x, not only accepts p, but also intends to contribute causally to y’s believing that he, x, accepts p” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 152). a lie is an untruthful assertion, that is, the speaker believes the statement that is made is not true, or is false: in the case of a lie, the speaker is attempting to get the hearer to believe a falsehood. note, however, that this falsehood is not (normally) what the speaker is stating. rather, the falsehood that the speaker is attempting to get the hearer to believe is that the speaker believes the statement to be true. this is the intention to deceive in lying (although, strictly speaking, deception is foreseen and not intended (“essentially, under this definition, you are only lying if you expect that you will be successful in deceiving someone about what you believe” (fallis 2009, 45)). the speaker is also attempting to get the hearer to have this false belief about what the speaker believes “in a special way by getting his victim to place his faith in him” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 149). this is the breach of trust or breach of faith in lying: “lying, unlike the other types of deception, is essentially a breach of faith” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 153). their complete definition of a lie may be stated as follows: according to l6 it not possible to lie if the speaker believes that the conditions are such that the hearer is not justified in believing that the speaker is making a truthful statement. kant provides an example in which a thief grabs a victim by the throat and asks him where he keeps his money. if the victim were to make the untruthful statement, “i have no money,” kant says that this is not a lie, “for the other knows that… he also has no right whatever to demand the truth from me” (kant 1997, 203; but see mahon 2009). chisholm and feehan hold that the victim is not making an assertion, and hence, is not lying, given that the victim believes that the thief is not justified in believing that the victim is being truthful (chisholm and feehan 1977, 154 155; but see strudler 2009 (cf. strudler 2005; 2010), for the argument that the thief can believe that the victim is credible, even if not trustworthy, because he is motivated by the threat of violence). charles fried also holds that lying requires an assertion and a breach of faith, but he rejects l6, arguing that it is possible for the victim to lie to the thief in kant’s example (fried 1978, 55 n1). according to him, making an assertion involves making a statement and intending to cause belief in the truth of that statement by giving an implicit “warranty”or an implicit “promise or assurance that the statement is true” (fried 1978, 57). when one asserts, one intends to “invite belief, and not belief based on the evidence of the statement so much as on the faith of the statement” (fried 1978, 56). a lie is an untruthful assertion. the speaker intends to cause belief in the truth of a statement that the speaker believes to be false. hence, a lie involves an intention to deceive. the speaker also implicitly assures or promises the hearer that the statement that is made is true. hence, the speaker is giving an insincere assurance, or breaking a promise  “in lying the promise is made and broken at the same moment”  and every lie involves a “breach of trust” (fried 1978, 67). fried’s definition of lying may be stated as follows (modified to include cases in which speakers only intend to deceive about their beliefs): david simpson also holds that lying requires an assertion and a breach of faith. in asserting “we present ourselves as believing something while and through invoking (although not necessarily gaining) the trust of the one” to whom we assert (simpson 1992, 625). this “invocation of trust occurs through an act of ‘open sincerity’” according to which “we attempt to establish… both that we believe some proposition and that we intend them to realize that we believe it” (simpson 1992, 625). lying is “insincere assertion” in the sense that “the asserter’s requisite belief is missing” (simpson 1992, 625). this entails that someone who lies aims to deceive in three ways. first, “we have the intention that someone be in error regarding some matter, as we see the fact of the matter” (simpson 1992, 624). this is the “primary deceptive intention” (simpson 1992, 624). second, we intend to deceive the other person “regarding our belief regarding that matter… we don’t lie about this belief, but we intend to deceive regarding it” (simpson 1992, 624). we intend that they be deceived, about whatever matter it is, on the basis of their being deceived about our belief in this matter. finally, someone who lies “insincerely invokes trust” (simpson 1992, 625). we intend that they be deceived about our belief in this matter on the basis of this insincere invocation of trust. other forms of intended deception that are not lies do not attempt to deceive “by way of a trust invoked through an open sincerity” (simpson 1992, 626). this is what makes lies special: “it involves a certain sort of betrayal” (simpson 1992, 626). since it is possible to lie without having the primary deceptive intention, simpson’s definition needs to be modified accordingly: paul faulkner holds that lying necessarily involves telling someone something, which necessarily involves invoking trust. he distinguishes between telling and making an assertion, and argues that in certain cases the implication of my assertion “is sufficiently clear that i can be said to have told you this” (faulkner 2013, 3102) even if i did not assert this. he defines telling as follows: “x tells y that p if and only if (i) x intends that y believe that p, and (ii) x intends that y believe that p because y recognizes that (i)” (faulkner 2013, 3103). in telling another person something, the speaker intends that the hearer believe what she is stating or implying, but she intends that the hearer believe what she is stating or implying for the reason that “y [the hearer] believes x [the speaker]” (faulkner 2013, 3102). it follows that tellings “operate by invoking an audience’s trust” (faulkner 2013, 3103). in lying, the speaker intends that the hearer believe what she is stating or implying on the basis of trust: “in lying, a speaker does not intend his audience accept his lie because of independent evidence but intends his audience accept his lie because of his telling it. the motivation for presenting his assertion as sincere is to thereby ensure that an audience treats his intention that the audience believe that p as a reason for believing that p” (faulkner, 2007, 527) a lie is an untruthful telling. the speaker believes that what she asserts or implies is false, she intends that the hearer believe that what she states or implies is true, she intends that the hearer believe that she intends this, and she intends that this be the reason that the hearer believes that what she states or implies is true: “x’s utterance u to y is a lie if and only if (i) in uttering u, x tells y that p, and (ii) x believes that p is false” (faulkner 2013, 3103). faulkner’s definition of lying also needs to be modified to include cases in which speakers only intend to deceive about their beliefs: it is an implication of complex deceptionist definitions of lying that certain cases of putative lies are not lies because no assertion is made. consider the following case of an (attempted) confidence trick double bluff (newey 1997, 98). sarah, with collaborator charlie, wants to play a confidence trick on andrew. she wants andrew to buy shares in cadbury. she decides to deceive andrew into thinking that kraft is planning a takeover bid for cadbury. sarah knows that andrew distrusts her. if she tells him that kraft is planning a takeover bid for cadbury, he will not believe her. if she tells him that there is no takeover bid, in an (attempted) double bluff, he might believe the opposite of what she says, and so be deceived. but this simple double bluff is too risky on its own. so sarah gets charlie, whom andrew trusts, to lie to him that kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for cadbury. she also gets charlie to tell andrew that she believes that it is false that kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for cadbury. sarah then goes to andrew, and tells him, “kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for cadbury.” she does not intend that andrew believe that she believes that kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for cadbury. however, she intends that he believe that she is mistaken, and that in fact kraft is about to launch a takeover bid for cadbury. as a result, he will be deceived. according to l6, l7, l8, and l9, sarah is not lying, because she is not asserting anything. according to simpson, for example, sarah would only be “pretending to invoke trust” (simpson 1992, 628), and would not be invoking trust. in such a case, the speaker intends to represent himself as “intending to represent himself as believing what he does not” (simpson 1992, 628). in order to lie, “one must pretend sincerity, but also act on an intention that this sincerity be accepted otherwise one is pretending to lie, and not lying” (simpson 1992, 629). sarah would be merely pretending to lie to andrew, in order to deceive him. another case of a putative lie that is not a lie according to complex deceptionist definitions of lying is a triple bluff (cf. faulkner 2007, 527). imagine an even more devious pavel, from the example above, telling an openly distrustful trofim, in response to trofim's question, that he is going to “pinsk.” he is actually going to minsk, but he answers“pinsk” in order to have trofim believe that he is attempting a double bluff. if it works, trofim will respond by telling him “liar! you say you are going to pinsk in order to make me believe you are going to minsk. but i know you are going to pinsk.” according to l6, l7, l8, and l9, pavel is not lying to trofim. he is pretending to attempt to deceive him with a double bluff, in order to actually attempt to deceive him with a triple bluff. at no point is he invoking trust, and breaching that trust. moral deceptionists hold that in addition to making an untruthful statement with an intention to deceive, lying requires the violation of a moral right of another, or the moral wronging of another. according to chisholm and feehan, every lie is a violation of the right of a hearer, since “it is assumed that, if a person x asserts a proposition p to another person y, then y has the right to expect that x himself believes p. and it is assumed that x knows, or at least that he ought to know, that, if he asserts p to y, while believing himself that p is not true, then he violates this right of y’s” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 153, [variables have been changed for uniformity]). nevertheless, it is not part of their definition of lying that lying involves the violation of the right of another person. according to most philosophers, the claim that lying is (either defeasibly or non defeasibly) morally wrong is “a synthetic judgment and not an analytic one” (kemp and sullivan 1993, 153). however, ‘lie’ is considered by some philosophers to be a thick ethical term that it both describes a type of action and morally evaluates that type of action negatively (williams 1985, 140). for some philosophers, “the wrongfulness of lying is… built into the definition of the term” (kemp and sullivan 1993, 153). for these philosophers, the claim that lying is (either defeasibly or non defeasibly) morally wrong is a tautology (margolis 1962). according to hugo grotius, it is part of the meaning of ‘lie’ when it is “strictly taken” that it involves “the violation of a real right” of the person lied to, namely, “the freedom of him… to judge” (grotius 2005, 1212). one can only lie to someone who possesses this right to exercise liberty of judgment. grotius’s definition of lying is therefore as follows (modified accordingly): according to l10, one cannot lie to “children or madmen,” for example, since they lack the right of liberty of judgment (grotius 2005, 1212). one cannot lie to someone who has given “express consent” to be told untruths, since he has given up the right to exercise his liberty of judgment about these matters (grotius 2005, 1214). one cannot lie to someone who by “tacit consent” or presumed consent “founded upon just reason” has given up the right to exercise his liberty of judgment about some matter, “on account of the advantage, that he shall get by it,” such as when “a person… comforts his sick friend, by making him believe what is false,” since “no wrong is done to him that is willing” (grotius 2005, 1215 1217). furthermore, “he who has an absolute right over all the rights of another,” is not lying when he “makes use of that right, in telling something false, either for his particular advantage, or for the publick good” (grotius 2005, 1216 1218). the right to exercise one’s liberty of judgment can also be taken away in cases “when the life of an innocent person, or something equal to it,” is at stake, or when “the execution of a dishonest act be otherwise prevented” (grotius 2005, 1221). in such a case, the person has forfeited his right, and “speaking falsely to those like thieves to whom truthfulness is not owed cannot be called lying” (bok 1978, 14). alan donagan also incorporates moral conditions into his definition of lying (modified to include cases in which speakers only intend to deceive about their beliefs): according to l11, it is not possible to lie to “children, madmen, or those whose minds have been impaired by age or illness” (donagan 1977, 89), since they are not fully responsible and rational persons. it is also not possible to lie to “a would be murderer who threatens your life if you will not tell him where his quarry has gone” (donagan 1977, 89), and in general when you are acting under duress in any way (such as a witness in fear of his life on the witness stand, or a victim being robbed by a thief), since statements made in such circumstances are not freely made. it has been objected that these moral deceptionist definitions are unduly narrow and restrictive (bok 1978). surely, for example, it is possible to lie to a would be murderer, whether it is impermissible, as some absolutist deontologists maintain (augustine 1952; aquinas 1972 (cf. macintyre 1995b); kant 1996 (cf. mahon 2006); newman 1880; geach 1977; betz 1985; pruss 1999; tollefsen 2014), or permissible (i.e., either optional or obligatory), as consequentialists and moderate deontologists maintain (constant 1964; mill 1863; sidgwick 1981; bok 1978; macintyre 1995a; cf. kagan 1998). it has also been objected that these moral deceptionist definitions are morally lax (kemp and sullivan 1993, 158 9). by rendering certain deceptive untruthful statements to others as non lies, they make it permissible to act in a way that would otherwise be open to moral censure. in general, even those philosophers who hold that all lies have an inherent negative weight, albeit such that it can be overridden, and hence, who hold that lying is defeasibly morally wrong, do not incorporate moral necessary conditions into their definitions of lying (bok 1978; kupfer 1982; cf. wiles 1988). non deceptionists hold that an intention to deceive is not necessary for lying. for simple non deceptionists (augustine 1952 (cf. griffiths 2003, 31); aquinas 1952; shibles 1985), there is nothing more to lying than making an untruthful statement. according to aquinas, for example, a jocose lie is a lie. this position is not defended by contemporary philosophers. for complex non deceptionists, untruthfulness is not sufficient for lying. in order to differentiate lying from telling jokes, being ironic, acting, etc., a further condition must be met. for some complex non deceptionists, that further condition is warranting the truth of the untruthful statement. for other complex non deceptionists, that condition is making an assertion. thomas carson holds that it is possible to lie by making a false and untruthful statement to an addressee without intending to deceive the addressee, so long as the statement is made in a context such that one “warrants the truth” of the statement (and one does not believe oneself to be not warranting the truth of the statement), or one intends to warrant the truth of the statement: carson includes the falsity condition in both of his definitions; however, he is prepared to modify both definitions so that the falsity condition is not required (carson 2010, 39). he also holds that the untruthfulness condition is not stringent enough, since, if a speaker simply does “not believe” her statement to be true (but does not believe it to be false), or believes that her statement is “probably false” (but does not believe it to be false), then she is lying. carson gives two examples of non deceptive lies: a guilty student who tells a college dean that he did not cheat on an examination, without intending that the dean believe him (since “he is really hard boiled, he may take pleasure in thinking that the dean knows he is guilty”), because he knows that the dean’s policy is not to punish a student for cheating unless the student admits to cheating, and a witness who provides untruthful (and false) testimony about a defendant, where there is a preponderance of evidence against the defendant, without the intention that the testimony be believed by anyone, in order to avoid suffering retaliation from the defendant and/or his henchmen (carson 2006, 289; 2010, 21). neither person is lying according to the definitions of lying of simple deceptionists (l1, l2, l3, l4, and l5) or complex deceptionists (l6, l7, l8, and l9) (cf. simpson 1992, 631) or moral deceptionists (l10, l11). both are lying according to l12 and l13, because each warrants the truth of his statement, even though neither intends to deceive his addressee. it has been argued that the witness and the student do have an intention to deceive (meibauer 2011, 282; 2014a, 105). it has also been argued that they are being deceptive, even if they lack an intention that their untruthful statements be believed to be true (lackey 2013; but see fallis 2015). however, it has also been argued that they fail to warrant the truth of their statements, and hence fail to be lying according to l12 and l13. one argument is that, in the witness example, the statement is coerced, and “coerced speech acts are not genuinely assertoric” (leland 2013, 3; cf. kenyon 2010). “in the context of a threat of violent death, the mere fact that he is speaking under oath is not sufficient to institute an ordinary warranting context” (leland 2013, 4). another argument is that the witness and the student are not warranting the truth of their statements because they believe that their audiences believe that they are being untruthful. carson has said that “if one warrants the truth of a statement, then one promises or guarantees, ether explicitly or implicitly, that what one says is true” (carson 2010, 26) and “warranting the truth of a statement presupposes that the statement is being used to invite or influence belief. it does not make sense for one to guarantee the truth of something that one is not inviting or influencing others to believe” (carson 2010, 36). the result is that to lie is to breach trust: “to lie, on my view, is to invite others to trust and rely on what one says by warranting its truth, but, at the same time, to betray that trust by making false statements that one does not believe” (carson 2010, 34). the combination of warranting the truth of one’s statement and breaching trust would appear to make carson’s definition of lying similar to that of complex deceptionists such as chisholm and feehan. it would also appear to produce similar results. for example, carson says the following about negotiators: if a negotiator makes an untruthful statement, “that is the highest i can go,” to another negotiator, then, since the negotiator believes that the other negotiator believes that he is making an untruthful statement, he cannot intend to warrant the truth of his statement, and/or the context (of negotiation) is such that he is not warranting the truth of his statement. as a result, he is is not lying, according to l12. he is not lying according to l13, either, at least if it is true that you cannot “intend to do something that you do not expect to succeed at” (fallis 2009, 43 n 48; cf. newey 1997, 96 97). it seems that the same thing can be said about the student and the witness. if the student believes that the dean already knows he is guilty, and if the witness believes that the jury, etc., already knows that the defendant is guilty, then it seems that neither can intend to warrant the truth of his statement, and/or the context is such that neither is warranting the truth of his statement. if this is so, then neither is lying according to l12 and l13. carson has said, about their complex deceptionist definition of lying, “chisholm and feehan’s definition has the very odd and unacceptable result that a notoriously dishonest person cannot lie to people who he knows distrust him” (carson 2010, 23). it does seem, however, that carson’s definition has the same result. jennifer saul also holds that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive. she has provided a modified version of l12 that combines the warranting context condition, and the not believing that one is not warranting condition, in the single condition of believing that one is in a warranting context: according to saul, it is not possible to lie if one does not believe that one is in a warranting context. saul considers the case of a putative lie told in a totalitarian state: “this is the case of utterances demanded by a totalitarian state. these utterances of sentences supporting the state are made by people who don’t believe them, to people who don’t believe them. everyone knows that false things are being said, and that they are only being said only because they are required by the state. […] it seems somewhat reasonable to suggest that, since everyone is forced to make these false utterances, and everyone knows they are false, they cease to be genuine lies” (saul 2012, 9). saul adds that “people living in a totalitarian state, making pro state utterances, are a trickier case (which they should be). whether or not their utterances are made in contexts where a warrant of truth is present is not at all clear” (saul 2012, 11). if a speaker is making an untruthful statement to a hearer, and “everyone knows that false things are being said,” that is, the speaker knows that the hearer knows that the speaker is being untruthful, then the speaker does not believe that she is in a warranting context. according to l14, the speaker is not lying. however, it is arguable that in both the student and the witness cases, “everyone knows that false things are being said,” and hence, that the speaker does not believe that he is in a warranting context. if this is so, then according to l14, neither the student nor the witness is lying. roy sorensen agrees with carson that lying does not require an intention to deceive, and that there can be non deceptive “bald faced” lies (sorensen 2007) and “knowledge lies” (sorensen 2010). however, he rejects l12, since it entails that one cannot lie when the falsity of what one is stating is common knowledge: “carson’s definition of lying does not relieve the narrowness. the concept of warrant is not broad enough to explain how we can lie in the face of common knowledge. one can warrant p only if p might be the case. when the falsehood of p is common knowledge, no party to the common knowledge can warrant p because p is epistemically impossible” (carson 2007, 254). according to sorensen, a negotiator who tells “a falsehood that will lead to better coordination between buyer and seller” is telling a bald faced lie (sorensen 2007, 262). sorensen defines lying as follows: “lying is just asserting what one does not believe” (sorensen 2007, 256). it is a condition on telling a lie that one makes an assertion. sorensen differentiates between assertions and non assertions according to “narrow plausibility”: “to qualify as an assertion, a lie must have narrow plausibility. thus, someone who only had access to the assertion might believe it. this is the grain of truth behind ‘lying requires the intention to deceive.’ bald faced lies show that assertions do not need to meet a requirement of wide plausibility, that is, credibility relative to one’s total evidence” (sorensen 2007, 255). sorensen provides, as examples of assertions, and hence, lies, the servant of a maestro telling an unwanted female caller that the sounds she hears over the phone are not the maestro and that the servant is merely “dusting the piano keys,” and a doctor in an iraqi hospital during the iraq war telling a journalist who can see patients in the ward in uniforms that “i see no uniforms” (sorensen 2007, 253). the claim that these are assertions, however, and therefore lies, is controversial (cf. keiser 2015). these statements neither express the speaker’s belief, nor aim to affect the belief of the addressee in any way, since their falsehood is common knowledge (cf. williams 2002, 74). as it has been said: “sorensen does not offer a definition of asserting a proposition (with necessary and sufficient conditions)… to the extent that he does not fully analyze the concept of assertion, sorensen’s definition of lying is unclear” (carson 2010, 36). it may be argued against sorensen that the “utterances in question are not assertions” (keiser 2015, 12), and hence, on his own account, fail to be lies. don fallis also holds that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive. he has also defended the assertion condition for lying: “you lie when you assert something that you believe to be false” (fallis 2009, 33). he has held that you assert something when you you make a statement and you believe that you are in a situation in which the gricean norm of conversation, ‘do not say what you believe to be false,’ is in effect. his definition of lying was thus as follows: counterexamples to this definition (pruss 2012; faulkner 2013; stokke 2013a) have prompted a revision of this definition in order to accommodate these counterexamples: both l15 and l16 are able to accommodate the following counterexample to the earlier definition: “when marc antony said to the roman people, ‘brutus is an honorable man’ … the citizens of rome know that (a) antony did not believe that brutus was an honorable man, that (b) antony was subject to a norm against saying things that he believed to be false, and that (c) antony had been a cooperative participant in the conversation so far. thus, they were led to conclude that antony was flouting the norm in order to communicate something other than what he literally uttered. in fact, the best explanation of his statement was that he wanted to communicate the exact opposite of what he literally uttered” (fallis 2012, 567). since antony does not intend to violate the norm of conversation against communicating something that he believes to be false (that brutus is an honorable man) by saying “brutus is an honorable man,” or, more simply, since antony does not intend to communicate something false with his untruthful statement, it follows that antony is not lying. however, in the case of a guilty witness, tony, against whom there is overwhelming evidence, who says “i did not do it,” without the intention that anyone believe him, he does intend to violate the norm of conversation against communicating something that he believes to be false (that he did not do it) by saying “i did not do it,” or, more simply, he does intend to communicate something believed false with his untruthful statement, even though he does not intend that anyone believe this. it has been contended that non deceptive liars do not intend to communicate anything believed false with their untruthful statements, and, indeed, may even intend to communicate something believed true with their untruthful statements (dynel 2011, 151). fallis rejects the claim that non deceptive liars do not intend to communicate anything believed false, even if they intend to communicate something believed true: however, in the case of polite untruths, such as “madam is not at home,” the untruthful statement is simply a euphemism: “for example, the words ”she is not at home,“ delivered by a servant or a relative at the door, have become a mere euphemism for indisposition or disinclination” (isenberg 1973, 256). in the case of polite untruths, it seems, there is no intention to communicate anything believed false. in the case of the servant who tells the female caller, “i’m dusting the piano keys,” or the iraqi doctor who tells the journalist “i see no uniforms,” or the negotiator who tells the other negotiator “that is the highest i can go,” or the person living in the totalitarian state who makes the pro state utterance, it is also arguable that there is no intention to communicate anything believed false. if this is true, then there is some support for the claim that non deceptive liars do not intend to communicate anything believed false with their untruthful statements, and hence, that they are not lying according to l15 or l16. andreas stokke also holds that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive. he has also defended the assertion condition for lying: “you lie when you assert something you believe to be false” (stokke 2013a, 33). according to stokke, to “assert that p is to say that p and thereby propose that p become common ground” (stokke 2013a, 47). a proposition, p, becomes common ground in a group “if all members accept (for the purpose of the conversation) that p, and all believe that all believe that all accept that p, etc.” (stokke 2013a, 49, quoting stalnaker 2002, 716). stokke thus defines lying as follows: in the case of a speaker making an ironic untruthful statement, the speaker does not propose that the believed false proposition (e.g., “brutus is an honorable man”) become common ground (stokke 2013a, 50). however, in the case of a non deceptive liar, the speaker does propose that the believed false proposition (e.g., “i did not cheat”) become common ground (stokke 2013a, 52). the fact that in the case of a non deceptive lie it is common knowledge that what the speaker is saying is (believed to be) false does not alter the fact that the speaker is proposing that the believed falsehood become common ground. indeed, even if the (believed) truth is initially common ground, before the speaker proposes that the believed falsehood become common ground, it is still the case that the non deceptive liar is proposing to “update the common ground with her utterance” (stokke 2013a, 54). for example, in the case of the student and the dean, “the student wants herself and the dean to mutually accept that she did not plagiarize” (stokke 2013a, 54). it is possible to argue that stokke’s account of assertion, and hence l17, is faced with a dilemma when it comes to non deceptive lies. either, in the case of a non deceptive lie, the speaker does propose that the believed false proposition become common ground, but becoming common ground is too weak to count as asserting, or becoming common ground is strong enough to count as asserting, but, in the case of a non deceptive lie, the speaker does not propose that the believed false proposition become common ground. stokke considers stalnaker’s example of a guest at a party saying to another guest, “the man drinking a martini is a philosopher,” and of the two guests proceeding to talk about the philosopher, when it is common knowledge that the drink in question is not a martini. about this example stalnaker says: “perhaps it is mutually recognized that it is not a martini, but mutually recognized that both parties are accepting that it is a martini. the pretense will be rational if accepting the false presupposition is an efficient way to communicate something true” (stalnaker 2002, 718). however, if proposing that a believed false proposition become common ground can mean engaging in and sustaining a “pretence,” possibly in order to communicate truths, then it is not clear that this counts as making an assertion (cf. keiser 2015). hence, a non deceptive liar may be proposing that her believed false proposition become common ground without this being an act of making an assertion. but this means that she is not lying, according to l17. alternatively, if proposing that a believed false proposition become common ground means something more than this, such that the speaker intends or wants herself and her hearer “to mutually accept” her believed false proposition, then it is not clear that a non deceptive liar intends or wants this. if this is correct, then non deceptive lies fail to be lies according to l17. the dictionary definition of deception is as follows: “to cause to believe what is false” (oed 1989). there are several problems with this definition, however (barnes 1997; mahon 2007; carson 2010). the principal problem is that it is too broad in scope. on this definition, mere appearances can deceive, such as when a white object looks red in a certain light (faulkner, 2013). furthermore, it is possible for people to inadvertently deceive others. if steffi believes that there is a talk on david lewis and the christians on friday, and she tells paul that “there is a talk on lewis and the christians on friday,” and as a result paul believes that there is a talk on c. s. lewis and the christians on friday, then steffi has deceived paul. also, it is possible for people to mistakenly deceive other people. if steffi mistakenly believes that there is not a philosophy talk on friday, and she tells paul that there is not a philosophy talk on friday, and he believes her, then then steffi has deceived paul. although some philosophers hold that deceiving may be inadvertent or mistaken (demos 1960; fuller 1976; chisholm and feehan 1977; adler 1997; gert 2005), many philosophers have argued that it is not possible to deceive inadvertently or mistakenly (linsky 1970; van horne 1981; barnes 1997; carson 2010; saul 2012; faulkner 2013). they hold that deception, like lying, is intentional. they reserve term “mislead” to cover cases of causing false beliefs either intentionally or unintentionally (carson 2010, 47). a modified version of the dictionary definition that does not allow for either inadvertent or mistaken deceiving is as follows: d1 may be taken as the traditional definition of deception, at least in the case of other deception (baron 1988, 444 n. 2). as contrasted with ‘lying,’ ‘deceive’ is an achievement or success verb (ryle 1949, 130). an act of deceiving is not an act of deceiving unless a particular result is achieved. according to d1, that result is a false belief. note that d1 is not restricted to the deception of other persons by other persons; it applies to anything that is capable of having beliefs, such as (possibly) chimpanzees, dogs, and infants. there is no statement condition for deception. in addition to deceiving by means of lying, it is possible to deceive using natural or causal signs (indices), such as packing a bag as though one were going on a holiday, in order to catch a thief (kant 1997, 202). it is possible to deceive by using signs that work by resemblance (icons), for example by posting a smiley face emoticon about a news item that one is actually unhappy about. finally, it is possible to deceive by non linguistic conventional signs (symbols), such as wearing a wedding ring when one is not married, or wearing a police uniform when one is not a police officer. it is also possible for a person to deceive by cursing, making an interjection or an exclamation, issuing a command or an exhortation, asking a question, saying “hello,” and so forth. it is also possible to deceive by omitting to make certain statements, or by remaining silent. there is also no untruthfulness condition for deception. it is possible to deceive by making a truthful and true statement that intentionally implies a falsehood. this is a palter. palters include bill clinton stating “there is no improper relationship,” with the intention that it be believed that there was never an improper relationship (saul 2012, 30), greeting a famous person by his or her first name with the intention that other people believe that you are a close friend of his, or making a reservation for a restaurant or a hotel as “dr.,” intending to be believed to be a (typically wealthier) physician rather than a (typically less wealthy) academic (schauer and zeckhauser 2009, 44). if pavel truthfully and truly tells trofim that he is going to pinsk, with the intention that the distrustful trofim believe falsely that pavel is going to minsk, and as a result trofim believes falsely that pavel is going to minsk, then pavel deceives trofim (a double bluff). it is also possible to deceive using truthful statements that are not assertions, such as jokes, ironic statements, and even the lines of a play delivered on stage, so long as the intention to deceive can be formed. if, for example, i am asked if i stole the money, and i reply in an ironic tone, “yeah, right, of course i did,” when i did steal the money, intending that i be believed to have not stolen the money, and if i am believed, then i have deceived using a truthful statement (it is unclear if such cases of “telling the truth falsely” (frank 2009, 57) are to be considered as cases of paltering). there is also no addressee condition for deception. in addition to deceiving addressees, it is possible to deceive those listening in, as in a bogus disclosure (e.g., deceiving f.b.i. agents secretly known to be listening in on a telephone conversation) or a disclosure (e.g., deceiving nasa handlers openly listening to exchanges between astronauts and their wives in capricorn one). it is also possible to deceive an addressee about some matter other than the content of the statement made (e.g., making a truthful statement, but faking an accent). several objections can be made to d1. one objection is that it is not necessary that the deceiver causes another person to have a false belief that is (truly) believed to be false by the deceiver: “if i intentionally cause you to believe that p where p is false and i neither believe that p is true nor believe that p is false” (carson 2010, 48) then this is still deception (van frassen 1988; barnes 1997; cf. shiffrin 2014, 13). for example, if michael has no belief whatsoever regarding the condition of the bridge, but he convinces gertrude that the bridge is safe, and the bridge happens to be dangerous, then michael deceives gertrude about the bridge being safe (van frassen 1988, 124). or, if alyce places a fake rabbit in evelyn’s garden, in which lives a reclusive rabbit, in order to guarantee that evelyn believes that she is seeing a rabbit in her garden (one way or the other), and evelyn sees the fake rabbit, and calls alyce on the phone and tells her “i am looking at a rabbit in my garden!” then alyce has deceived evelyn, even though she cannot believe or know that evelyn is seeing the fake rabbit rather than the real rabbit (barnes 1997, 11). although this objection to d1 is not necessarily compelling (mahon 2007, 191 2), a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is as follows: the most common objection to d1 is that it is not necessary that the deceiver intentionally cause another person to have a new false belief. although this form of deception, according to which a person intentionally brings about “the change from the state of not being deceived… to that of being deceived” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 144), is the most normal form of deception, it is not the only form. a person may deceive another person by causing that person to continue to have a false belief (fuller 1976, 21; chisholm and feehan 1977, 144; mahon 2007 189 190; carson 2010, 50; shiffrin 2014, 19). this is where, “but for the act” of the deceiver, the person “would have lost or given up” the false belief (chisholm and feehan 1977, 144), or least have a greater chance of losing the false belief. a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following: a further objection to d1 (and d2 and d3) is that it is not sufficient for deception that a person intentionally causes another person to have a false belief that she truly believes or knows to be false; it must also be that this false belief is caused by evidence, and that the evidence is brought about by the person in order to cause the other person to have the false belief (linsky 1970, 163; fuller 1976, 23; schmitt 1988, 185; barnes 1997, 14; mahon 2007). if andrew intentionally causes ben to believe (falsely) that there are vampires in england by, for example, operating on ben’s brain, or giving ben an electric shock, or drugging ben, then andrew does not deceive ben about there being vampires in england. also, if andrew causes ben to believe falsely that there are vampires in england by getting ben to read a book that purports to demonstrate that there are vampires in england, then andrew does not deceive ben about there being vampires in england. however, if andrew writes a book that purports to demonstrate that there are vampires in england, and ben reads the book, and as a result ben comes to believe that there are vampires in england, then andrew does deceive ben about there being vampires in england (fuller 1976). a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following: all of the definitions so far considered are definitions of positive deception, where a person “has been caused to add to his stock of false beliefs” or has been caused to continue to have a false belief (chisholm and feehan 1977, 144). a further objection to d1 (and d2, d3, and d4) is that it is not necessary for deception to cause a new belief or to cause to continue to have a false belief. one can deceive another person by causing the person to cease to have a true belief, or by preventing the person from acquiring a true belief. these are both cases of negative deception, according to which a person “has been caused to lose one of his true beliefs” or been prevented from gaining a true belief (chisholm and feehan 1977, 143 144). for example, if i intentionally distract someone who is prone to forgetting things irretrievably when distracted, in order to make that person forget something irretrievably, and, as a result, that person loses a (veridical) memory irretrievably, then i have caused him to cease to have a true belief. (in science fiction the same result can be achieved by using a memory erasing device, as in the neuralyzer used in the 1997 science fiction film men in black). also, if i hide a section of the newspaper from someone in order to prevent her from learning about some news item, such as an earthquake in a foreign country that harmed no one, then i prevented her from acquiring a true belief about a distant earthquake. a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following: however, this objection to d1 (and d2, d3, and d4) is not necessarily compelling. it may be argued that negative deception is not deception at all. after all, no false belief has been acquired or sustained. it may be argued that to prevent someone from acquiring a true belief is to keep that person in ignorance, or to keep that person “in the dark,” rather than to deceive that person (mahon 2007, 187 188; cf. carson 2010, 53). the state of being ignorant is not the same as the state of being mistaken. one may not know what city is the capital city of estonia (tallinn); this is different from mistakenly believing that riga is the capital city of estonia. similarly, although it is more unusual, rendering a person ignorant of some matter is not the same as deceiving that person, at least if it results in no false belief. for example, in the 2004 science fiction film the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, people go to lacuna, inc., to have their memories of their previous relationships, as well as their visits, erased. those who run lacuna, inc., make their clients forget things, or render them ignorant of things. they do not deceive them in doing this. chisholm and feehan admit that augustine and aquinas “do not call it ‘deception’” to “hide the truth” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 187). d5 only counts as deception cases of deception “by commission” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 143 144). according to chisholm and feehan, it is also possible to deceive “by omission” (chisholm and feehan 1977, 143 144). one may allow a person to acquire a false belief, or allow a person to continue with a false belief, or allow a person to cease to have a true belief, or allow a person to continue without a true belief. for example, one may allow a person to read a news story and acquire a belief that one knows is false (e.g., a news story about the ceo of your company resigning for health reasons, when you know he was forced out for mismanagement of funds), and one may allow a person to continue to have a false belief by not correcting the person’s false belief (e.g., not correcting a child’s belief in santa claus). or, for example, one may allow a person to forget a veridical memory by not stopping them from getting distracted, and one may allow a person to continue without knowing about an earthquake that has occurred in a foreign country. according to chisholm and feehan, there can positive and negative deception by commission and by omission. a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following: finally, d6 only counts as deception actions and omissions that are intentional. according to chisholm and feehan, however, deception can be unintentional. a modified definition of interpersonal deception that incorporates this objection is the following: the objection to d5 that negative deception is not deception also applies to d6 and d7. [please contact the author with suggestions.] assertion | chisholm, roderick | grice, paul | grotius, hugo | kant, immanuel | peirce, charles sanders: theory of signs | ryle, gilbert | self deception | testimony: epistemological problems of | williams, bernard copyright © 2015 by james edwin mahon <james.mahon@lehman.cuny.edu> view this site from another server: the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy is copyright © 2023 by the metaphysics research lab, department of philosophy, stanford university library of congress catalog data: issn 1095 5054

as a philosopher and ethicist, sissela bok grapples with hard truths, as well as with hard untruths. her writings explore the psychology of lying, the consequences of deception and the perils of keeping secrets. in this episode of world of ideas, bok discusses the psychology and history of political lies and the impact of deception on public trust. watch a clip transcript bill moyers: [on camera] good evening. i’m bill moyers. americans never know nowadays when they’ll wake up to yet one more disclosure of deception in government; from the u2 affair to the war in vietnam, from watergate to iran contra, and in a steady stream of daily information and disinformation, the bond of trust between the government and the governed seems frayed to the breaking point. can a republic die of too many lies? the question has become critical for the future of the democracy. in this broadcast you’ll meet a woman whose work is devoted to trust in america. join me as we meet sissela bok. [voice over] as a philosopher, sissela bok grapples with hard truths, and with hard untruths, as well. her writings explore the psychology of lying, the consequences of deception, and the perils of keeping secrets. intellectual accomplishment is a tradition for her family. eight years after her father, the swedish scholar, gunnar myrdal, won a nobel prize for economics, her mother, alma, an activist and diplomat, won the nobel peace prize. sissela bok studied at the sorbonne in paris, and went on to earn advanced degrees in both psychology and philosophy. she has taught ethics at harvard medical school and its kennedy school of government, and now she teaches philosophy at brandeis university. her new book, a strategy for peace, will be out early next year. at her home near boston, we talked about breaking and keeping the public trust. [interviewing] what do you find so fascinating about the subject of lying and secrecy? they seem so, sort of, forbidden topics in a way, or topics not all that pleasing or affirmative about life. what about this subject interests you? sissela bok: well, the subject of lying connects for me, very much, with all of communication, and the amazing thing that we human beings do communicate, in fact, with one another rather well, quite often. but then lying, of course, is a way of gaining power over other people through manipulating them in various ways, and this is something that children learn. they also learn to keep secrets. and then i believe we almost have to unlearn that. if we are to mature, we have to unlearn any enjoyment of that power. bill moyers: any enjoyment of deception. sissela bok: yes, any benefit from it. bill moyers: the power that deception brings to you over someone else, you have to unlearn that? why? sissela bok: you have to know that the power is there, and then i think you have to see if you can possibly live without it. you know, live without doing that. that doesn’t mean you never get into a situation where lying might be necessary, but on the whole, how can you try to lead your life so that you communicate with other people without trying to manipulate them? bill moyers: i remember when i was white house press secretary, the line of george bernard shaw, who said, “i am not a professional liar, and i’m surprised at the extent to which, in my infirmity, i’m an amateur one.” and i kept being surprised at the extent to which i could be an amateur liar. sissela bok: yes, because it can happen so easily. and, of course, sometimes people just slip into it, they don’t even stop to think. bill moyers: there is this general lament in the country that we’re slipping, that our ethics are going downhill, that this generation isn’t as good as the previous generation, that moral standards are deteriorating. well, you say it yourself in your book, you quote somebody else saying that civilization is on the decline. what’s your own appraisal of that? sissela bok: i think, first of all, that that’s something people have always said since the beginning of time, and it seems that it happens particularly when they reach middle age. all of a sudden   bill moyers: you’re getting very personal now. sissela bok: they begin to think that when they were young, or when they were children, everything was much better or maybe they even look back 100 years or 200 years and say, “when our country was that much younger, everything was so much better.” but then when you ask them, “where was this golden age? was it, for instance, in this country during our period of slavery, was that so great? was it so wonderful for women? who, exactly, was benefiting from these high moral standards?” then they become more hesitant. so that i don’t think, in fact, that we can show that as a general rule everything is slipping. bill moyers: someone said to me recently that he thought american life, all of american life, was built upon deception. do you think that’s a fair assessment? sissela bok: no, i don’t think so. you know, if that were true, then i don’t think our society could function at all, and after all, it does function reasonably well much of the time. i don’t think that human relationships could function if everything were deceptive. advertising very often, in fact, is not. you know, there’s lots of factual, informative advertising. then in politics, and in business i think that there are quite a few quite honorable, upright individuals around; and the sad thing is that whenever somebody comes into the news who has, you know, done a lot of deceiving, then it casts aspersion on all the others. bill moyers: and oliver north, then, is treated as the public face of everybody in the bureaucracy, of everyone in the white house. sissela bok: you hear that quite a lot in the people who tell you why they’re not going to vote, or say so in television interviews and at other times. they simply have no confidence any more in public officials, you know, which i regard as terribly wrong headed. because i would say that most public officials are trustworthy, a lot of the people who work in the various bureaucracies. but when somebody comes to public light who is not, then, first of all that sets an example, and somebody said, you know, examples of this kind are very contagious. and i think that’s true. bill moyers: what’s happening in our government that has given us the deception of watergate, the deception of the iran contra scandal, the previous deceptions on vietnam? sissela bok: there is, to some extent, a desire on the part of every government, i believe, to have greater control over secrecy. many members of government feel that that’s the way that they can get more things done. if only they didn’t have to worry what was lawful, if only they didn’t have to worry about elected representatives of the people, they could get a lot of things done that somehow many people are trying to prevent at present. on the other hand, we do have the countervailing influence. it’s getting harder and harder to keep these secrets for very long. you can keep the secret long enough to do a terrible amount of harm to your nation, but, in the long run, they will surface. not only in this country, but in lots of other countries, it has happened that the iran iraq war has involved a number of governments in arms trades and other activities that were secret and that have come to light. and so i do believe that, what with the whole world press, and the kind of information that now travels across all boundaries, it’s going to be harder to keep that kind of secret for very long. bill moyers: and yet, it has not escaped me as a journalist that it was not the american press that broke the story of iran contra; that it was a small, obscure magazine in beirut, lebanon, that broke the story. i’m not sure we’re as vigilant as the circumstances   i know we’re not as vigilant as the circumstances require. sissela bok: i think, perhaps   and there i should ask you   but it seems also that sometimes members of the press are no longer doing the kind of digging that would be necessary to find out the information. if they simply wait for press releases, it’s not clear that they’re always going to get what they want. bill moyers: what did it say to you that an admitted liar, a man who admitted deceiving congress, lying to the press, lying to the public, oliver north, became a hero to many people, including a national hero to his own president? sissela bok: i was thinking about that quite a lot, because i asked myself, “how come that people seem to be identifying with him, not with the people who are being deceived?” now, usually when we get worried about a lie, we worry because we think, “how would it feel for me,” to be, for instance, in the situation of the patient who has been deceived by cancer, or a spouse who has been deceived by infidelity or something, how come then that everybody identified with him? and i thought that there were enough people in america who didn’t care if he lied to foreigners, in particular not to the iranians. there were also enough people in america who didn’t care if he lied to members of congress because those groups had been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism, you know, in these last few years. so, the curious thing, then, was that so many people identified with the person who was telling the lies. and that meant that they were not asking the question about, you know, what happens to the people being lied to? what happens to the country? what happens if more lies are told, perhaps to us next time? they simply didn’t stop to ask those questions. bill moyers: it’s been quite intriguing to me that colonel north is out making speeches and raising money as a hero to right wing groups. they still look upon him as a true patriot, irrespective of the deceptions, the lies, the cover up. sissela bok: to some extent they’re not entering into debate, you know; with other people about what patriotism really means. you know, what does it mean to love your country, and to honor your country. does it mean that you lie on behalf of your country sometimes? does it mean that you draw your government into these kinds of problems? can it mean that? bill moyers: they say it does, because we live in a lawless world, and it’s naive to expect the united states government to act lawfully in a world that doesn’t respect the rule of law. sissela bok: it’s true. there are parts of the world that are quite lawless. there are also, in fact, quite a few parts of the world that are not. the question is, “how do we expand the number of nations and societies that do respect the law?” we don’t necessarily want to say that just because some don’t, we’re going to classify our government in that group. bill moyers: because we are working toward, we hope, a lawful world, not a lawless one. sissela bok: yes, very much. and then the question has to come up, “what are we doing? what am i doing as an individual? what is somebody doing as a public official? what is an entire government doing to make sure that it moves in that direction, to make the world a little more law abiding rather than less?” it’s so important for us to be able to shift perspective and to say, “okay, here i’m on the side of the people who are telling the lies, and i think it’s alright for the moment because it’s my side, bit how would i feel if i were on that side?” and then to say, “well, next time i may be on the other side. in fact, these very same people who say they’re my friends now, may need, for their particular purposes, to lie to me next time. and then i’ll feel very much more troubled than i did when they lied to some foreigners that i didn’t care about. bill moyers: in your book on secrets, your point that partisanship causes people to condone abuses for their particular cause, their particular ideal, that they would never condone in their adversary. and it’s partisanship   that parochial loyalty to a cause, an idea, a crusade, a campaign   that is the ultimate corrupter of one’s own judgment and one’s own standards. sissela bok: when it goes too far it does that corrupting. i would say that any community needs, of course, the cohesiveness of some loyalty, you know, any community needs that, but when the partisanship becomes what i sometimes call pathological, when it goes so far as to say that in order to preserve loyalty within our small group, we can do anything to those people   we can send terrorists into their country, we can spew forth disinformation, we can do anything   then it has become pathological. and then people don’t, again, stop at all to ask any questions. they simply have blinded themselves to the kind of harm they’re doing to the outside. bill moyers: we saw this, of course, in the johnson era when democrats who had doubts about the vietnam war nonetheless supported the president because he was their partisan. people remained loyal to richard nixon, despite the smoking gun, because he was a republican president. and when george bush announced that the most qualified man in the country was dan quayle, i saw good, honest, wise republicans swallow, click their heels and step in line. partisanship was the ultimate claim on their loyalty, not judgment and rational analysis of the evidence. sissela bok: the word “partisan” can mean two things. on the one hand, it can mean some very brave people who undertake to struggle against, for instance, the nazis, many other people. on the other hand, it can mean people who abandon judgment. and one has to think, you know, which is the one that’s at play? and unfortunately, very often, the first can turn into the second unless one is very careful to think about certain moral values that one will uphold whether or not one is going to act in a partisan way. bill moyers: and it becomes hardest, does it not, to uphold these standards in a time of crisis, of challenge, of trauma? sissela bok: yes, definitely. that’s when it becomes very tempting to say, “well, i’m going to let go of my principles now. i do have, for instance, the principle that i shouldn’t take innocent life, but just for now, because we are under all this threat, i’m going to let go of that principle, and maybe a couple of others as well.” bill moyers: you say, in strategy for peace, that our problems are so severe that unless we can marshal a principled collective response, all the worst predictions of social collapse may finally be coming true. and that’s a hope i share, but history argues otherwise, because previous generations didn’t take principled and collective action in time to stave off the threats they faced in their own day. what makes you think we can do it better or differently? sissela bok: i think that it certainly is true, looking back through history, that a number of societies have collapsed because they didn’t take issues of survival seriously enough. on the other hand, they have never been in this predicament that we are in now. now we’re in it together, and i think that may force us, for the first time, to take the common interest into consideration. but then i would also say that there are other factors that give me some hope. i’m not at all wanting to say that everything is rosy. on the contrary, this is a very serious situation. but there is some hope. the other factors are, first of all that our century, because it has been so unbelievably violent and so brutal, and so filled with tyranny, our century has also brought forth countervailing powers. we’ve had popular movements seeking change nonviolently, and, in fact, succeeding more and more often. it began, in some ways, with gandhi in india. we’ve had the american civil rights struggle. since then, we’ve had the philippines, where corazon aquino specifically referred to martin luther king and to mohandas gandhi. now we have burma weighing in the balance. we’ve had argentina undergoing a peaceful change, spain undergoing a peaceful change. that’s one thing. then we also have all kinds of research that people didn’t have in past generations about how to solve conflicts nonviolently. we have better history. we know much better how wars start and how they can get out of band   all the research, for instance, that’s been done on the first world war. so, i think that we are in a better position if we were to seize this opportunity. bill moyers: do we need a new ethic for this predicament? sissela bok: i don’t think we need anew ethic at all, and there are various people who insist that nothing will change until, somehow, our human consciousness changes or we develop some new way of thinking. even einstein said that unless we all become much more altruistic and charitable   but i think, in a way, it’s a little too late to hope for that. there i would say, myself, that i’m not at all sure that the human race can change in that way, and i’m not at all sure that, if there were some cataclysmic change of consciousness, that it would be for the better. it could very easily be for the worse, and we’ve seen sometimes how that’s taken over in countries like nazi germany and others. so that we don’t need a new ethic at it, but what we do need, i think, is to concentrate more than we have before on the moral principles and the moral values that we have in common, also, with people of other religions and other cultures. i would say, first of all, that nonviolence, to the extent possible, that doesn’t mean it is always going to be possible, but nonviolence is one of the two most important factors, the other being trying to avoid lying. bill moyers: true, but everywhere i look i find evidence of muslim against jew, christian against christian. sissela bok: the trouble is that those principles have never been held very high when it’s come to outsiders, to enemies of any kind. so what we now need to do is to take those same principles, so that it becomes just as awful for us to take an innocent life in our own country as to take it somewhere else. and that will take a little rethinking on the part of a lot of people, but it’s not a transformation of the human spirit. now, then, the third principle, i think, is that of constraints on betrayal, or breaches of law, or breaches of promise. now, again, every single culture has had to develop some notion of promise keeping, of covenant or something like that. and the notion that to breach would constitute betrayal. so those are three very, very ancient principles. in our day, it would involve obeying the law, for instance, also. then there is a fourth, and that is a constraint on secrecy, because if we don’t constrain secrecy, then all the other things can go on and we don’t even know they’re going on. there can be violence within communities, or on the part of governments or what have you. there can be deception. there can be betrayal, violations of law, and many other similar things. bill moyers: you think that we could begin to shape it; a minimum moral framework for the world to cooperate on this, to solve this predicament of survival? sissela bok: i do believe so. i think that this is, in fact, what a number of governments are trying to do, and, of course, international law is based, to some extent, on those four principles. bill moyers: but every government violates international law when it finds it expedient to do so; we in nicaragua, the soviets in afghanistan, the british. sissela bok: that doesn’t mean, by the way, every government, you know. there are   but still, a number of governments have done so, and i think it has backfired very badly for them   certainly the soviets in afghanistan and for us also. bill moyers: the tendency seems to be in the opposite direction from the collaboration and cooperation that you’re calling for. sissela bok: that’s where this epidemic of peace may also give some hope, because the more governments become democratic and undergo a democratic and peaceful change   and then, you know, become more eager to abide by international law, more eager to deal nonviolently with other nations   the more of those governments there will be, the fewer of the others. and then, perhaps, the world can focus much more on the pockets that still remain, the very, very problematic pockets. but, it has been almost impossible to do so so long as in every continent there was some war going on. bill moyers: bring this down to the level of one person out there listening. so many people in this country feel helpless to effect any change. “how can i make a difference? what can i do? she’s talking about international organizations, governments up there and over there. she’s talking about organizations into which i don’t go. what can i do to make a difference, or can i? sissela bok: if you take gandhi and martin luther king and their movements, if you look at those very often they started in very, very piecemeal ways. people began doing something in one community, and then expanded. gandhi started that way; martin luther king started that way. and there are lots of people, i would say, all over the world   you know, we often hear that there are no heroes. i think that there are lots of heroes. bill moyers: i cherish very much the notion in the conclusion of your book about starting personal and piecemeal, about carving out a space in one’s own life where one begins to practice, personally, what one advocates politically and publicly. sissela bok: and there i think, again, if one takes these principles that i’ve mentioned   you know, let’s say that you want to carve out in your own life what gandhi sometimes called a zone of peace, or something like that, and just say that, “in my family, and at work, and wherever i have human contacts i am simply not going to engage in manipulation of people. i’m not going to be coercive, violent with respect to them.” already, that will make a difference and that’ll have an effect on some other people. and then if one can say, “in our community, we’re simply not going to deal with one another this way.” and i would say that that is a fond of maturing, of saying, “alright i know that i can get things my way by manipulating people, but i’m not going to do that i’m going to see if i can work another way.” simone weil once spoke of that as   she talked about herself and she said, “i would like to achieve the kind of radiance that can bring about nonviolently what other people might have to do violently.” and, of course, we see teachers like that. we see parents like that, who have a kind of radiance so that they don’t have to raise their voice, they don’t have to beat their children or anything like that. they simply make a different atmosphere. bill moyers: so in this personal zone, i don’t act violently against my family. i keep my promises, my vows, my oaths. i don’t deceive. i practice, right in that small circle, what one would hope one’s neighbor and one’s government would practice. sissela bok: i don’t give up on the government at all, because one thing i have to do then, if i’m engaged in this, is to make every effort to see to it that the government, for instance, doesn’t slip into further practices of secrecy; that there are protests when disinformation takes place; that there is concern for individuals, innocent civilians who are being killed. so that all of that means that the private individual, while he or she is doing this, sort of, within that personal zone, also reaches outward, reaches toward the profession and the government and i think that people often ask the wrong question when they think about violence and deception and they say, “do you mean that there should never be any lies anymore?” or, you know, that “i should never defend myself by means of force?” bill moyers: or keep a secret   sissela bok: or ever keep a secret, that’s right. or never, never break a promise. that is the wrong question. and, i think, instead, the question is, “how can we roll back the amount of violence, the amount of lying, the amount of breaches of promise and of law? how can we just move back, roll that back so that there is less of it?” because, if we don’t manage to roll that back, then we’re not going to manage to cope with our common problems, then i don’t think we’re going to manage to cope with the social problems we have, and we certainly won’t, in the long run, be able to cope with those of survival  namely the nuclear threat and the environmental threats   if we can’t manage to work together. and how could we manage to work together if we’re so distrustful of one another, for very good reasons, namely that we’re always doing these things to one another. there is so much that individuals can do, but i think that they do need to have some hope, and it’s much too early to give up hope. and i think you would probably agree with that, too, that people   bill moyers: what was it your mother said? it’s not worthy of human beings to give up? sissela bok: it is not worthy of us, as human beings, with all that we’ve been given, really, in this extraordinary creation, it’s not worthy of us to simply give up and say, “well, looking back at history, i’m now going to declare that there’s no hope.” bill moyers: [voice over] from her home in cambridge, massachusetts, this has been a conversation with sissela bok. i’m bill moyers. this transcript was entered on march 27, 2015. © 2025 doctoroff media group llc terms of service | privacy policy

q: my ex husband and i each agreed to pay for half of our son's education. because he is enrolling in a university where his dad teaches, our son receives a tuition remission, but my ex insists that i must still write him a check for half the tuition because that tuition waiver is his benefit, not mine. am i ethically obligated to pay?   h.h., new jersey a: your ex has a glib line of patter. i see why you married him. and why you divorced him. a divorce lawyer might argue otherwise, but as an ethical matter, you should not have to open your checkbook. there is nothing for you to reimburse; your ex has not paid a dime of tuition. a better way to see this: the university waived the tuition, rather like giving your son a full scholarship. your ex has done no extra work, sacrificed no rewards. it's not as if he had to choose between benefits   tuition for your son or a year's sabbatical in ... hawaii! and how will he get there? a brand new car! that drives underwater! college costs are variable; not all students pay list price. had the tuition waiver not been an offer, there's no telling what financial aid packages might have been available to your son. presumably you endorsed his attending this school in part because of that waiver. had you thought you would be paying full freight, you might have urged him to enroll elsewhere. in any case, your ex husband may not unilaterally impose his idiosyncratic payment plan after the bill arrives, or rather does not arrive. financial pressures might make your husband feel trapped in his current job, but unless he contemplates an imminent departure   which he apparently does not   he has only a hypothetical problem and not one that you are duty bound to alleviate with your wallet. q: my wife's sister and her husband keep kosher, so we have a special pot for their visits. recently my wife caught me using the pot for my traif soup. she insists we must buy another pot, but i say as long as my in laws believe it's kosher, they won't violate their faith by using it. would i be unethical to keep this secret or simply cheap?   paul kramer, montclair, n.j. a: religious laws, like secular ethics, often distinguish between knowing and unknowing transgressions. menachem genack, an orthodox rabbi, confirms that this is so for kashrut, jewish dietary codes. biblical law punishes deliberate violations more severely than inadvertent errors (while contemporary jews impose no actual punishments for kashrut violations). this would ameliorate but not obviate your in laws' misdeed. certainly it would not justify your deceiving them. putting aside religion, if your in laws discover your deception, trust between you will be undermined, much as that between you and your wife must already be damaged or at least scuffed. an additional victim of your chicanery: the fine folks at your local ikea, just up the road in paramus, who offer quality cookware at moderate prices. it is possible to be both unethical and cheap. incidentally, if you want to avoid being what the talmud terms "a weasel"   no, wait, that's not the talmud; that's me   doing so is surprisingly affordable: no need to buy a new pot. you can "kasher" (make kosher) the tainted pot by boiling it and performing other acts; consult your local rabbi for details. there is another way to analyze your keeping this secret: you haven't. readers can direct their questions and comments by e mail to ethicist@nytimes.com. this column originates in the new york times magazine.

printed from oxford research encyclopedias, literature. under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see privacy policy and legal notice). date: 09 february 2025 deception is a central preoccupation in the western discursive tradition. within this context, deceptive texts constitute a metagenre that borrows from the array of conventional forms. its history twins that of narrative traditions whose productions the fakes mimic. intent, context, effect, and the nature of the deception inform categorizations of hoax, fraud, plagiarism, and forgery. across these modes, recognition of the deception precedes analysis of a textual fake as such. mirroring conventional productions, textual fakes imitate what culture values. their investigation attends to purposes that writers and readers pursue as they participate in the life of a text. across discursive spheres, representation interacts with the real, the virtual transforms the concrete, the technological inflects the natural. such categories remain essential for analysis even as they blend in practice. technological platforms that amplify the written word also expand the range of textual deceptions. contemporary forms from phishing emails to fake news tweets share mechanisms of deception with literary and other textual fakes, from the fabricated autobiography to the allegedly ancient verse attributed to a nonexistent bard. you do not currently have access to this article please login to access the full content. access to the full content requires a subscription printed from oxford research encyclopedias, literature. under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see privacy policy and legal notice). date: 09 february 2025 character limit 500/500 character limit 500/500

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the magazine’s ethicist columnist on marital deception. by kwame anthony appiah a woman i know often complains about her “manic” husband. he is a war veteran in his late 50s who owns a very successful business and is the primary breadwinner for their family. (they have no children.) the wife, a woman in her early 60s who works part time and is dependent on his income, recently told me she dissolves melatonin in the water he takes with him to work in order to “calm him down.” she said, “i told him it was a nutritional supplement, something to help him because he sometimes doesn’t eat lunch.” i looked a bit shocked at her confession, and she immediately justified her actions by saying: “you don’t have to live with him. he doesn’t take his medications. now he’s calmer.” she did not ask his permission to add melatonin to his drinking water. melatonin is not regulated in the united states   though in many countries it is available only by prescription   so legally speaking she is not “drugging” him without his knowledge or consent. and since he is under 65, this would not fall under elder abuse laws in my state. but i am seriously considering revealing this subterfuge to her husband, whom i know. (she did not swear me to secrecy; in fact, i sensed from the way she told her story that i was not the first to hear of this.) unfortunately, i have no confidence that confronting her would have an impact; she likes him better now that she’s secretly giving him substances with no regard for his long term health or the deception. if my wife did this to me, i’d be apoplectic. i’d appreciate your counsel.    name withheld from the ethicist: first, any benefits from this “treatment” could well be a second order placebo effect. as an expert i conferred with confirmed, there’s no serious evidence that melatonin is a useful treatment for mania, and there’s no evidence to support this daytime, waking hours use of melatonin at all.