Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

A lie is a rejection and – so to speak – the destruction of man’s own dignity. A man who does not believe himself what he says to another one (even if it were a merely ideal person) has a lesser value than if he were simply a thing; since a thing is something real and given, so someone else could profit from its condition in some way; but to communicate one’s own thoughts to another via words that contain (intentionally) the opposite to what the speaker thinks, is an end that is opposed to the natural finality of his faculty of communicating thoughts, and thus, it amounts to renouncing his personality and to a deceitful appearance of a man, rather than the man himself.

Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 429

1

Lying is generally frowned upon, big shock. If we are to believe any of the plausible stories of how communication arose among humans, not only thwarting the exchange of information but willingly exploiting trust in order to deceive runs clearly counter to the goals of our talking to each other, and it is wont to make others stop treating the liar as a fair player. No-one likes being lied to!

However, as with most things, we have culturally sanctioned exceptions. Some are quite benign and barely qualify as lies when actually analyzed for what they are. Closing an email with “all the best” to a person you wouldn’t wish in earnest so much as one good day; slurring “I’m alright, thanks; you?” after having an awful day; these are quirks of polite society, nobody expects truthful information to be exchanged in any capacity at that juncture. Then come trickier social scenarios; questions that aren’t really questions, the limits to oversharing, and so forth. Any of these can imaginably get some sort of justification in the form of overarching rules for conducting oneself among others.

There are, though, some unambiguous lies that get a pass, not for the typical reasons we withhold our duties, to wit, extenuating circumstances – being forced to lie under duress, etc. – but for whom it is they are directed towards: children. These come in broadly two shapes. One is the category of protective lies: the pets that were sent to a farm upstate, for one. I am not going to talk about these. Rather, I am interested in a second kind of acceptable lies: those aimed at keeping the spark of childhood innocence alive. Say, Santa.

2

The intentions here are noble. We of the Western Christian tradition inherit, and many of us remember, a feeling of unadulterated wonder on Christmas morning (or, well, January 6th, but I’m a Spaniard), having been witnesses to the little miracle of presents delivered by magic beings. Exciting as the post-revelation Christmases are, childhood wonder and naïveté are never to return, and the banal truth that Ol’ Nick is actually mom and dad may as well be a motto for the dry Entzauberung of adult life. There’s a lot of nostalgia crystalized in this sort of memory, and it is likely that the bulk of it isn’t coming from a desire to believe in a jolly gift-giver, but we aren’t in the business of psychoanalysis here.

What is clear, at any rate, is that the good intentions behind the Christmas “fraud” doom any possible case that this isn’t actually lying. Sure, from our perspective there are few things as obvious and as readily available in the public forum than the real identity of Father Christmas, but without prompting an actual belief in children that Santa Claus is real, there is none of this “enchantment”, no pixie dust, no magic feeling of gullible living in the moment. And since people aren’t born believing in Santa Claus, this is intentional deceit, this is “spread of misinformation”, it is a lie!

3

The lie, it appears, is constitutive of the special sort of experience that one seeks to have their children enjoy. It isn’t even just that it “just so happens” that Santa isn’t real, but what is more, the yearning for the simpler times of childhood and the desire to have the next best thing, letting one’s kids live a precious few innocent years in our stead is essentially a reaction against an objective outlook into the world. We are eventually forced to bump into reality, and we find it reasonable; charitable, even, to give newcomers a bit of a break while they figure it out.

A clear problem of unintended consequences arises here, though. Sure, we may have had a wonderful childhood and long for the days of Christmas past, but what do we know of the reactions of our kids? Typically liberal as it may be, it sounds as a good piece of advice not to live one’s life through one’s children, because, as separate beings they are, they may experience things quite differently. Christmas may not be that big of a deal, whilst learning that the people you trust the most in the world would lie to you could be pretty devastating. In that sense, there are clear parallels to Kant’s argument in the infamous On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy. If you tell the truth, you’re off the hook; but if you lie, even for a good reason, your lies can have unforeseen consequences that will be on you.

Even then, assuming that all went as planned, there is still something a bit off about lying “for a good cause”. White lies always carry with them a distinctive stain. If lying is, all things considered, wrong, we may be inclined to thinking that it entails an immediate harm of a particular kind to the deceived person, even barred ulterior consequences. If I lie to you because I want you to be misled about something, and you believe me, even if my plans don’t come to fruition and the lie can never deploy its schemed use, I will surely have wronged you. The casuistic mess that tends to come with lies is only the cherry on top.

4

Children, though, are usually subject to a host of moral exceptions. Going back to the liberal point from before, people are by and large taken to be the best judges of what is good for them, and thus taken to be free to pursue a variety of life projects. Not children, though. Many generally accepted cases of “knowing better” are those that give parents, or tutors, or teachers, or whatnot, a certain prerogative over the immediate wants of kids. Couldn’t this help justify seasonal lies?

It seems unlikely. When we waive the liberal dictum that each man’s a king for himself and we don’t let children do whatever they want, this is broadly justified under the assumption that they cannot form a fully informed decision that will actually take in consideration the relevant risks, or something along those lines. Similar prudential considerations may advise that we do not tell them everything they may want to know about a topic, or in too blunt a way, but lying entails something different than that. You cannot lie to a newborn baby, not in the straightforward sense of the word. In order for you to lie, you need to find a deceivable receptor of your intended lies. Insofar as children can be lied to, they are the sort of being who can understand what is being said to them, and who can expect to be given truthful information. However partial their rationality, they are rational enough that they can trust your word and they can have that trust betrayed. What is distinctive about children, then, isn’t something that has a bearing on their standing in the lying game, especially if we grant that there is a distinctive wrong to lying.

5

What if there isn’t, though? Maybe harmless lies would really be harmless, and we’d all be better off living happy lies instead of making a big deal about what’s true. Maybe the problem isn’t so much with lying to children as it is with our stubbornness not to be lied as adults. What is the intrinsic, or inherent, or distinctive wrong of lying?

Most people remember Kant’s treatment of lying in the Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. A maxim of action that requires us to lie cannot be universalizable, because, were everyone to lie, nobody would trust the liar to begin with. Lying, as we already hinted at, is a free-riding misuse of our trusting practices and the general goals of human communication. We hold ourselves to be acceptable exceptions to the duties of truthfulness and to have a right to manipulate someone else’s life, be it for their good or for their detriment. This is bad enough, but Kant has something else to say. The liar, too, makes a mockery of their own dignity as a person.

In fully respecting ourselves, we wouldn’t artificially twist our words, we wouldn’t go against our own beliefs in constructing our own public persona. In a sense, lying turns ourselves into an unlawful means to some ulterior ends. It is not proper to our nature as rational agents to degrade the use of our language into a mere tool of manipulation. This, in its most natural reading, hangs on some potentially dodgy teleological claims, and while Kant is no stranger to those, and that’s most likely what he is going for here, we may be able to make sense of this even without assigning too high a credence to a belief in the “natural use” of our capacity for language. Rather, it may point as well to an ideal community of rational interlocutors. Inasmuch as we are rational – and nobody is fully rational! -, we enter into a relation with others where we share our ends and our beliefs in as full transparency as circumstances allow. Sometimes, due to our own limitations, that won’t be possible. To choose, though, of our own volition to hamper these relations is to actively put some extraneous goal over that of the community of rational agents. If it so happens that building towards that community is our paramount goal, and that our duties of educating children are directed first and foremost towards turning them into its future citizens, endowed with a fully developed autonomy, then such a shift in priorities is, strictly speaking, wrong. We wrong the children whose autonomy we fail to recognize, and we wrong ourselves and our relation with them by giving undue prevalence to a deceitful form of community.