Truthfulness PROBLEM Now that we have examined questions relating to health, we turn to one of the most important areas of the personal life, interpersonal communication. We take care of our health precisely so that we can live in meaningful relationships with others and enjoy the values surrounding our relationships. Among those values is truthfulness. All of us claim respect for our own personhood as conscious rational subjects and must show similar respect for our neighbor’s personhood by putting right order in the communications between our own minds and feelings of others. Whoever speaks is expected to speak truthfully, but we can still ask whether we are always obliged to speak truthfully. Is truth-telling an absolute value in any and every circumstance? When we think truthfulness, we usually think first of all about intellectual honesty and almost never give a thought to emotional sincerity, which is another name for emotional honesty. We are very sensitive to the virtues and vices of the mind; we admire a truthful person and are repelled by a liar. Lying is despicable, shameful, and immoral; nit is intellectual dishonesty, intellectual insincerity. Our emotional life has its parallel to this, for we can express emotions we do not feel and deceive others about the emotions we actually do feel. We can lie not only about the truth we know but about the emotion we have as well. The problem of truth-telling arises from the fact that a person may also have a right or a duty to conceal the truth about what he or she thinks or feels. Each of us has a right to privacy. We may be entrusted with a secret that must not be divulged. There might not be much trouble on this pointif people did not have the habit of asking questions, but then the privilege of inquiring goes with the gift of speech. What can we do when questioned point blank on a matter we must keep secret? How can we veil our speech to guard the truth as well as to communicate it? Does a physician, for example, have a duty to tell the patient the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Are there occasions when the substance of our humanity is too frail to bear the full burden of the truth? Certainly our social world cannot endure without the truth and yet if the absolute truth were always to prevail in human affairs, we could not endure it. We need to explain: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What is lie? Are all deceptions lies? Why and how far is lying wrong? Why must secrets be kept? How can secrets be kept without lying? MEANING OF ALIE What is a lie? The literal-minded person may define a lie as any statement not in strict literal accord with actual facts. But no one with the faintest spark of imagination or the most primitive inkling of courtesy could confine his or her speech within such narrow bounds. Speech not only exchanges information but also contributes to the amenities of life. Candor has its place, but the outspoken telling of the unvarnished truth on every occasion would lose us all our friends and make us unfit for society. Speech need not always be used thus, and this literal-minded definition would require a distinction between lies that are allowable and those that are not, between so-called white lies and black lies. A better procedure is to reserve the word lie for the misuse of speech that is morally wrong and to define it accordingly. To distinguish it from the loosed usages of everyday speech, we may call it a strict or formal lie. We are concerned with it alone. Commenting on St. Augustine’s definition of a lie as “a false statement uttered with the intent to deceive,” St. Thomas says that it contains three things: 1. The falsity of the statement. This provide the material for a lie for it is not a lie to say what is actually false while thinking it true, though it is a lie to say something is actually true while knowing it to be false. 2. The will to tell the falsity. The essential element of a lie as a human act is the willful disconformity between one’s thought and one’s speech, so that it is “speech contrary to one’s mind.” 3. The intention to deceive. This is the usual motive to lying and indicates its normal effect on the one lied to. The intent need not be efficacious, as when a liar knows that he or she will not be believed. Some add a fourth that a lie must be: 4. Told to one who has a right to the truth. If this addition is properly understood, it will make the explanation of lying much simpler and clearer. It should not mean that we can say anything and everything we want to a person merely because that particular person has no strict right to demand the truth of us. It must be presumed that anyone to whom we speak has the right to be spoken to truthfully if we speak to him or her seriously on any matter at all. Respect for the person as a person requires that we speak truthfully. Someone loses this right only when we have the greater right to withhold the truth and cannot do so by silence. In this case, speech must be used to conceal rather than reveal the truth, and what we are really communicating to the person is the fact that we are not communicating. Such a person should be able to take the hint that he or she is not being lied to but is being put off. The person has the right to the truth about what we think may also have a right to know the truth about what emotions we feel. If it is to this person’s advantage or to someone else’s advantage that he or she know what I feel, if it makes a real difference to his person or to another, then to express an emotion I do not feel and/or to conceal emotions I actually do feel is a failure to be honest. To express an emotion I do not feel is, in this context, emotional insincerity, a kind of emotional untruthfulness, to fail to express what I actually do feel is, in this same context, a suppression of the truth, an act of dissimulation. To express love for a person when I do not feel it is one of the most cruel forms of emotional insincerity, just as it is equally insincere to conceal my true feelings from someone to whom the knowledge would make a real difference. Other examples of this kind of dishonesty are pretending to like things or persons we do not like or pretending to feel sympathy or joy for a person when we do not. Just as a person who habitually trifles with the truth tends to lose the ability to distinguish between truth and falsity, so a person who habitually cheats others about his or her emotions soon becomes unable to know what he or she really feels. The end result is not only deception of others but self-deception as well. When we tamper with the sincerity of our emotional life we destroy our own inner integrity, we become unreal for ourselves and for others, and we lose the ability to know what we actually feel. The problem comes down to the nature of speech as a medium of communication and its function in human society. For a strict lie there must be an indication, at least in the circumstances, that: 1. Serious communication is going on. 2. It is meant to be taken as true. 3. It is being accepted by the hearer as true. 4. Yet it is known by the speaker to be false. Conventionality of Speech It is natural for us to speak, but apart from a few obvious gestures and imitative sounds, there is no natural language. The so called natural languages are merely those that were never consciously invented but grew up historically. Language is conventional; the symbols used being developed by human artifice and dictated by custom. Hardly any word has a single univocal meaning whenever used, like the symbols of mathematics. Language is a peculiar mixture of logic and tradition, in which the conventions are undergoing subtle but continual change. By convention we distinguish fact and fiction, literal and figurative expressions, jokes, and serious statements, emotional outbursts and sober information, ironical allusions and scientific data, polite compliments and solemn testimony. Often nothing but circumstances indicates the difference. 1. Communication is not limited to words but is any sign used to convey thought. Looks, gestures, nods, winks, shrugs, facial expressions, tones of voice, and even the circumstances in which something is said are all signs capable of telling another of what we think and, if used for this purpose, are communication. Lying is possible by any of these means. 2. The sign must be intended by the speaker to convey a meaning. Involuntary looks and gestures are not communication. It is not always lying to conceal our emotions under outward calm nor appear cheerful when we are sad, but only when we are intentionally using our appearance to express our real feelings. 3. The sign must be made to another person for communication is between personal selves. It is impossible to lie to oneself, nor would it be lying to confide untruths to one’s dog. Talk in other people’s presence, when it is clearly not directed to them, is not communication to them. Eavesdroppers listen at their own peril. 4. The sign must be such as to express the speaker’s own judgment, what he or she believes to be true. To lie, therefore, the speaker must express as true something thought to be untrue, or as certain something not known for a certain. If I mistakenly think that what I say is true, though in fact it is not, I do not lie; my speech is untrue but not untruthful. 5. Fiction is not lying for the story is used as an expression of one’s creative imagination and entertaining ability, not of one’s factual judgment. Jokes and exaggerations are not lies if there is any circumstance to indicate that they are not to be taken seriously. 6. Figures of speech are not lies. When a word has several meanings, its sense in this particular statement must be judged by the content and meaning of the whole statement by the total figuratively, and the figurative meaning can just as genuine as the literal. 7. Many polite expressions and stereotype formulas have lost old meanings and acquired new ones through convention. “Not guilty in a law court is a legal plea by which the accused does not confess but demands that the case be proved. “Good morning,” “goodbye,” “how do you do,” “see you later” once meant something but is now mere forms of greeting and parting. How far one can go in the use of polite excuses depends on convention. “Not at home,” “in conference”, “occupied,” “too busy,” “previous engagement” are recognized as urbane ways of putting one off, depending on the circumstances. Once these probably were lies, but use has softened their import. 8. Circumstances can be such that, though words are used, there is no formal speech because no communication is intended nor should it be expected. A captured soldier, for instance may regale his captor with tall stories about the disposition of his own troops. Even if they are foolish enough to believe him, he is not lying because circumstances show that he is entertaining and not communicating. The case is different if a prisoner is put on parole and seriously accepts the conditions. Lying and Deception Deception is the usual motive for lying, but we must not confuse these two concepts. Feints, disguises, impersonations, fictitious names, and other such pretenses are deceptions but not lies. The difference is in the lack of communication in the sense just explained. Deception is not wrong in itself but can become wrong from motives and circumstances if intended or foreseen as a cause of harm. The wrong comes not from the act done which is indifferent, but from the consequences the harm that follows. Most games are built on harmless deception. Even harmful deception may be permitted in the protection or vindication of one’s rights, according to the principle of double effect. Thus stratagems and military maneuvers in war may be designed deliberately to mislead the enemy. Such deceptions are not lies because nothing is said no judgment is expressed, no statement is made by the usual symbols of communication. Actions are done, it is true, but if the enemy takes a meaning out of them, he does do at his own peril. The intent to deceive may be justified on the grounds that one is defending one’s own rights and merely permitting the enemy to harm himself. Some even classify the presentation of forged passports and other documents to elude an unjust government as deceptions but not lies, because circumstances show that they are not communications but only an external compliance with demands the officials have no right to make. Hugo Grotius correctly distinguishes between lies and stratagems, but his application is poor; he classes among stratagems among some actions that really are lies: to tell a falsehood to do someone a service, to use false intelligence to encourage troops, and his probation of Plato’s “noble lie” told for the public welfare. These are not stratagems, actions capable of a deceptive interpretation, but lies. A free hand cannot be given to one of the worst forms of lying yet invented, mass propaganda of militant nationalism. ARGUMENTS ON LYING We have shaved down a lie to the minimum because people use speech loosely and give it other social functions besides that of communicating thought. These remain an irreducible residue: speech meant and taken in all seriousness as communication from person to person. The hearer trusts the speaker and has a right to be told the truth if he or she is told anything. Hence lying in the sense defined and explained which we have called strict or formal lie as a morally evil act. St. Thomas’s argument cites Aristotle and St. Augustine. As words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind. Hence the Philosopher says that lying is in itself evil and to be shunned, while truthfulness is good and worthy of praise. Therefore every lie is a sin, as also Augustine declares. The first of the following arguments is an expansion of St. Thomas’s argument, and the other two are additions to it. 1. Argument from the abuse of a natural ability. It is natural to intelligent beings to have some means of communicating their thoughts to win assent from others. To communicate as thought what is not thought, to convey seriously to another as true what one knows to be untrue, is to abuse this means of communication and to render it unfit for its purpose. Hence lying is an act against our nature and violation of the natural law. 2. Argument from our social nature. Human society is built on mutual trust and faith among people. If lying were morally allowed, we could never tell when a person is lying and when not, whether the next statement will be a lie or the truth; we could not even accept a person’s assurance that the statement he or she is now making is the truth. Such speech would cease to have any meaning for us, and if this practice became widespread, there would be an end to human communication and thus to human society. 3. Argument from the dignity of the human by being fed falsehood instead of truth under the assurance that it is truth. This is precisely what the liar does. By subjecting another’s intelligence to a lie for the liar’s own advantage, he or she degrades the person of a fellow human being and in so doing degrades his or her own person. No moralist advocates lying as a normal practice or thinks that we may play fast and loose with the truth as we please, but some, and not only relativists, object to the rigidity and absoluteness of the arguments just given. There are occasions, they think, when lying is allowed and perhaps even required. 1. Words are a means to an end and have no sacredness in themselves. They may be used for communicating or for withholding the truth. There is no reason why one should be a natural use and the other an unnatural abuse. We use other abilities for purposes not directly intended by nature, as when an acrobat stands on her hands, without considering it an abuse. Why should speech be treated differently? 2. Everyone recognizes the social value of speech and the need for trust among people. But the good for society may sometimes be promoted more by a lie than by the truth, for instance, to save an innocent person’s life or to avert war. Kant thought that if I were hiding a friend from a pursuing murderer, I could not save him by telling the lie that he is not here. Such idolatry of principle would be more antisocial than social. It would destroy the fugitive’s trust in men, and even the pursuer, while accepting my betrayal, would despise me for it. 3. A person should be morally allowed to lie, not arbitrarily, but only in limited social situations. The person would be using the lie for protection, and the greater the lie the more extreme would have to be the peril to justify it. The rest of us can usually recognize when someone is cornered and can make due allowances for the truth value of his or her speech. We actually do so anyway, yet the social value of communication is not thereby destroyed. 4. If self-defense allows us to go so far as to kill an attacker, why may we not save ourselves at much less cost by telling a lie when lying would get us out of the situation? Why should physical force be an allowable means of selfdefense and the spoken word an immoral one? To let someone be deceived is a far less evil than to kill him or her. 5. In self-defense the means of self-defense are to be proportioned to the means of attack. If we may repel force by force, why should we repel a lie with a lie? Force cannot defend against speech, it is true, but speech can defend against speech. One who slanders my good name can be deterred by knowing that he or she will receive the same treatment from me. 6. The difference between lie another kinds of deception is that a lie uses the common symbols of communication called speech, whereas other forms of deception use actions capable misinterpretation. Why make so much of this difference? Why not consider a lie as any other stratagem, and treat it on the same terms? There is a value to some of these objections. Others have already been considered in determining the factors necessary for a lie to be a lie in the strict sense. 1. Many prefer not to use the argument from the abuse of a natural ability, not as denying that such abilities can be abused, but as questioning how we decide what uses are unnatural abuses since many things in nature have several alternative uses. Standing on one’s hands does not make them unfit for their normal use, but to drive nails by punching them in with one’s bare fist would soon do so. The boy in the fable who cried “Wolf” so ruined his speech that he could no longer communicate when it became necessary. Does such a result come from a lie or two, or from the reputation of being a habitual liar? 2. The telling of a lie seems a small price to pay for saving life or averting war. But where does one stop? Murder or any other crime could be done for similar reasons. Not the size of the evil but the kind is what counts. Moral evil may not be done to avert even the greatest of physical evils. All this makes sense only if the lie is really a lie in the full meaning of the term. Murdered have no right to know where their intended victim is, and nothing said to them has the character of communication. This is not an example of a real lie, and there is no need to follow Kant’s rigid interpretation of duty. 3. The same answer is applicable to a person in extreme difficulty. We do not expect literal truth from such a person because we know that he or she is not communicating. The case is different when this person is put under oath in court, for then what he or she says is taken seriously by those who have a right to know, unless the court itself is corrupt and vehicle of injustice a fact to be proved and not presumed. 4. One may summon all one’s powers to aid in defense against an unjust attack, but one must not misuse these powers so that they become evil means to a good end. We should certainly defend ourselves by speech rather than by killing, if the speech can be morally justified in any legitimate way, but not if it is a real lie in the strict and formal sense previously discussed. Physical force can be a moral or immoral means of self-defense, depending on how it is used, and so can speech. A strict lie is an immoral means by definition. If in the most such cases the adversary would not have a right to the truth, what is said would not be a strict lie. 5. We have here a different case from the preceding. It is not a case of warding off physical attack by speech rather than by force, but of trading off lie for lie. To answer a lie by telling another lie is returning evil for evil and not repelling of the first evil. A lie against me is a wrong use of speech, which is telling the truth. 6. The value of our examination into the factors that make up a lie in the strict sense here becomes apparent. Speech may often be used as a means of deception, as we have seen partly and will see more clearly. Feints, stratagems, and other forms of deception may not be used indiscriminately, and neither may speech. A lie in the strict sense is always an immoral use of speech and is just any form of deception. TRUTHFULNESS IN THE DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP Does the physician have the duty to tell his or her patient the truth and nothing but the truth in any and all circumstances? The patient obviously has a right to know the physician’s diagnosis of his or her case. Is the right to know absolute, that is, unqualified, in any sense? Today we are concerned that each patient has the ultimate decision as to the care and medical treatment to be given. Only an informed consent will suffice. If the patient does not have sufficient information, including knowledge of the viable alternatives available for choice, how can such a person make an informed decision? On the other hand, the physician has agreed to care for and treat the patient so as to heal, restore to health, a person who asked for help in the first place. An attitude of trust on the part of the patient is essential if the healing process is to begin. Competence on the part of the physician usually must be presumed on the part of the patient; and this competence is guaranteed by the government in licensing the physician to practice. Traditionally, the judgment of the physician has been held paramount in the area of truth telling and the early oaths and codes of medical practice are all silent on what physicians should tell patients. The general principle that seems to emerge from our tradition is that the main concern of the physician and the others attending the sick is to maintain the good spirits of the sick person. If telling the whole, unvarnished truth will harm the patient, then the tradition would sanction withholding the truth or even bending it. Clearly the tradition is paternalistic and needs further nuancing for the contemporary physician. No casuistic solution can be advanced here to govern all cases. The personal dignity of the patient must be upheld by the physician, for the patient always has the right to know the seriousness of his or her condition to the extent that this knowledge is required for the patient’s decisive response. The physician has a duty to reveal the gravity of the patient’s ability to cope with it and in accord with the time left for the patient to deal with this knowledge. The greatest insult to the patient’s intelligence is to lie to the patient. Most patients desire to be hold frankly but gently about their condition as they approach death. Unless the patient indicates clearly, either explicitly or implicitly, that he or she does not want the whole truth, the physician ought to inform the patient gradually but fully as a way of befriending the patient and helping him or her search for the ultimate truth of his or her life. For the physician to indulge in deception is to destroy the mutual respect and trust, that may well be the physician’s most valuable therapeutic asset. SECRETS If our speech is such that it is serious communication, what we say must be true, but there are times when we may and times when we must refuse to speak. We must reveal the truth when the other party has a right to it. Such would be a lawful superior, a judge in court, or a party to a contract. We must not reveal the truth when it is a strict secret. A secret is knowledge that the possessor has the right or the duty to conceal. For want of a better term we shall call a truth that one has a duty to conceal a strict secret. A person may be obliged to keep a secret because: 1. The knowledge of its very nature is private 2. He or she has promised not to reveal it The first is a natural secret, because the matter it deals with is private. What belongs to a person’s private life, to the closed circle of the family, to the status of business firms and corporations, to military and diplomatic affairs of governments, cannot be aired in public without injury to the parties concerned. Those who share in such matters are bound to keep them secret. Others who happen to find out about them are also bound to keep them secret, but not to the jeopardy of their own rightful interests. The second comprises secrets of promise, when one already has the knowledge and then promises not to divulge it; and secrets of trust, when the knowledge is confided to one only under the condition, expressed or implied, that the matter is confidential and not to be revealed. Both of these may also be natural secrets and/or not, depending on the nature of the matter. Professional secrets are typical examples of secrets of trust and are usually natural secrets also. A secret of trust is the strictest kind of secret and binds in justice, because it is based on a contract expressed or implied. That we are at times permitted to conceal the truth should be evident from our nature. Besides being a member of society, each of us is also an individual. I have not only social and public relations but also private and personal affairs of my own. I have a right to my own personal dignity and independence, to freedom from meddling and prying into my private affairs. Furthermore, we are at times obliged to conceal the truth. One of the purposes of speech and of human society itself is that we can get help from our fellow human beings that we can get advice from our friends and consult experts without danger of making private affairs public, that when we organize with others for the pursuit of a common goal, we can exchange information without fear of betrayal to a hostile group. One of the main purposes of speech would be lost unless we can also control how far the knowledge we communicate will spread. How far does the duty of keeping a secret extend? This question concerns the conflict of rights when the right of one party to have a certain matter kept secret conflicts with the difficulties the other party experiences in trying to keep the secret. In general, one is no longer bound to secrecy: 1. If the matter has otherwise been divulged 2. If the other party’s consent can rightly be supposed The first of these conditions is evident, since the secret no longer exists, but the second needs some explanation. One may be expressly released from the obligation of secrecy and then is no longer bound. Even if this release is not expressly given, conditions may be such that it can be reasonably be presumed, for no one has the right expect a person to keep a rather ordinary secret at the expense of his or her life. The laws excuses from duty, as previously explained apply to natural secrets of promise one is no longer held to keep the secret when doing so would cause disproportionate hardship. However, one who has expressly promised to keep the secret even under grave or extreme hardship must keep the promise, unless it went morally wrong to have made such a promise. Greater reasons are required to release one from a secret of trust, but even such a strict secret may cease to bind if the holding of the secret would cause serious damage, not merely hardship, to the parties concerned, to a third party, or to the community. Sometimes however, the revealing of a secret, such as a military secret, would cause such damage to the community that it must be guarded even at the expense of one’s life. What means can one use to keep a secret when directly questioned about it? The following four are customarily noted: 1. Silence. The normal way treat an impertinent question is to refuse to answer. A courteous statement that one is not free to talk of such matters usually ends the subject. Persistent pryers are not put off, however, and silence is often interpreted as consent. 2. Evasion. The use of evasion distracts the questioner without giving the information he or she wants, by changing the conversation, answering a question with a question, passing it off as a joke, or assuming an injured air. Evasion requires more ready with than some people can command. 3. Equivocation. By the use of doublemeaning expressions the speaker are capable of another meaning that is false; if the incautious hearer takes the wrong meaning, that is not the speaker’s problem. Thus a man may speak of his child without saying whether it is his child by birth or adoption; the hearer who assumes one rather than the other is making a hasty judgment. For equivocation to be legitimate, both meanings must be discoverable by the hearer, even though one meaning is much more obvious. 4. Mental reservation. Mental reservation is the limiting of the obvious sense of words to some particular meaning intended by the speaker. It is the truth but not the whole truth. Part of the truth is reserved in the speaker’s mind, lending a possibly deceptive coloring to the part that is expressed. For mental reservation to be legitimate, some outward clue to the limited meaning must be objectively present, though the speaker hopes that it will not be noticed by the listener. The clue may be nothing else but circumstances in which the words are said. A doctor is asked whether his patient has a certain disease and answers, “I don’t know,” meaning, “I don’t know, secret apart and in my nonprofessional capacity.” He may even answer, “No,” meaning, “No, not insofar as I can tell you.” The very fact of his profession is sufficient clue to the meaning, for the questioner ought to know that the doctor cannot speak in his or her professional capacity. Thus this example can be taken as mental reservation but is better interpreted as an instance of no communication. May a person use evasions, equivocations, and mental reservations at any time and for any reason? No. They are not lies and not wrong in themselves, but an act can become wrong by its motive or its circumstances. An unrestricted use of these means of concealment would have ruinous social effects and would break down mutual trust among people. It is not the normal mode of speech, and we cannot be constantly combing over every sentence uttered to us to find possible hidden meanings. We expect our neighbor to speak to us with candor and sincerity, and we take his or her words in their obvious sense in the ordinary transactions of life. These combinations of speech and nonspeech are to be used only as a refuge to guard a secret from prying questioners who have no right to the information they seek. With this motive and in these circumstances they are morally allowable. Finally, in circumstances in which the questioner not only has no right to the information but would use it to do evil and the necessary concealment can be accomplished by neither equivocation nor mental reservation, what is morally allowable? We must avoid cooperating in evil and so cannot, take a chance of giving the questioner some outward clue to the information. Given the duty to maintain the secret, the further duty to avoid cooperation in evil, and the fact that the questioner has no right to the information, we may tell the questioner anything that sounds reasonable. In this way we succeed in deceiving the questioner and so deflecting him or her from doing evil without telling a strict lie. The world we live in is an imperfect one. Duplicity and deceit are a real part of that world and cannot be wiped out altogether. At the same time, we know that personal integrity demands truthfulness from each of us and that trust and integrity are precious values and are difficult to regain once they have been squandered. Only on the basis of respect for truthfulness can trust and integrity flourish in society. For this reason we have insisted that concealment he kept at a minimum and that in the use of mental reservation there be some outward clue to the meaning objectively present. Legitimate as these subterfuges may be, they should not be overstressed. Most cases of allowable verbal deception can be explained simply by the fact that speech is not being used in its function of serious communication. CONCLUSION By nature we are social beings, and the ability to speak is perhaps the chief means by which our social life is carried on. Like all other gifts, speech may be used or abused. Thus truthfulness is good and lying is wrong. Speech can be abused in two ways: by seriously communicating as true what one knows to be untrue or by revealing truths one has no right to reveal. We are never allowed to do the former, since the hearer has a right to the truth. We would have no difficulty about the latter were it not for other people’s prying minds and impertinent questions; against them we have right to protect ourselves, a right that often becomes a duty when other people are involved. I such a difficult situation we are allowed sometimes obliged, to summon all our ingenuity to extricate ourselves from the difficulty and to guard the trust others have placed in us. Apart from such situations, sincerity and candor should rule our speech.
