Homework answers / question archive / Special Professional Morality and the Duty of Veracity  Author(s): Joseph S

Special Professional Morality and the Duty of Veracity  Author(s): Joseph S

Philosophy

Share With

---

Special Professional Morality and the Duty of Veracity 
Author(s): Joseph S. Ellin

I will now give three arguments to show why lying is a greater wrong. The first two distinguish between lying and deception by degree only: lying is a greater violation of a principle which deception also violates. The third argument, drawn from Kant, does, however, introduce a new idea: that lying violates the social contract in a way that deception does not.

The first argument is that the liar takes advantage of weakness more than does the deceiver. Consider a typical case of deception in the professions: the surgeon, who smilingly enters the patient's room and reports that the operation went very well, but fails to mention that the findings were devastating. The deception occurs (the false belief is formed) only if the patient assumes that when the surgeon said the operation went well, he meant well from the patient's point of view rather than from the surgeon's (i.e., there were no complications or unexpected difficulties). This may be a natural inference, but it is an inference: if deception harms the victim's interest in the truth, this harm can occur only if the victim draws an inference grounded on what he has been told (or has observed, in Kant's example). We can defend ourselves against this harm by adopting the following maxim of prudence governing belief: "Believe everything you are told but draw no inferences unless supported by independent evidence." If we followed such a rule no one would ever be harmed by deception. Such a rule would impose far fewer burdens on life than a rule which protected against lying, to wit, "Believe nothing you hear unless it is supported by independent evidence." Most of us find the cost of following either rule excessive, hence we are vulnerable to the deceiver as well as to the liar. But the costs are not equal. Each rule may be regarded as a defense, where the cost of the defense against lying is greater than the cost of the defense against deception. Since weakness may be measured by the costs of defense (the more it costs to protect yourself against something, the weaker you are with respect to that thing), and since we are therefore weaker with respect to lying than we are with respect to deception, we can say that the liar takes advantage of our weakness to a greater degree than the deceiver, and is consequently morally worse, even though the harm produced by each is the same.

The second argument follows easily from the first. The liar is more responsible for the harm caused than is the mere deceiver. The reason for this is that in mere deception, the person deceived participates in his own deception, hence is in part responsible for causing it. This is usually obvious: in the case of the surgeon, the patient could have unmasked the deception simply by asking the surgeon a direct question about the findings. The patient is at fault for failing to ask. Even where there is a lie, of course, the victim must bear some responsibility for being deceived, since he has imprudently trusted the liar and failed to verify the statement made to him. But usually it is unreasonable for the victim to seek such verification: in the absence of reason to think otherwise, it is unreasonable not to accept for truth direct statements made to you. But the victim of deception does not simply believe what is said: he draws an inference which is based on, but not verified by, the evidence offered, and then fails to ask the speaker to confirm the inference. The victim of the lie fails to verify a direct statement, but the victim of deception fails to verify a conclusion of his own and fails to seek confirmation from the speaker, and hence is more responsible for the ensuing harm (his coming to hold a false belief).

We now come to the third difference between lying and deception. Suppose we adopted a social contract point of view and postulated that the duty of veracity depends on an original undertaking not to deceive. A lie would then be a violation of this implicit agreement. Such a view was held by Ross, who, however, confined the duty of veracity to the duty to use language truthfully: "Yet the peculiar stringency of the duty of veracity seems to spring from an implicit understanding that language shall be used to convey the real opinions of the speakers...."15 We could even make the strong claim that unless there were such an implicit understanding, speech itself would be frustrated (and society as we know it impossible), since words establish their meaning only by being applied in standard situations, that is, by being spoken when they truly apply. Now the social contract point itself does not establish a difference with deception, since the undertaking is not to deceive, not merely not to lie. To establish a difference we would have to make one or both of two further points. The first is that the promise to speak the truth is more important than the promise not to deceive, since speech is necessary to any human society, whereas non-deception is necessary only for a tolerable or decent society. Truth we might say is an enabling condition for society, whereas non-deception is but an enhancing condition. This point, though powerful, rests on the assumptions above connecting meaningful speech with truth-telling and with human society, assumptions clearly beyond our present scope.

The second point depends on our interpretation of the social contract, that is, how we affirm and reaffirm the promise to be truthful. Suppose we held that in addition to the underlying "implicit understanding," there is also a more explicit promise made everytime we speak, so that to speak at all is virtually to warrant that our words are true. A lie would then amount to a violation of the very promise made by the speech act in which the lie is stated. If we further supposed that it would be implausible to make a parallel claim about deception, then a clear moral difference would emerge: a lie violates a warrant given by the very act of speech, whereas deception violates at most only the underlying "implicit understanding." Such a view would explain our feeling that a liar is less trustworthy than a mere deceiver, since the liar violates his promise in the very act of making it, whereas the deceiver violates only the remote understanding of the original agreement.

1. Make your counter-claim about Ellin's "Cost of Defense" argument.

2. Make your counter-claim about Ellin's "Culpability" argument.

3. Make your counter-claim about Ellin's "Social Contract" argument.