What Philosophers Argue About Lying

West presents Nietzsche's view that the falseness of a belief is not by itself an argument against it, since many false or unverifiable beliefs, like a stable unified self, are necessary for organizing a livable life. Nietzsche is presented as arguing that humans often prefer useful fictions to the cold hard truth, and that treating truth as an unconditional ideal is a leftover from religious thinking.

Drawing on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, West argues that lying includes unknowingly true statements meant to deceive, technically true but misleading partial descriptions, bald-faced lies nobody expects to be believed, and bluffs that are an accepted part of an environment like poker or war. He concludes that the moral status of a lie depends heavily on which kind of lie it is.

West presents Augustine's claim that lying splits a person's inner unity and damages the liar as much as others, Montaigne's claim that lying destroys the trust that social cooperation requires, and Kant's argument that lying parasitically depends on background trust and robs others of the agency needed to deliberate and consent. He then presents Hannah Arendt's extension of this to the political scale, where widespread lying erodes a shared sense of reality needed for collective judgment.

West proposes that across these different scales, a harmful lie can be understood as robbing someone of a future reality, whether that is a shared political reality, the picture of the world needed for agency, or the social bonds needed to function.

West presents Plato's Republic myth of citizens born from the earth with metals mixed into their souls as a lie that, despite being false, can bind strangers into a community with shared values. He extends this with an example of a forged painting that produces real cultural and economic benefits, arguing that lies can be constructive cultural forces alongside the truth.

West presents Max Stirner's egoist argument that truth is a spook, an idea people wrongly treat as sacred, and that no one is owed the truth automatically. Stirner is presented as holding that whether to lie should depend on examining who is asking, what relationship exists, and what they will do with the truth, while warning that lying out of fear, vanity, laziness, or greed can still make you owned by something else.

West presents Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, in which a hive becomes smaller and less prosperous once all its bees become perfectly honest and virtuous, to argue that strategic insincerity and other social vices can be part of what makes complex human cooperation function well.

Kant is presented as holding that lying is self-contradictory because it relies on a background norm of truth-telling that the liar exempts themselves from, treating others merely as means. Stirner is presented as rejecting this, arguing the categorical imperative is not a real universal law and that lying is simply effective and justified case by case depending on the relationship and situation.

Montaigne is presented as arguing that lying destroys the trust that basic social functioning depends on. Mandeville is presented as replying, through the fable of the bees, that a hive purified of all vice and insincerity becomes smaller and less prosperous, suggesting some level of strategic dishonesty is part of what makes complex cooperation work.