On lies

“This is just a set of rambling thoughts on the issue of the ethics and morality of lying.  In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant discusses lying and calls it a moral wrong no matter what.  The example of the hostess who was a terrible cook asking her guest about her cooking, would have elicited from Kant the truthful reply: "Your cooking sucks".  Earlier western philosophers including Descartes and Hobbes were not as forthright as Kant, but in the penumbra of their works, it is clear they tended towards the same conclusion that lying is always wrong.

Why are our ethics so different today?  For example, if following a routine gene test of his pregnant patient’s blood, a doctor were to accidentally discover that the supposed father isn’t the father… is he obliged to tell her the truth?  No.  If an insurance company turns down a patient’s request for a life-saving procedure, can the doctor lie to the insurance company to get the patient the necessary procedure?  Yes.  Today’s medical ethicists in both cases have sent Kant packing.  They have no problem with the “compassionate lie”.

It seems we’re much closer today to the ancient oriental sage Confucius than to the relatively modern German, Immanuel Kant.  Take a look at this beauty from “The Analects” a compendium of aphorisms attributed to Confucius who preceded Christ by more than half a millennium:

-       The Duke of Sheh informed Confucius, saying, "Among us here there are those who may be styled upright in their conduct. If their father have stolen a sheep, they will bear witness to the fact."  

-       Confucius said, "Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this."

This flies in the face of conventional western philosophy that would not have countenanced such a thing.   So why this huge difference between eastern and western ethics on lying? 

Western ethics is based on Aristotle and his syllogism.  "If all A is B and all B is C therefore all A is C".  “All or none” have lain at the root of western thought for more than 2,500 years.  It is at the root of deductive reasoning and "Formal Logic".  Kant was the very apotheosis of this school, and his "Critique..." stands as the unscalable Everest of formal logic.

Two things happened in modern times (during and after Kant) that disrupted the western world’s ethical and moral self-confidence.  One was the west’s plunge into enormous evil in the name of good (i.e. the excesses of colonialism, the massacre of the Indian tribes, WW-1, WW-II, and the Nazis’ final solution) led by Das Sprach Zarathustra and his unintelligible gift to unprepared mankind of Ubermensch or superman.  This opened the way to a disintegration of western spirituality and a fleeing to the gurus of the east.

The second came from science.  The syllogism-based western thinking was failing science as it found enormous limitations with the absolutism of western formal or deductive rationality.  Formal logic is absolute, able only to deal with "all A's or "all C's".  It can't deal with concepts of strangeness, uncertainty, probability and indeterminism.  Even inductive logic started to fail science forcing the birth of Informal logic in the 1920s.  Most of informal logic’s rules were developed in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  It's very, very new and generally untouched and unknown by western society except in the higher reaches of academia.

Science obviously needed to deal with "some".  We have "some" proof that Darwin was right but can we say " Darwin was right"?  We have some test proof that copper wires conduct electricity but can science say all copper wires conduct electricity?  After all, consider Bertrand Russell's chicken who looked forward to the farmer coming every morning to throw him food to eat?  Dare he assume the same will happen today?  What if this morning the farmer comes with an axe?

This is the dilemma science faced at the turn of the 20th century and this is what forced informal logic to get born.  A whole new paradigm came forth to illumine the darkness into which the west had plunged.  Absolutes were relegated by science to the dust heap… as just two points at either end of a long continuous string.  We have a preponderance of evidence that all copper wire conducts therefore all copper wire conducts.  Don't bother to test each wire before you install.  The same holds with Darwin and with global warming today.  There is a preponderance of evidence; therefore the main theses are true.

This revolution in thinking hit almost every aspect of life; including "lying”.  For example in the second example I gave about a doctor lying to the insurance company, despite the fact the law has stepped-in making such acts illegal and felonious, in surveys done, nearly 60% of American doctors admit having done so.  Ethicists call these “compassionate lies”.  They’re also called “good lies”.  As it has always been in the east, it also is now in the west. 

Kant’s harsh and absolutist opinion lies in the dung heap of history and in its place is another larger truth.  Academic studies show that lies are infrequent.  And modern ethics instruct that  when compassion is at the root then a lie is good…