In some cases it is already against the law to lie: Lying under oathLying to a police officerLying about being a police officerlying to the IRS*
Should it be illegal to ever lie at all, to anyone? Even “little white lies”? Should the intentional telling of an untruth to anyone be a punishable offense, either criminally or civilly? If so, what should the penalties be?
:rolleyes: Alright, it would be very unenforcable, and jam up the courts if enforced. We got that statement out of the way.
But would we be a better society if lying had a much harsher stigma attatched to it (i.e. a crime) that it seems to have now.
I know you’ve already mentioned unenforceability, but it’s pretty hard to discuss the usefulness of a theory if it patently couldn’t be applied. Or maybe that’s just me.
If you can’t enforce it (as you say) it’s pointless to have it. Even if you could, how would you detect it? Does an absence of relevant information mean the same as a lie? You can bend, hide and circumvent the truth quite easily without actually lying.
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Okay, ignoring the unenforceability: most societies are founded on the notion that truth-telling is a pre-requisite for communication. James Rachels (I think) makes a case that truth-telling is a moral universal, since no society could exist if its members could not assume that each other spoke the truth; personal and financial relationships would just not work, and a lack of trust would hinder any dealings with other members of that society.
Given that our societies today seem to be mostly happy with the idea that Lying Is Bad, would making it illegal make the slightest difference? Those that lie could be said to be breaking other laws and punishable via them (e.g. fraud laws) or involved in personal relationships that the law arguably should not be regulating.
pkbites, the biggest question in my mind is where to draw the line. Shall we outlaw only intentional lies? Only malicious ones? Shall we outlaw fiction? Satire?
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that lying is already illegal, if the effect of the lie is significant enough. See the voluminous writings on libel in any law library, for example.
I would question this assumption. Rather ahistorical and egocentric. Plenty of societies I am familiar with take a rather different take on the concept, avoidance of offense being put before truth telling in terms of communicative value. Makes doing business rather more difficult in our modern age but has its purposes.
Actually in America we have many laws that are more or less unenforceable that are used basically just to nail people when other crimes can’t be pinned on them. No examples come to mind, sorry I’m fried.
Fraud would be another example. I don’t now when a lie is serious enough to cross the line into fraud, but it can.
Aside when it causes real harm to people (as in libel, perjury, or fraud cases), I don’t see any good reason for the government to get involved in regulating what we can say to each other.
In addition, in some jurisdictions there is the civil wrong known as the tort of deceit. Its an old fashioned form of misleading and deceptive conduct legislation available in the past few years in some countries’ trade practices laws (effectively killing off caveat emptor).
Someone deceives you with a lie, you can sue for your loss.
It seems to me that there would be serious Constitutional problems with outlawing lying. If the First Amendment is going to protect kiddie porn, skinheads, and whatever it is that Louis Farrakhan “thinks”, then surely there must also be room under the umbrella for my decision about whether or not to tell you people that I am – in reality – Bill Gates.
If it is desirable for a government to tell its subjects (for in this case they could not rightly be considered citizens) something as essential to personal autonomy as that they must in all instances be truthful to one another, under penalty of the law, then what other choices ought not also to be wrested from their control?
To enact a policy such as this would be to abandon democracy as a working theory of governance entirely, because it would be – in principle – to jettison any notion that We The People are competent to make our own decisions.
For more on whether or not democracy is worth pursuing, see Churchill, Winston.
You certainly are - your sentence makes no sense. If they are “unenforceable”, how can they be possibly used “to nail people”? If people are being arrested, tried, and convicted, then the law is being enforced. Get some sleep and try again.
Not so fast. Enforceability of the law is vital to the continued health of the law. If laws cannot be or are not enforced, it breeds disrespect for all law. This is not mere philosophizing - it is the core of Guliani’s and Bratton’s successful fight against crime in NYC. They targeted the squeegee-men and turnstile jumpers on the theory that if the atmosphere tolerates minor crime, major crime follows.
In point of fact, however, the problem is not that criminal lying is unenforceable; it is. The problem is that you cannot possibly get every perpetrator. The result would be selective enforcement - people who lies to cops and their families will go down, but few others will. Not a good scenario.
Fair enough (but ‘egocentric’?). Rachels apparently hasn’t explained such examples. However, assuming that we are talking about modern states with a concept of the rule of law (given the OP), is the idea that truth-telling is a dominant principle really that invalid?
Fraud, if I recall correctly, requires a material misrepresentation of fact for the purpose of inducing someone to perform some act which he would otherwise not perform (such as transferring property or providing a service). Not all lies lead to fraud.
A similar issue actually comes up in the rarefied field of legal ethics. Attorneys are not permitted to lie (“make a false representation of fact”) in the course of representing a client. However, this presents a problem in negotiations. If you are absolutely forbidden from lying, then you cannot say to your opponent’s attorney, “My client’s position is that she cannot accept anything less than $5 million for the property” when in fact you’re willing to accept $2 million. In other words, making an opening bid less than you are actually willing to pay, or more than you are actually willing to accept, would be prohibited. If lies of this sort are prohibited, then negotiation becomes rather pointless. Virtually all commentators do not believe that “lies” of this sort are immoral or wrong, but it is quite difficult to distinguish them from the sort of lies we do want to prohibit.
