Given the obvious importance of the issues, it is perhaps surprising how little agreement there is about what exactly constitutes lying as opposed to misleading and regarding the moral significance of the distinction. In this excellent and concise book Jennifer Mather Saul shows why there is such disagreement, basically due to the inherent complexities of the subject matter, but also manages to steer a course through these complexities to a relatively clear position of her own.
There are, Saul points out (p.69), two leading traditions regarding the lying/misleading distinction. One tradition has a rather inclusive understanding of what constitutes lying, where any deliberate deception constitutes a lie, thereby downplaying the lying/misleading distinction. The other tradition defines lying much more strictly in terms of the deliberate assertion of false propositions, and so the lying/misleading distinction is upheld. The former tradition generally allows for the moral permissibility of some lies, whereas the latter often tends to the view that lies are never or very rarely permissible. When traditions and intuitions clash so explicitly, it is clear that the philosopher faces serious challenges.
In one simple, but deceptively straightforward, move Saul lays the ground for how to move forward. She advocates from the outset the view that any satisfactory definition and linguistic theory of lying must allow for a contrast with misleading, to the extent that this is a necessary condition for an adequate theory of lying. It is therefore particularly notable that Saul's conclusions regarding the morality of lying and misleading give less significance to the lying/misleading distinction than is usual in the literature.
It is impossible to do justice here to the detail and rigour of Saul's analysis. A brief example must suffice. Take Saul's preferred definition of lying (p.19):
‘If the speaker is not the victim of linguistic error/malaproprism or using metaphor, hyperbole, or irony, then they lie iff [if and only if] (1) they say that P; (2) they believe P to be false; (3) they take themself to be in a warranting context’.
Saul arrives at this definition at the end of a series of arguments designed to test each element of the definition. What might not be obvious, though, is what is left out of the definition. It might, for example, seem a platitude that a necessary condition for lying is the intention to deceive. As Saul rightly points out, a witness in court under oath who has good reason to fear reprisal and who has been recorded on CCTV clearly witnessing a crime, might lie in asserting that he did not see the crime taking place, even though he can be reasonably sure that in so lying he is deceiving no one.
With this definition in place, Saul proceeds to the philosophy of language. She divides the leading theories of what is said into three groups: the unconstrained, the constrained and the austere. The difference between these is largely to do with the role of context in determining what has been said. Saul concludes by finding them all inadequate for tracking the lying/misleading distinction, and so she finds them all inadequate as theories of lying.
The theory that Saul arrives at is neither overly unconstrained nor austere. In particular, she argues for the position (p.57):
‘A putative contextual contribution to what is said is a part of what is said only if without this contextually supplied material, [sentence] S would not have a truth-evaluable semantic content in [context] C’.
Thus a satisfactory theory of lying and misleading should allow contextual contributions to what is said in terms of completion, but not of expansion (p.66). A sentence like
‘Beau is late.’
requires contextual contributions for the utterance to be truth-evaluable (Beau is late – for what?), whereas in the case of the sentence
‘Billy went to the top of the Empire State Building and jumped.’
contextual contributions are not necessary for the utterance to be truth-evaluable, but nonetheless contribute to what is intuitively asserted (presumably jumped off the edge, but not excluding the possibility of up and down on the spot etc.).
Having put forward her linguistic theory of lying and misleading, Saul proceeds to examine the moral issues. She defends the view that the act of misleading is generally not to be morally preferred to the act of lying, though in some specific sorts of cases it might be (e.g. in an adversarial context such as a courtroom). To help explain a conclusion that might be counter-intuitive for many, Saul appeals to the distinction of act-evaluation and character-evaluation. She argues, citing a host of examples, that misleading and lying tend to be on an equal footing in terms of act-evaluation, but to mislead rather than to lie might indicate a better character. Saul moves too quickly here, and has relatively little to say about why acts of equal moral standing should reflect differences in moral character. She continues her account of the morality of lying/misleading in a final chapter dealing with some special cases, such as some of the finer details of the Clinton/Lewinsky case and various theories in the Christian casuistical tradition, such as the doctrines of mental reservation and of equivocation.
Throughout her analysis Saul generally takes a middle position between the leading competing linguistic and moral theories. In this she not only rejects commonly held positions, but also presents an important and novel position of her own. This position possesses the considerable merit of being relatively clear, whilst not downplaying the inherent complexities of the subject matter. The conclusions she draws from her examples struck me as plausible in the main, even if I part company with her in a few, but important, cases. This, however, highlights for me a weakness in an otherwise very strong book, namely, an arguably excessive reliance on a largely assumed consensus regarding our intuitions in response to specific examples and the lack of adequate reflection on the nature of intuitions and on the value of the inferences we might draw from them. Such reflection seems particularly important in ethics, given the extent of disagreement on moral issues and the range of factors (e.g. cultural, religious, the nature of the relationship with one's interlocutor etc.) that can affect our intuitions in this area. Apart from this, Saul's book struck me as a model of how philosophy of language and of ethics can be combined to help shed light on difficult questions with subtlety, rigour and insight.
