Hilary Lawson (HL): Lying is not about how the world is; lying is about our relationship to our own expression.

Parashkev Nachev (PN): An error is not necessarily a lie, a lie is something that one deliberately chooses to say as a deception usually for ones own gain.

James Whyte (JW): When you don’t have a convention of truth-telling its incredibly expensive for society. People can’t rely on each other and it drives up the cost of interaction between individuals.

Chair: Should we embrace lies as a necessary part of being human?

JW: Lies are a part of being human but I’m not sure if they are necessary and we certainly shouldn’t embrace them. That’s because the convention of honesty is incredibly important to the smooth functioning of society. By which I mean a society in which people have the best chance of getting what they want. When you lie you are thwarting people’s goals; here’s an example. I ask my wife where my shirt is and she tells me that it is in the dryer. I go to look in the dryer and its not there and I’ve wasted my time and I have to continue looking. That’s the problem with lying. We depend on other people to navigate the world and get by in life. Here’s another example: A menu at a restaurant, I want to eat a steak, it says steak on the menu and I order the steak and I am relying on the fact that they will deliver a steak. If you took this away society would collapse.

What matters when we are listening to other people is whether we can rely on them. Relying on people has two elements, one of which is honesty. If I am trying to judge on whether I should rely on what you say and base my actions on that, I have to make two judgements about you. Are your beliefs about the world likely to be true and are you likely to be honest? This varies enormously between people and subjects. It also varies in cultures too. You only care about honesty in people in so far as you want them to be reliable indicators of what’s real in the world. Once you understand those terms you can see why it is sometimes moral to lie.

HL: James and I disagree fundamentally about objective truth. I am a radical non-realist; I think the language of thought is incapable of allowing us to arrive at some objective truth about the world. But I don’t think that means we can say whatever we want or there is no such thing as lying. The reason for that is I also believe lying has nothing to do with truth. That’s why it’s possible to say something which is a lie but which is fact true. It’s also possible to say something honestly which is false.

Imagine someone calls into work sick. They say ‘I am very sick and can’t come in’ when in actual fact they are planning to have a nice day out with their new girlfriend. So it’s a lie. But let’s suppose that unbeknown to them they have a terminal illness, an early form of cancer. So what they have said on the phone is at least socially agreed to be true, but it doesn’t stop it being a lie. That’s because lying is not about how the world is. Lying is about our relationship to our own expression. It’s about whether we hold what we are saying as true, not whether it is true. When we lie we therefore pretend to hold something as true which it isn’t. When we tell the truth we are simply saying things as we hold them.

So whether Tony Blair was lying when he was talking about WMD’s in Iraq has nothing to do whether we found any. It’s not relevant to the question. The question is when he gave us the impression that he thought there were WMD’s was that an accurate picture of how he was holding the world. So lies are not the same thing as truth and falsity and therefore you can hold a position, as I do, that there is no objective truth and yet still adhere to the notion that there can be a clear sense of lies and honesty.

Where I do agree with Jamie is I also want to argue that honesty is something I want to advocate. I want to do so because communication relies on our sharing of the way that we hold the world. When I talk to you I’m encouraging you to hold the world in the way I do. In doing that you are able to share that with me. But if I am lying to you, you aren’t able to share it with me because I’m not offering it to you, I’m lying. There are however certain circumstances in which there are necessary times to lie.

If I am a spy I have to lie otherwise I will get caught out. Same with being a revolutionary, otherwise I would end up in jail. So when we are dealing with an authority we disagree with, lying is an effective strategy. But in our personal lives if we lie we end up like the spy; that is, we are rather alone in that situation. The spy has a lonely space where no one is present with them. So, on a personal level if we are honest this is better for us and those around us.