Ethics

Is lying by omission really a form of lying?

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If the question is about the

If the question is about the word "lying," then there's probably no clear answer. But what word we use isn't the interesting question. Suppose X isn't true, but it's to my advantage that the person I'm talking to should think it's true. For example: maybe I'm talking to my boss, who would reasonably expect that I would have carried out a certain task. In fact, I didn't, and the result was not good. By answering questions artfully, I may be able to leave my boss with the impression that I actually carried out whatever the task was, without ever actually saying this. I've left a crucial detail out of what I said.

Have I actually lied? Maybe not; depends on how you want to use the word. Have I deliberately tried to deceive my boss? The whole point of the story is that I did. Of course my boss might not just assume that I did my job properly, but I'm hoping that's what she thinks, and I'm trying to make that as likely as I can short of outright saying something false.

Is this as bad as an outright lie? Perhaps not; as we've said, there's still a chance that my boss didn't end up believing what I'm hoping she believed. But "not being as bad as an outright lie" still leaves room for not being right all things considered. At the very least, "lying by omission" typically amounts to trying to manipulate someone in a way that we'd expect them to object to if they found out.

That said, sometimes people aren't entitled to know what they want to know. And we aren't always obliged to tell them that we're leaving information out. Thinking about the details of the case will probably give us more moral insight than worrying about exactly which label we use to describe it.

Allen Stairs is right in

Allen Stairs is right in suggesting that it is possible to lie by saying nothing, and perhaps it is worth adding that lies of this sort often form the basis of prosecutions for fraud.

Fraud is legally complicated, but the basic idea is that you can injure someone by causing that person to rely on your assurances, even when you know that your assurances are false. Many legal systems assume that such conduct should sometimes be punished, depending on the circumstances, but they also assume that false assurances (or false representations) can come from what you don't say as much as from what you do say.

For example, if I sell you a car without telling you that it has no brakes, and I omit this fact knowingly, my conduct might well be punishable as fraud. One can label such conduct with a variety of names, of course, but the basic idea is that there is something fundamentally wrong and dishonest about it, and many societies have sought to punish it.

A key element in these situations is trust. If I sell you the car, then you have a legitimate right to expect that you can trust me to disclose any gravely serious defect that I know about, like the car’s having no brakes. (Such expectations are sometimes “fiduciary,” from the Latin fiducia, for trust, and this is especially so when one gets advice from a lawyer or an agent, who is expected to disclose relevant information.) To betray this trust, by commission or omission, is often punishable. By contrast, enemy combatants are not normally expected to disclose their strategic plans to each other, and one reason is that neither side has any obvious right to trustworthy information from the other side. (Perhaps it is just this assumption that lies behind Sun Tzu’s famous aphorism in the Art of War, “All war is based on deception.”)

Similar distinctions often appear in sports or business. Sports teams have no obligation to tell their competitors that the competitors are preparing for the wrong play. But they do indeed have an obligation to disclose violations of the rules by their own players. (“Sure, he played with regulation footballs; we’re just not telling you that the balls were all intentionally deflated.”) Business competitors have no obligation to tell each other of their strategic plans, but they do indeed have a responsibility, both moral and legal, to disclose serious defects in a product to their own customers. In many of these cases, people have a right to trustworthy information, and this right can be violated by what we don’t say as much as by what we do say.

Even in war, an adversary who accepts terms of surrender has a right to expect that there are no undisclosed conditions that would make the surrender absurd or the equivalent of suicide. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, Prince John of Lancaster promises rebel leaders that their grievances will be redressed and urges them to surrender. After the rebels lay down their arms, Prince John orders their arrest and sends them off to execution. He explains that their grievances will indeed be redressed; he simply left out the part about their being arrested and executed.

I am tempted to leave it there, but trust requires that I disclose an additional fact—that I am not a lawyer, just a fellow who teaches philosophy. So if there is any possibility of fraud by omission, it is certainly prudent to consult an attorney.

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