Topics Ethics

Question Setting aside the sort of lies told by parents to children, are there any lies which, in the panelists' view, it would benefit people in general to believe? (For instance, you might think that although there is no god, religious belief is so beneficial as to outweigh a strict concern for truth.) Or is it the case that there is no lie worth believing?

Accepted:
March 2, 2009

Comments

I think there are probably lots of lies worth believing, and that this probably varies from individual to individual: the person even thinking about drinking and driving ought to believe that he or she will end up harming someone that night, even though statistics do not actually support that belief. The person thinking of cheating on a test ought to believe that she will get caught, even if the chances are very unlikely, and so on.

But many people might think the very question of whether or not there is a lie worth believing is a moot one: the question assumes it is possible to make yourself belief in something you know to be false. Many philosophers think this is just not possible, that you cannot "will to believe" something, just because believing it will somehow benefit you. This seems right to me: there is something about belief that has to be sensitive to the truth. If it really were the case that you knew something was a lie, I don't think you could believe it. The situation may change if you were genuinely indifferent about whether or not the proposition was a lie (as is often the case regarding beliefs about God); in such cases of uncertainty, it might be that the benefit of believing may tip the scales and allow someone to believe something that might be false. But, when it comes to lies, and things we know to be false, I doubt it is even possible to believe, in any meaningful sense.

There are some ideas in ethics that I consider it valuable for people to believe, even though I'm not sure that they are strictly true. For example, the ideas in the UN declaration of human rights are not so much true as approximations to the truth. Jeremy Bentham might have been correct when he said rights were "nonsense upon stilts." But rights talk is powerful and inspiring, and a good way of abbreviating a more complex set of ethical realities.

Although I can't make myself take rights talk 100% seriously, it does get taught in schools and through the media, so that people come to believe in rights, and I wouldn't want to get in the way of this process.