Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well.

Only in such a context can one make sense of what I have found perhaps the most annoying behaviour of Massachusetts natives: the habit of responding to the phrase “Hi, how are you doing?” with another “Hi, how are you doing?” Such a response would never be uttered by an Ontarian in response to another Ontarian, any more than they would say “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” in response to “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” (In my experience, this has also been true of most of the rest of the English-speaking world.) I have always believed that “How are you doing?” is an actual question, and therefore merits an actual response. So, in recent years when I have been convinced of the vital importance of truth-telling, if I am not feeling well I have tried to respond to this question with a shrug and a “meh” – or a similar response that implies that, while I am not feeling particularly well at the moment, it’s not a particularly big deal and the questioner should feel no obligation to distract herself with concern about it.

Feser’s approach, while intended to explain away a pleasantry that is in some sense false, also helps explain pleasantries like the Massachusetts greeting that are literally nonsensical. In Massachusetts, the phrase “how are you?” does not mean anything more than “hello,” and people are occasionally startled when the question receives an answer. The words themselves have no semantic meaning at all.

I’m reminded here of Frits Staal‘s study of Vedic sacrifices and recitation. It has long been noted that many Indians in history (including some still alive) have been able to recite all the words of the Vedas without knowing a single word of the Sanskrit language in which they were composed. Staal used his study of Vedic practitioners to argue against those who searched for an intellectual meaning to every ritual, especially to ritual words like mantras, magic spells. He would claim that many rituals are “rules without meaning” – comparing them and the words spoken in them, instructively, to birdsong. (Insert a joke about Twitter here if you wish.)

If we think of pleasantries as analogous to birdsong, I think we learn something important about them – and we do not necessarily diminish these activities for doing so. Since Aristotle it has been a commonplace that human beings are rational animals – and the “animal” is often just as important as the “rational.” We have a need for wordless reassurance, just like our pets.

One might even apply the term more generally to all the kinds of human behaviours that Confucians call “rites” (li 禮) – patterns of interpersonal behaviour sanctioned by tradition, from solemn ceremonies like weddings and funerals to polite gestures like pleasantries. If we think of pleasantries and other speech rites like birdsong in this way, we return to something like the performance theory of ritual that I had criticized in this post: analyzing spoken words in terms of what they do rather than what they mean. But as I later noted, my earlier criticism was too harsh: many rites should be thought of in terms of what they do rather than what they mean, but we should be clear to include our own rites among these. And here it’s worth noting that this applies to rites that consist solely of words, such as “How are you doing?”. Sometimes, we mean what we say. Sometimes, we just chirp it.

Speaking of rites, I don’t expect to post on Sunday, because I’ll likely be busy with festivities for American Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!

Sandel, however, claims that Kant’s position is not quite as counterintuitive as it seems. Sandel regularly makes this claim in his Justice course, which I taught for as a teaching fellow, and which Sandel has now made available to the public as a course as well as in a book. While Kant brooks no lies, Sandel says, he is quite happy with misleading truths. As evidence Sandel points to Kant’s own life:

Kant found himself in trouble with King Friedrich Wilhelm II. The king and his censors considered Kant’s writings on religion disparaging to Christianity, and demanded that he pledge to refrain from any further pronouncements on the topic. Kant responded with a carefully worded statement: ‘As your Majesty’s faithful subject, I shall in the future completely desist from all public lectures or papers concerning religion.’ Kant was aware, when he made his statement, that the king was not likely to live much longer. When the king died a few years later, Kant considered himself absolved of the promise, which bound him only ‘as your Majesty’s faithful subject.’ Kant later explained that he had chosen his words ‘most carefully, so that I should not be deprived of my freedom… forever, but only so long as His Majesty was alive.’ By this clever evasion, the paragon of Prussian probity succeeded in misleading the censors without lying to them. (Sandel, Justice, p. 134)

I was reminded of Sandel’s position recently while leafing through Śaṅkara‘s commentary on the Yoga Sūtras – specifically sūtra II.30, which speaks of the “restraints” (yama) that a yogin must practise, similar to the Buddhist Five Precepts and identical to the five Jain precepts. On both of these lists is satya, truthfulness. And in expounding the concept of truthfulness, Śaṅkara specifically warns us against the kind of misleading truths that Sandel describes.

Śaṅkara refers to a famous episode in the great Mahābhārata epic, an episode I greatly enjoy. The Pāṇḍavas – the Mahābhārata’s “good guys” – are at a stalemate against their Kaurava foes, because the Kauravas are led by the great general Drona. As long as Drona commands the Kaurava forces, the Pāṇḍavas cannot win. But the Pāṇḍavas have a plan, hatched by Krishna (Kṛṣṇa), that great trickster of a god. Drona cares more than anything for his son Aśvatthāman, and if he thinks Aśvatthāman is dead, he will lose the will to fight. But the Pāṇḍavas have no way to kill Aśvatthāman. What they can do is make Drona think Aśvatthāman is dead. Drona will believe Aśvatthāman is dead, Krishna notes, if he hears news to that effect from Yudhiṣṭhira, the leader of the Pāṇḍavas. For Yudhiṣṭhira, Kantian before the fact in his unswerving regard for the moral law, never tells a lie.

The problem, of course, is just that Yudhiṣṭhira never tells a lie! So he refuses to tell Drona that Aśvatthāman is dead – until Krishna comes up with a different plan. The Pāṇḍavas will kill an elephant named Aśvatthāman, and then it will no longer be a lie to say that Aśvatthāman is dead. It will merely be a misleading truth.

Yudhiṣṭhira agrees. The poor beast’s head is smashed in with a mace, and once Yudhiṣṭhira is within earshot of Drona the Pāṇḍavas call out “Aśvatthāman is dead!” Drona turns to Yudhiṣṭhira and asks, “Is this true?” And Yudhiṣṭhira calls out “Yes, it is true! Aśvatthāman _{the elephant} is dead” – adding the words “the elephant” in a voice too soft and hasty for Drona to have any chance of hearing it. Sure enough, Drona loses the will to fight, and the Pāṇḍavas begin to triumph.

Śaṅkara calls this story to mind in order to rule it out as an option for the yogin. The author of the Yoga Bhāṣya commentary says “The speech spoken to convey one’s own experience to others should not be deceitful”; to the end of this sentence Śaṅkara adds: “as when one states what one knows to be a fact, but this very truth is being spoken with the aim of tricking some other person. So Yudhiṣṭhira said ‘Aśvatthāman is killed – _{I mean the elephant.}‘” Even though it was for a good end, what Yudhiṣṭhira did was wrong; one should not do it.

Śaṅkara, then, explicitly rules out “misleading truths” as an option. Does Kant? I’m not sure. I didn’t buy the account when Sandel made it in class; it seemed to me that Kant was merely being a bad Kantian. But in his book Sandel explains in more detail. “A carefully crafted evasion pays homage to the duty of truth-telling in a way that an outright lie does not. Anyone who goes to the bother of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do expresses, however obliquely, respect for the moral law.” More importantly, the misleading truth can be universalized. One would not be able to lie to the murderer if everyone told lies in such situations, for the claim could never be believed. But one could tell misleading truths if that’s what everyone did; it’s not that the claims would not be believed, but that people would have learned “to listen like lawyers and parse such statements with an eye to their literal meaning.” (Justice, p. 137) And because it can be universalized, one is treating one’s interlocutor as an end and not merely as a means; the misleading true statement “does not coerce or manipulate the listener in the same way as an outright lie. It’s always possible that a careful listener could figure it out.” (pp. 137-8) I’m still a little skeptical of the point, but Sandel might just be right. With these arguments, he’s managed to do what I thought was impossible: to defend Kant’s actions on Kantian grounds.

While I think I’ve established the importance of truth as an end in itself, I don’t think I’ve at all established that truth as an end overrides other ends, especially beneficial consequences. I am not convinced of Kant’s or Augustine’s view that lies are always unconditionally wrong – that one should tell the truth even to a murderer whose victim you’re sheltering. In Rawls’s terms, I don’t think that there is a “lexical order” of priority between truth and good consequences, such that the latter matters only when the former isn’t an issue. Far from it.

Indeed I’m concerned about an overemphasis on truth per se. In an earlier post I thought about this question in the context of children and happiness: suppose that one’s children make one less happy, as some psychological research suggests is often the case. If one keeps this truth firmly in mind at all times, one is likely going to become a significantly worse parent. Even supposing that one should recognize this truth, one is likely better off ignoring it.

Here the relevant distinction may be between truth and importance, significance. It is true (in this supposed case) that one’s children make one less happy; but it is also true that one should love one’s children as wholeheartedly as possible. And the second truth is more important than the latter, it matters more. (Even if beneficial consequences are not the issue; Kant himself would have to say that it is a duty to love one’s children.) And so perhaps in other cases I have recently considered: the truth that Mañju?r? doesn’t exist matters less than the truth that praying to Mañju?r? helps one in dark times; the truths seen by pessimists matter less than the truth that optimism makes one happier.

I begin to wonder whether the concept of importance needs to get more philosophical investigation than it so far has. The biggest divide in contemporary Western thought, between analytic and “continental” philosophy, has seemed to me to rest at least in part on exactly this distinction: analytic philosophy typically looks for truth without importance, continental philosophy for importance without truth.

The point seems to come up again and again, for there are many reasons why trying to believe false things might prove valuable. In cases where one’s children make one less happy, one is still a better parent if one falsely believes that children make one happy. Some psychologists suggest the possibility of depressive realism: the idea that depressed people actually view the world more accurately than others. In a comment I noted the happiness often radiated by evangelical Christians: should one perhaps try to become such a person even if their God doesn’t exist? Last time the point came up in speaking of prayer: there seem to be real benefits from prayer, but it might require belief in an entity that isn’t real.

Now in every one of these cases, the good thing about lying to oneself has something in common: it is a good result. If one believes false things, one will treat one’s children better, be happier, be more successful, be stronger, as a consequence of that false belief. And so the goodness of lying to oneself in these cases seems to rest primarily on the truth or falsity of consequentialism: the idea that whether actions are good or bad (and a belief is a kind of action in this case) depends entirely on their consequences.

Consequentialism has a real intuitive appeal. To do something for a reason other than its consequences – well, that seems literally pointless. And yet, in cases like these, it seems to land one in outright contradiction. It’s one thing to tell other people false things for the sake of their happiness or success. But oneself? It doesn’t even seem possible to believe something one believes to be false. For to believe something is just to believe it to be true.

What is possible, and indeed frequent, is to believe contradictions. People hold beliefs that contradict each other all the time. And yet, it is difficult for those beliefs to survive reflection. In speaking of contradiction previously, I noted Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance: something feels wrong about contradiction, makes us uncomfortable. (And we would seem to feel this cognitive dissonance for good reason, since even contradiction’s most sophisticated defenders, like Graham Priest, admit that “[i]f we have views that are inconsistent we are probably incorrect.”) Also, practically, contradiction can lead us to acting at cross-purposes with ourselves, foiling our own goals (spiritual or otherwise).

It would seem that a pure consequentialism requires us to believe false things. Peter Railton’s defence of consequentialism relies at least in part on a distinction between truth and justification, so that on consequentialist grounds one could be justified in believing things that are false. But if we believe false things, the false things we believe are very likely to contradict other true beliefs. And such contradictions get us in various kinds of trouble.

It seems to me, as a result, that a pure consequentialism may well be wrong. Certain kinds of action, especially believing, will have to be good even though they bring worse results than their absence. I guess this takes me back to an earlier post on the idea that pleasure is the only good: truth must be a good in itself. For that reason, as far as I can tell, we should try never to lie to ourselves.

I know there are other people who could have done such a thing much more easily. What I wonder is: is that a skill worth having? I’m inclined to think that it’s probably just as well not to be very good at keeping things from those close to you – it’s too easy for such a skill to lead you into all the wrong places. I suppose it’s not unlike the reasons to prohibit torture in politics, even in the ticking time bomb scenario – if the ability to do something is there, there’s too much temptation to use it wrongly.

The situation reminds me of a more general problem in a virtue-based ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, generally following Aristotle, likes to talk about virtues as habits which allow us to succeed at practices; practices, in turn, are socially and culturally grounded crafts which have their own internal standards of excellence. But this raises what Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey – feminist critics writing in a volume called After MacIntyre – have called “the problem of evil practices.” There are some skills it is good not to acquire, some practices that it might be corrupting to be good at. Torture itself seems an example; MacIntyre makes some remarks about it on pp. 200-1 of After Virtue. The personal example is deception: I probably wouldn’t want to get better at lying and concealing even if it did mean I could throw surprise parties more easily. More generally one might want to ask: what skills, what crafts is it intrinsically bad to acquire? Not just as a matter of spending one’s precious time on those skills as opposed to more valuable ones, but bad even with unlimited time to learn them?

As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.

More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. One can claim in the context of editorial journalism that consistency is merely a modern invention, and in the context of historical scholarship that it is an ideal as ancient as philosophy. That’s inconsistent, but consistency doesn’t matter.

Fish’s answer to the religion-science debates depends on just such a view: “the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.” In a sense, Fish is taking up the logical implications of the NOMA view more seriously than Stephen Jay Gould had himself: “science” and “religion” can remain separate domains, not because they don’t contradict each other on important matters (it should be obvious that they do) but because that contradiction itself doesn’t matter.

Fish’s argument makes the case from everyday life. It’s not hard to imagine a fundamentalist Christian medical student during the week learning biological ideas founded on the presumption that human life evolved over millions of years, and then going to Bible fellowship on Sunday and speaking about human life on the assumption that human life was created by Jehovah in one instant. People can and do live with contradictions. Why should contradictions bother anyone, beyond pedantic philosophers bothered by obscure details?

Well, for starters, most of us already are bothered. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is fairly well established in social psychology: the perception of inconsistency among our own beliefs and actions is a motivating factor in its own right, one that makes us want to reduce this inconsistency. Perhaps Fish’s preferred form of spiritual practice would be a kind of therapy or meditation that makes us comfortable with such inconsistencies. He doesn’t, however, describe how such a practice could work, nor why we might want to follow it rather than just trying to make our beliefs and practices more harmonious. So we’ve already got a prima facie reason to try and reduce our inconsistencies and contradictions.

More than that: consistency is important for the efficacy of self-transformation as well. If one is trying to practice Osho‘s ideal of free expression for pleasure and sexuality, one will be hindered by simultaneously trying to practice the ascetic self-denial of a Theravāda monk; and vice versa. One’s efforts to become a better Christian will be hindered by learning in science class that core Christian beliefs are false. Attempting to practise contradictory ideals is like taking an expectorant and a decongestant at the same time: one undermines one’s own efforts. Perhaps Fish has never tried to become a better Christian or a better Buddhist or just a better person more generally, and has never had to deal with this problem; but for those of us trying to improve our lives, it’s a big issue. Consistency matters, and the differences between competing worldviews will not be resolved this easily in practice, let alone in theory.

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

Now, I am no parent, and (as I’ve noted before) have no plans to be one; so my reflections here are not grounded in personal experience, and I urge parents and potential parents to take them with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, childrearing is a central part of life for most people, and our approach to it tells us a lot about what we value, so I don’t expect this to be the last time I dip my toes into these particular muddy waters.

The first of these objections appears the most radical. It would seem to suggest that telling stories is a form of lying or deception. Such a view is hardly without philosophical precedent; we can recall Plato banishing the poets from the ideal city. But in Plato’s work this is clearly understood to be a radical approach, of a piece with his other radical ideas about childrearing (especially, that children should be raised in common rather than by famillies). Do we really want to raise children without stories, without fictions – at least, without fictions that are clearly marked as such? One can tell children stories they will understand, long before they understand the difference between myth and reality. Is this a lie? Perhaps, but one shudders before the implications of an account of truth so unflinching and demanding that it requires all children’s stories be clearly marked as false and fictional. The worldview at issue sounds rather like Dickens’s unsympathetic Mr. Gradgrind; the burden of proof would seem to be on whoever would count such a cold way of life admirable.

White’s second objection is close to my heart, since I’m enthusiastic about Buddhist critiques of wealth. The objection would seem to apply not merely to the Santa myth, but to Christmas gift-giving in general: we will make our children better and happier people if we don’t train them to value material goods. While I’m sympathetic to the position, the advice seems to overestimate the influence that single decisions can have on a child’s emotional development. If a parent withholds Christmas gifts and gives a child only the bare necessities, will that teach the child Buddhist/Epicurean moderation, or will it teach the reverse? My empirically uninformed money is on the latter: a child raised in relative poverty will crave possessions far more, because she will not have had the opportunity to learn the fleeting nature of wealth’s pleasures (let alone the hedonic treadmill they might put you on). I suspect this is a reason the historical Buddha was (said to be) a prince: we do better to find out for ourselves that wealth is inessential (or worse) for our happiness and well-being.

The third objection is very Rawlsian, in a way particularly close to the heart of the young Rawls but in keeping with Rawls’s mature work as well: we deserve nothing, our station in life is determined primarily by external factors. Now while the point seems largely true to me on a macro level, it seems like it does not need to be true at a micro level. Within the household, parents are quite capable of setting up an environment in which children are rewarded with material goods for acting well. (It would seem important, however, that the parents follow through with such rewards and the denial of the rewards, holding them back when children have been genuinely “naughty”; if they’re not prepared to do so, it may not be appropriate to spread the Santa myth.) I think here of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of goods internal and external to practices, an account which is also central to his more general account of virtue (at least in After Virtue). It is no coincidence that he introduces the distinction with a discussion of childrearing: specifically, how to teach an intelligent child to play chess when he or she does not want to play. At first, one offers the child some candy if she wins, and then her motivation is always to win, so that the child will cheat if she can.

But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands. Now if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself. (After Virtue, p. 188)

Chess, for MacIntyre, is one example of a social practice, and virtues are those qualities that allow us to achieve goods internal to practices – such as the good of enjoying the challenge of chess, for its own sake. One teaches children to be virtuous first through external motivation, such as candy, in the hope and expectation that soon they will discover motivation internal to the practice. It strikes me as entirely reasonable to see Santa as analogous to the chess-player’s candy: he is the external motivator for virtue, who we expect will give way to internal motivation as the child matures.

In short, I don’t think White’s objections to Santa are compelling individually or collectively. Nonetheless, it’s a thought-provoking short piece, exactly the sort of challenge to social convention that philosophical reflection should provoke us to from time to time.

Well, suppose we always saw what people were like, and particularly what they would do in any situation in which we might have to do with them. How would we relate to people if we had such knowledge of them? I think we would manipulate them. I do not mean that we would necessarily treat people in a selfish or immoral way, but I think we could not help having an attitude of control toward them. And I think the necessity we would be under, to have such an attitude, would be conceptual and not merely causal. If I pursued my own ends in relation to you, knowing exactly how you would respond to every move, I would be manipulating you as much as I manipulate a typewriter or any other inanimate object. And if at some point I refrained from pursuing my own ends, in order to defer to some desire of yours, I would be manipulating you in the service of your end that I had made my own. By the very nature of the case I could not escape from this manipulative role except insofar as I could forget or ignore what I knew about the responses you would make…

Our actual uncertainty about what other people will do makes it possible to depend on another person in a way that is much more personal. It enables the other person to be more truly other. To the extent that I realize that I do not know how he will respond to my action, I cannot regard him as an extension of my faculty of action, as I regard my typewriter.

Even in the actual world, with all its uncertainties, trust is often manipulative. If I trust the bus driver, it is to take me exactly where I expect her to take me, with no unpleasant surprises en route… In cases like these the trust, and indeed the whole personal relation, is not an end in itself, but a means to the individual ends of the parties involved.

There are other relationships, however, in which we open our lives to be influenced and partly shaped by the other person in ways that we cannot predict very precisely except that we have some confidence that they will be good. And even in that confidence we may be allowing the other person some part in defining our good. Uncertainty allows these relationships to be largely nonmanipulative, and I believe the relationships that seem most intensely personal are of this type. It is not easy to say exactly what is so good about the dependence–usually a mutual but often an unequal dependence–in these relationships. But I am sure that it is logically and not just causally necessary for whatever it is that we value so highly in the best personal relationships. (20-22)

What struck me most about this passage is how alien it is to Śāntideva’s thought. Most Buddhists believe that the buddhas are omniscient; and for Śāntideva, this omniscience does not get in the way of their relationship to other people, but enhances it. The bodhisattva does best when he can know others’ motivations, so he can help them escape from suffering: in this respect the highest end I can strive for is to “be manipulating you in the service of your end that I had made my own.” (The idea of skill in means seems to work on grounds like this: you tell people things that are not necessarily strictly true in order to help them escape their suffering.)

Moon, it turns out, objects to Adams on similar grounds in a Christian context. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to know God fully, or our relationship to him might be manipulative; but he knows us fully, he “manipulates” us in Adams’s terms, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed that’s what makes his relationship to us so good. Where Śāntideva and Moon would differ is on the question of whether we can or should ourselves try to become omniscient beings of this sort, whose relation to other people involves manipulating them for their own good. One might call it “playing God,” except that for those who believe Śāntideva’s account of bodhisattvas, it’s not about playing.

Now I wonder if there’s a further metaphysical upshot to Śāntideva’s take. When Adams brings up manipulation it reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion in After Virtue of emotivism, the view that moral judgements are reducible to emotional expressions of approval and disapproval. For MacIntyre, every moral philosophy “characteristically presupposes a sociology,” and the key to emotivism’s social content is that “emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.” (23) He draws a contrast to Kant, for whom morality is all about treating people as ends and not merely means. To treat people as ends is “to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons”; to treat them as means is to act on others “by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion.” (24)

For the bodhisattva, people’s suffering is urgent enough, and their delusions strong enough, that this kind of manipulation is exactly what they need. It’s not emotivism exactly; the bodhisattva acts only for one reason, and that reason is the benefit of others, not his own approval or disapproval. Still, I wonder if there might not be some sort of expression here of Śāntideva’s Madhyamaka metaphysics. If there is no absolute truth to speak of, does that mean that truth becomes significantly less of a value? While reading him for my dissertation, I noted how little Śāntideva speaks of honesty. The Five Precepts of the Pali suttas include refraining from false speech; but Śāntideva deemphasizes the criticism of telling falsehood, and rather praises skill in means. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Justin’s quite right that what I present in that post looks like a rather washed-out version of Buddhist tradition, “a bit dour.” I think the title “One and a half noble truths” effectively acknowledges that I don’t claim the view to be traditional Buddhism. I agree that it doesn’t provide the kind of excitement available in the Third Noble Truth’s promise of a life without suffering.

But I don’t make the claim that one and a half of the truths are right on the grounds that it will motivate people to practice; I make the claim on the grounds that it’s true. Amicus Buddha, sed magis amica veritas. If it’s not Buddhist, well, that’s a big reason I don’t call myself a Buddhist.

And if people don’t get motivated? If they don’t do the hard work the path requires, because the diminution (as opposed to elimination) of suffering is not enough of a motivator? Well, then the questions get tougher. Should we tell people that actually all four truths are true after all, so that people suffer a little less? Then it seems we’re looking at what Plato called the noble lie: saying things that aren’t so, for the good of the people you’re lying to?

Buddhist literature uses the much nicer-sounding term of “skill in means” (up?yakau?alya), but I prefer Plato’s term because it’s a bit clearer about what’s involved. The classic example of skill in means is the Lotus Sūtra’s parable of the burning house. A rich man’s house is on fire and he needs to get his kids out, quickly. The kids love playing with wagons, so he quickly figures the surest way to get them out is to tell them there are toy wagons waiting for them outside. They leave the house quickly, and ask for the wagons. Instead of wagons, the man gives them something much better: beautiful jewel-encrusted chariots.

As a way of explaining why the Buddha might have taught Theravāda if he really believed Mahāyāna, the parable is pretty and enjoyable. But if one wants to practise “skill in means” oneself, the story feels like a bit of a copout. What if a poor man’s house is on fire? What if the only way to save your kids is to tell them there are toy wagons outside – but you have no way of giving them toy wagons, let alone jewelled chariots?

Immanuel Kant’s ethics is noted for telling us not to lie, ever – not even to a murderer who asks us whether his potential victim is inside our house. Surely Kant would stand his ground on this question, if anyone would: if you can’t get the children out of the house with truth (or at least with force), you still must not lie. Better to just let them burn.

The problem is particularly thorny in the context of the previous discussion because Justin’s a big Kant fan, and tries hard to illustrate parallels between Buddhist and Kantian ethics. It is worth noting here as well that false speech (mus?v?da) is one of the things prohibited by the Five Precepts.

I don’t take as strong a stance against lying as Kant does; few would. But I’m acutely aware of the harm that lies and half-truths can do – to others and to ourselves. And I’m quite uncomfortable with the idea of telling other people lies because we think we know better than they do. The noble lie is associated today with the thought of Leo Strauss: the truth is too hard for normal people to handle; they will be better off with traditional, revealed religion. Philosophers are better off keeping the truth esoteric, a secret. At least, that’s how I understand Strauss’s position, which is difficult to figure out since, well, he was trying to keep his real view a secret. But I have some real trouble with such a position, because it gets in the way of humility. If we don’t tell people our real views, we don’t give them a chance to call us out when we’re wrong. If fully awakened people exist, maybe they can get away with skill in means. But I’m sure not that, and so for me it’s worth sticking to the truth whenever possible. And that would seem to imply publicly endorsing the view of one and a half noble truths, however dour and uninspiring it might look.

The issue of humility complicates the question further, though. I noted before that sometimes our own attitudes and behaviours are the problem, and submitting to a tradition can help us get over them; this is its own form of humility. But it seems very dangerous to submit to a tradition when we’re not confident that most of it is true. That way lie the cults.

Why? The answer seems obvious: if you don’t think that your children make you happy, if you resent them and regret them, you’re going to be a bad parent. By telling yourself your kids make you happy – even if they don’t – you are giving them a better life, doing something that will help them out. Surely that’s your duty as a parent, to think of your kids as your great joy and the centre of your life.

But there remains something unsettling here. Do we really want to say there’s a duty to lie to oneself, even for such a noble reason? If one allows oneself this kind of self-deception, surely it makes room for other, more harmful kinds of self-deception? I imagine this will be a difficult question to resolve – the kind that would require going down to the foundations – but I would like to hear your thoughts.

(For the record, I don’t have children and don’t plan on having them, so this is not a personal question for me.)