Lying to Nazis - disentangled
Lying to Nazis?
Lying to Nazis is a designation often given to a particular problem in moral reasoning. It is a notable and vexatious problem that has been addressed multiple times, in multiple ways. Alas, it is extremely easy to get tangled up in the reasoning, with the result that people can end up very firmly holding moral opinions that are not at all well-founded.
The problem is typically set out this way: You are hiding some Jews in your house, where they are safe from Nazis who are searching for them. If they discover the Jews, they will certainly kill them. Some Nazis come to your door and ask you: “Are there Jews in your house?” Supposing that you have the unshakeable belief that lying is always and everywhere wrong, are you permitted to lie to the Nazis, to save the Jews?
The difficulty seems to be that you can’t say “There are no Jews in my house”, because that would be a lie, and your belief that lying is always wrong would completely prevent you from saying that. But then what might you say that protects the Jews from death?
There have been various suggestions for things that might be said that are short of lying, such as:
Say nothing.
Evade answering the question.
Say something that is true, but misleading.
These suggestions, and others, provide interesting practical ways that can sometimes work.
Tangled?
However, to press the issue, and get to a more forcing, tangled, but helpful situation, I will further suppose that the Nazis are quite cunning, and understand the prohibition against lying. So, instead of merely asking: “Are there Jews in your house?”, they also add some extra conditions around any answer:
If the answer is “Yes”, then they will search the house, and surely find and kill the Jews.
If the answer is “No”, then they will move on to another house.
If the answer is silence, or if any other answer whatsoever is given, they will also search the house and kill the Jews.
Now what do you reply to the Nazis? It seems to be that if you can’t lie by saying “No”, then the Jews are doomed.
What is Lying?
I’ve used the wording “seems to be” twice because the situation has been described in a loaded way — the word “lie” was used where it had not necessarily been proved that there was a lie. This loaded use of the word “lie” is actually quite common when people are describing the Lying to Nazis problem. To remove some of the hidden bias in the use of this word, let’s first look in a more detailed way at how the word “lie” can be defined.
A lie is not just saying something false. For example, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit” is false, on the grounds that hobbits are not real. But’s a piece of fiction, not a lie.
A lie is not just saying something that will cause the listener to be deceived. If I gave a particle physics lecture to learners and accidentally said — because of forgetfulness — that “kaons have strangeness 0”, that would be false, causing the learners to be at least temporarily deceived. But it would be an uncalculated mistake. It would not qualify as a lie.
A lie is intentionally saying something to cause the listener to be deceived.
The deception must be something that is aimed at. Something that is deliberate. Something that is wanted. When a deception is aimed at/deliberate/wanted, I will say it is intended.
If a car salesperson says, “this car has never been in an accident” knowing in fact that it has — because the salesman wants a higher price for the car — then that is a lie.
Given this definition of a lie, there are some examples of fallacies to be avoided when deciding if some specific arrangement of words is definitely a lie:
A) The words are false. That would be insufficient to conclude they are a lie, without intention also being known.
B) The speaker knows the words are false. Intention is missing — it doesn’t necessarily prove the speaker was lying, because knowing something and intending something are different things. (If the speaker is asked to give an example of a false statement, and says “Paris is the capital of Germany”, there is no lie here.)
C) The listener was deceived by those words. Intention is missing. Also, it can happen that the listener understands the words in a sense that the speaker did not anticipate.
D) The listener was deceived by the words, and the speaker knows the listener would be deceived. Even this case still doesn’t prove the intention to deceive. For example, if the listener erroneously believes that the speaker often lies about where they went on vacation, they make take some true statement in the opposite sense to what the speaker actually intended, even when the speaker understands the listener’s error, but was still choosing to be truthful.
In each of these fallacies, something is missing that makes a statement short of being definitely a lie.
Hiding information?
Sometimes, divulging hidden information can cause harm. (In the situation under consideration, the harm is clearly the death of the hidden Jews.) No method of divulging is allowed: not by speech, not by action, not by jokes, not by fiction, not in any way. Every possible way the information could be divulged has to be carefully controlled.
In particular, this means that anyone possessing the hidden information must have the intention not to reveal that information in anything they say. The information mustn’t be revealed in any way — whether by true statements, or even by false statements. For example, if I reveal the location of the Jews by unrealistically bringing up at every opportunity the topic that the Jews are not in my house, and this raises suspicions, then I have divulged the information.
If someone possesses secret information, and they also believe that lying is always wrong, then everything they say now has two intentions behind it: an intention not to lie, and a separate intention not to reveal the hidden information. In most cases, speech satisfying both intentions is fairly straightforward, and it usually does not take too much effort to satisfy both intentions with everything that is spoken.
A clash of intentions?
And now we have reached the situation, described earlier, that the cunning Nazis have entangled us in. They’ve set up a confrontation where the only answer that hides the presence of the Jews is a false one. Given the question, “Are there Jews in your house?”, the answers “Yes”, or silence, or any other reply, will cause the finding and slaughter of the Jews. Only the false answer “No” will keep them hidden.
At this point, many people who firmly believe that lying is always wrong will conclude that the answer “No” also cannot be given. It seems to be that the answer “No” must be deliberately false; and it seems to be that the Nazis are deceived on account of that answer. And so it seems to be that it was a lie.
Disentangling intention
But let’s look at the answer “No” more carefully. Compared with the other possible answers, this is the one that succeeds in keeping the Jews hidden. It’s the only possible answer that the cunning Nazis have allowed which succeeds in this intention. Hiding the information about the Jews as much as possible is what the speaker is aiming at, what the speaker has chosen deliberately, what the speaker wants — it’s intentional.
For the other intention — not lying — can someone who says “No” legitimately claim that deceiving the Nazis was not intentional? Surprisingly, they can. They can claim that deception wasn’t part of their plan. They can claim that the reply “No” was chosen because it was the only way of saying something that provided no cause for the Nazis to search for the Jews. They can claim that although they knew that the reply was false, their only plan was hiding information, as best they could given the way the Nazis had constrained their choices. Hence there was no deceptive intention behind the falsity, and hence it does not qualify as a lie.
(This claim that there is no intentional lie is essentially a claim that double effect applies. You can learn more about double effect here. The principle of double effect is simple in outline, but often difficult to get exactly right. There are quite a few places on the web that fail to get double effect right. So, be careful.)
Generalizing
Although we’ve looked at a specific situation, as set up by cunning Nazis, it can be generalized to other situations. When divulging hidden information will do harm, it is possible that the harm of saying something false may be lesser, and thus it might be permitted. But this possibility is conditional:
It is preferable to hide information by using silence, or evasion, or ambiguity, whenever possible.
It is never allowable to hide information by using an intended deception.
These requirements limit the occasions on which the technique of false information can be used.