Knowledge And Decisions

The philosophic postulate that statements are instrumental may be necessary, but by no means sufficient, as the basis for lying as a principle. It is not that philosophical postulate but the empirical presupposition of virtually zero incremental knowledge costs (omniscience) for some subset of people (“leaders”) that is crucial for the conclusion. Even viewed from a wholly instrumental perspective, the ethical norm of truth is a cost-saving social institution for people for whom knowledge is not a free good. If the set of such people includes all of humanity, then instrumental lying has social costs which cannot be assumed to be less than whatever benefits are contemplated — either for society at large or even for the subset who engage in this wholesale disinvestment in credibility. The presumption is indeed the other way. The systemic evolution of ethical norms of truthfulness in the most diverse and separated cultures — around the world and down through history — suggests something of the instrumental value of truth. Similar ethical norms in this regard originating in the prehistory of the human race, when the species was even more separated and fragmented than today, hardly seem the product of coincidental philosophic intentions rather than of systemic universalistic experience. It is difficult even to conceive theoretically of a society that could survive if statements had no more probability of being true than if they were generated by a process that was random with respect to truth as a value in itself. Even totalitarian governments invest substantially in the production of truth, including secret police and torture, from an instrumental point of view.

The substitution of instrumental consequences for empirical truth as the criterion for statements is by no means the substitution of a more manageable standard. “The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion: as disputable, as open to discussion and requiring discussion as much as the opinion itself.”³¹ The sweeping scope and arbitrariness of the assumption that one can trace the instrumental consequences of particular words and deeds may be indicated by asking whether anyone could have foreseen the consequences of a certain Italian explorer’s theory that he could reach India by sailing west — a set of words and deeds that led to the discovery of half the planet and changed the course of history in both halves. It is especially ironic for totalitarianism to assume such omniscience, since it was precisely totalitarian oppression which drove from Germany and Italy the men who gave America the decisive military weapon of World War II and ushered in the nuclear age — Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi.

Conversely, imagine a being with zero incremental knowledge cost — someone able to discern the remotest ramifications of his every statement. Why should such a being be bound by ethical norms of truth, either from the standpoint of self-interest or even if making the interests of humanity the paramount determinant of his behavior? If he knows to a certainty that saying A would on net balance (in all its ramifications) be more beneficial to mankind than saying B, would it not be blind, fetishistic, traditionalism for him to say B? Would it not be self-indulgence to say B in order to salve his own conscience at the known expense of perhaps millions of his fellow creatures, now and in the future? This is only to say that if human beings were entirely different creatures, entirely different principles might well apply. More practically, a choice among principles involves an understanding of the inherent limitations of the species and its surrounding circumstances, rather than a comparison of what would be the best mode of operation in an unconstrained world.