Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok

This powerful, important book was a best seller when first published in 1979, in the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War. It is as applicable, relevant, and instructive today as it was then; indeed, it has much to teach us. The author, who taught ethics in the Harvard medical school for many years, is the daughter of two winners of the Nobel Prize-Gunnar Myrdal andAlva Myradal. Bok has continued her role as a public intellectual by writing, among other books, Secrets: on the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (1982), A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War (1989), and Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (1998). But it is Lying that seems to me to be most valuable for us today.

Bok is particularly clear that lying, whether public or private, involves the intention to deceive and is additionally a power play, robbing by its deceit the ones lied to of power of knowledge and thus of the power of knowledgeable choice and action. In the introduction she notes the recent, in 1979, loss of public trust. We may feel that the case is even more severe in our own day.

Bok holds that "trust in some degree of veracity functions as a foundation of relations among human beings; when this trust shatters or wears away, institutions collapse." Even so, we must reckon with lies in both private and public life, and she observes that liars "desire not to be deceived." They "prefer a 'free-rider' status, giving them the benefits of lying without the risks of being lied to.

In her first chapters Bok examines the nature of lying, then treats white lies, which leads her to consider what excuses have been offered for lies and lying and to what extent some excuses may have limited applicability. (One with murderous intent: "Where is your friend?" You, inaccurately: "He went that way.)

In all this, Bok brings to bear the insights of Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Hume, and especially Kant with his choice of no excuse for a lie, even in the most dire circumstances. She does so with a lightness of touch that graces all her work. A consummate liar whom she instances several times to illuminating advantage is Iago.

For me the chief current value of this fine book is its placing the Principle of Veracity at the center of public life. Let's have more of it.