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Alien Disclosure – Is Ignorance Bliss?

image of ufo hovering over desert road

This week – in scenes straight out of an episode of The X-Files – a House Oversight subcommittee has begun hearing testimony regarding an alleged alien cover-up by the U.S. Government. According to retired Major David Grusch, the U.S. has been retrieving and reverse engineering unidentified flying objects (UFOs) since the 1930s. Among the claims made by Grusch, the most audacious – and, perhaps, most unsettling – is that this government activity has included the recovery of non-human biologics.

Put simply: Grusch claims that aliens have visited Earth, and that the U.S. government is well aware of this.

It’s obvious that UFOs exist: I see one every time I spot something in the sky that I’m incapable of identifying. What is controversial, however, is the claim that some of these UFOs are of alien origin. As famed astronomer Carl Sagan noted, however: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And while Grusch has provided a great deal of testimony relating to the alleged cover-up, this has been exclusively in the form of second-hand reports from other government officials. Grusch himself has not seen these alien spacecraft or biologics first-hand, nor has he yet provided concrete evidence of their existence to the subcommittee.

But suppose that Grusch is right. The possibility of the government covering up evidence of alien visitations raises all kinds of ethical questions – especially when it comes to a government’s duty to disclose information to its citizens. Would it be right for the U.S. to keep such a revelation from its people?

Governments keep secrets all the time. Ostensibly, this is done for the benefit of those they govern. We can only assume that something similar would be true in this case. Incontrovertible evidence of the existence of alien life would be an unprecedented turning point in human history. It would shatter the worldviews of many, and have far-reaching implications for many of our religious and philosophical beliefs. It’s conceivable that, despite our best cognitive intentions, this revelation would be accompanied by widespread fear and anxiety.  As the protagonists of Men in Black so eloquently put it:

James Edwards: “Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.”

Agent Kay: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

The reason for government non-disclosure, then, might simply be to avoid such panic: that is, to maximize the welfare of the citizenry. But how do we measure welfare? Put another way, how do we establish what makes a life go well? One obvious answer is “happiness.” Indeed, this is what the Hedonists believe – that how well a life is going can be measured purely in terms of pleasure and pain. What this means is that if the disclosure of alien life would, on balance, make people’s lives less happy, then the government is maximizing welfare (i.e., doing the right thing) by refraining from sharing that information.

But is pleasure really all that matters? Robert Nozick poses a famous thought experiment to challenge this idea. Imagine that there is a machine that can give you any experience you want. You can program it with whatever will bring you pleasure, and avoid anything that brings you pain. What’s more, upon entering the machine, you will lose any memory of having done so – meaning that your experiences will not be ruined by the knowledge that they are illusory.

The question: would you choose to hook up to this machine for the remainder of your life?

When I pose this thought experiment to my students, they often raise one of several concerns. Many worry about the friends and family they would leave behind. But suppose that these people also have the option to enter their own experience machines – something which they happily do. Others worry that a life filled with constant pleasure wouldn’t be as good – that is, that without the bitter, the sweet wouldn’t be as sweet. But we can take care of that too. If it helps your appreciation of the pleasure, some small amounts of pain can be programmed into your experience too. Ultimately, all that matters is that your life in the experience machine would be one that gives you a greater balance of pleasure-over-pain than your ordinary life.

Yet, despite this, many would be reluctant to enter the experience machine. The most often cited reason for this is that there is more to our welfare than happiness. Sometimes, what’s best for us isn’t what brings us the most pleasure. That’s why we go to bed early, visit the dentist, and read dry philosophical treatises.

And the very same reasoning applies to knowledge. Suppose that you’ve just bought a brand new outfit and ask a trusted friend how you look. Suppose, further, that the outfit is atrocious and makes you look absolutely ridiculous. Which would be better for you: To be told a flattering lie that makes you feel good about yourself? Or to receive the harsh truth – a truth that might allow you to make better decisions going forward? While the former might bring about greater pleasure, there are good reasons why many of us might prefer the latter.

There are many cases where it might be good for us to be given certain information, even when that information brings us sadness or anxiety or fear. Consider, for example, a cancer diagnosis or evidence of the infidelity of a spouse. The question for us is whether or not evidence of alien life is one such example. It’s undeniable that while some would be thrilled by government disclosure of the existence of alien life, many others would suffer from a raft of negative emotions. Given the considerations above, however, it’s no longer immediately obvious that these negative responses justify non-disclosure. It may very well be the case that our lives will go better knowing that we are not alone in the universe, even if that prospect doesn’t make us happier. Maybe, when it comes to evidence of aliens, ignorance isn’t bliss.

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Why Misleading Is Wrong (but Isn’t Perjury)

photograph of Kavanaugh being sworn in with hand on Bible

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson (where the Court overturned national legal protections to abortion rights codified by 1973’s Roe v. Wade), several justices have faced heavy criticism for comments they made during their confirmation hearings about Roe and stare decisis (the legal practice of ruling on cases according to established precedent).

According to critics, multiple justices lied during their job interviews about their commitments and principles, not only misleading the politicians who supported them, but theoretically making them liable to impeachment.

As talk show host Stephen Colbert put it, “if these folks believe that Roe v. Wade was so egregiously decided, why didn’t they tell the senators that during their confirmation hearings?”

There are at least two ways to answer Colbert’s question and, importantly, neither of them entail that any of the justices lied under oath — but that’s not to say that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or others didn’t speak immorally nevertheless. Consider how someone can manipulate or mislead another by carefully speaking in a way that is not technically untruthful, using insinuations, suggestions, and even silence to push their audience into believing something: in so doing, the speaker is unethically violating conventional expectations about trust and good-faith communication, even if they never speak a falsehood.

Indeed, “telling a lie” and “misleading an audience” are substantively different and although both speech-acts are unethical, only the former is clearly illegal while giving sworn testimony. But whether justices were carefully following the “Ginsburg rule” during their hearings (that requires a judicial candidate to give “no hints, no previews, no forecasts” of their potential rulings) or whether they were shrewdly avoiding a clear answer that might sour their chances of confirmation, it’s not clear that any of them lied to Congress.

In order to actually tell a lie, someone must:

1. Know the truth,
2. Assert the opposite of the truth,
3. Act with the intention of getting their audience to believe the opposite of the truth.

Suppose that Bill tells Calvin that their automatic garage door opens because a guy lives in the attic to operate its movement. This claim is not true, but if Bill genuinely believes it (violating Condition #1), then he hasn’t lied — he’s simply incorrect. Similarly, if Bill violates Condition #2 and phrases the speech act as a genuine question (“Do you think that someone lives in the attic?”), then he hasn’t lied either. And, crucially, if Bill is just making a joke or is otherwise speaking ironically (and doesn’t actually mean for Calvin to form a belief in an attic-dwelling door-opener), then he is violating Condition #3 and has also not explicitly told a lie.

But suppose that Bill simply implies that someone lives in the attic and misleads Calvin to form such a false belief — maybe Calvin asks Bill if such a person exists and Bill responds with “It is metaphysically possible for such a person to live in our attic.” This response isn’t technically false (because, although it is wildly unlikely, it is possible), so Bill hasn’t technically lied. Granted, Calvin would have to be exceedingly gullible to be misled by Bill in this way, but Bill could be guilty of trying to mislead Calvin nonetheless.

As MIT philosophy professor Sam Berstler explains in a recent paper, both liars and misleaders violate social conventions about the trustworthiness of speakers in conversations (where we typically assume that our interlocutor is acting in good faith), but only the former also violates expectations about truthfulness.

Put differently, liars fulfill conditions (1), (2), and (3); misleaders fulfill only conditions (1) and (3).

And, crucially for the present conversation, the legal definition of perjury requires that someone fulfill (2).

So, what did the SCOTUS justices actually say about Roe before being confirmed to the bench? Speaking in 2017, Neil Gorsuch repeatedly referred to the precedent set by Roe, calling precedent the “anchor of law” that functions as “the starting place for a judge”; when pressed about whether or not he accepted that a fetus is not protected by the 14th Amendment, Gorsuch replied “that is the law of the land. I accept the law of the land.” The following year, Brett Kavanaugh infamously told Senator Susan Collins in a private conversation that he considered Roe “settled law,” but in his sworn testimony he again referred to it as “a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis” and, like Gorsuch, repeated that “the Supreme Court has recognized the right to abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade case. It has reaffirmed it many times.”

This is clearly true: prior to June 2022, SCOTUS had indeed repeatedly looked to Roe’s precedent as the law of the land — but SCOTUS is also empowered to overrule precedent: as Gorsuch said, it is only the starting place for a judge.

Which means that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony (as well as that of the other four justices who overturned Roe) is fully compatible with the present Court overturning that precedent: it was the law of the land during their confirmation hearings, but now it is not.

Put differently: because no Supreme Court justice explicitly asserted that “I will not ever vote to overturn Roe,” none of their speech acts fulfill Condition #2 and so qualify as neither lies nor perjury.

However, to reiterate, this does not mean that the justices are above reproach here (despite what some pundits have suggested): misleading your audience — as Gorsuch and Kavanaugh (and others) apparently did by giving well-crafted, technically-not-perjuring responses that still prompted senators to form false beliefs about their later intentions — is unethical in a host of ways. In particular, being misleading violates expectations about your trustworthiness and integrity: this is something close to lying, even though it is not illegal. A key difference, however, is that your audience also bears some responsibility for their naivety, ignorance, or lack of epistemic diligence that allowed them to be duped (something particularly damaging to the credibility of the justices’ audiences, given that U.S. senators should be familiar with the stereotypical double-speak of lawyers and politicians — to say nothing of the other evidence available prior to the confirmation votes).

But there’s little formal recourse for shamefulness.

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On “Dog-Wagging” News: Why What “Lots of People” Say Isn’t Newsworthy

photograph of crowd of paparazzi cameras at event

On June 17th, Lee Sanderlin walked into a Waffle House in Jackson, Mississippi; fifteen hours later, he walked out an internet sensation. As a penalty for losing in his fantasy football league, Sanderlin’s friends expected him to spend a full day inside the 24-hour breakfast restaurant (with some available opportunities for reducing his sentence by eating waffles). When he decided to live-tweet his Waffle House experience, Sanderlin could never have expected that his thread would go viral, eventually garnering hundreds of thousands of Twitter interactions and news coverage by outlets like People, ESPN, and The New York Times.

For the last half-decade or so, the term ‘fake news’ has persistently gained traction (even being voted “word of the year” in 2017). While people disagree about the best possible definition of the term (should ‘fake news’ only refer to news stories intentionally designed to trick people or could it countenance any kind of false news story or maybe something else?), it seems clear that a story about what Sanderlin did in the restaurant is not fake: it genuinely happened, so reporting about it is not spreading misinformation.

But that does not mean that such reporting is spreading newsworthy information.

While a “puff piece” or “human interest story” about Sanderlin in the Waffle House might be entertaining (and, by extension, might convince internet users to click a link to read about it), its overall value as a news story seems suspect. (The phenomenon of clickbait, or news stories marketed with intentionally noticeable headlines that trade accuracy for spectacle, is a similar problem.) Put differently, the epistemic value of the information contained in this news story seems problematic: again, not because it is false, but rather because it is (something like) pointless or irrelevant to the vast majority of the people reading about it.

Let’s say that some piece of information is newsworthy if its content is either in the public interest or is otherwise sufficiently relevant for public distribution (and that it is part of the practice of good journalism to determine what qualifies as fitting this description). When the president of the United States issues a statement about national policy or when a deadly disease is threatening to infect millions, then this information will almost certainly be newsworthy; it is less clear that, say, the president’s snack order or an actor’s political preferences will qualify. In general, just as we expect their content to be accurate, we expect that stories deemed worthy to be disseminated through our formal “news” networks carry information that news audiences (or at least significant subsets thereof) should care about: in short, the difference between a news site and a gossip blog is a substantive one.

(To be clear: this is not to say that movie releases, scores of sports games, or other kinds of entertainment news are not newsworthy: they could easily fulfill either the “public interest” or the “relevance” conditions of the ‘newsworthy’ definition in the previous paragraph.)

So, why should we care about non-newsworthy stories spreading? That is to say, what’s so bad about “the paper of record” telling the world about Sanderlin’s night in a Mississippi Waffle House?

Two problems actually come to mind: firstly, such stories threaten to undermine the general credibility of the institution spreading that information. If I know that a certain website gives equal attention to stories about COVID-19 vaccination rates, announcements of Supreme Court decisions, Major League baseball game scores, and crackpots raging about how the Earth is flat, then I will (rightly, I think) have less confidence that the outlet is capable of reporting accurate information in general (given its decision to spread demonstrably false conspiracy theories). In a similar way, if an outlet gives attention to non-newsworthy stories, then it can water down the perceived import of the other genuinely newsworthy stories that it typically shares. (Note that this problem is compounded further when amusing non-newsworthy stories spread more quickly on the basis of their entertaining quirks, thereby altering the average public profile of the institution spreading them.)

But, secondly, non-newsworthy stories pose a different kind of threat to the epistemic environment than do fake news stories: whereas the latter can infect the community with false propositions, the former can infect the community with bullshit (in a technical sense of the term). According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, ‘bullshit’ is a tricky kind of speech act: if Moe knows that a statement is false when he asserts it, then Moe is lying; if Moe doesn’t know or care whether a statement is true or false when he asserts it, then Moe is bullshitting. Paradigmatically, Frankfurt says that bullshitters are looking to provoke a particular emotional response from their audience, rather than to communicate any particular information (as when a politician uses rhetoric to affectively appeal to a crowd, rather than to, say, inform them of their own policy positions). Ultimately, Frankfurt argues that bullshit is a greater threat to truth than lies are because it changes what people expect to get out of a conversation: even if a particular piece of bullshit turns out to be true, that doesn’t mean that the person who said it wasn’t still bullshitting in the first place.

So, consider what happened when an attendee at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in 2015 made a series of false assertions about (among other things) Barack Obama’s supposedly-foreign citizenship and the alleged presence of camps operating inside the United States to train Muslims to kill people: then-candidate Trump responded by saying:

“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to look at that and plenty of other things.”

Although Trump did not clearly affirm the conspiracy theorist’s racist and Islamophobic assertions, he nevertheless licensed them by saying that “a lot of people are saying” what the man said. Notice also that Trump’s assertion might or might not be true — it’s hard to tell how we would actually assess the accuracy of a statement like “a lot of people are saying that” — but, either way, it seems like the response was intended more to provoke a certain affective response in Trump’s audience. In short, it was an example of Frankfurtian bullshit.

Conspiracy theories about Muslim “training camps” or Obama’s unAmerican birthplace are not newsworthy because, among other things, they are false. But a story like “Donald Trump says that “a lot of people are saying” something about training camps” is technically true (and is, therefore, not “fake news”) because, again, Trump actually said such a thing. Nevertheless, such a story is pointless or irrelevant — it is not newsworthy — there is no good reason to spread it throughout the epistemic community. In the worst cases, non-newsworthy stories can launder falsehoods by wrapping them in the apparent neutrality of journalistic reporting.

For simplicity’s sake, we might call this kind of not-newsworthy story an example of “dog-wagging news” because, just as “the tail wagging the dog” evokes an image where the “small or unimportant entity (the tail) controls a bigger, more important one (the dog),” a dog-wagging news story is one where something about the story other than its newsworthiness leads to its propagation throughout the epistemic environment.

In harmless cases, dog-wagging stories are amusing tales about Waffle Houses and fantasy football losses; in more problematic cases, dog-wagging stories help to perpetuate conspiracy theories and worse.

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“Fake News” Is Not Dangerously Overblown

image of glitched "FAKE NEWS" title accompanied by bits of computer code

In a recent article here at The Prindle Post, Jimmy Alfonso Licon argues that the hype surrounding the problem of “fake news” might be less serious than people often suggest. By pointing to several recent studies, Licon highlights that concerns about social standing actually prevent a surprisingly large percentage of people from sharing fake news stories on social media; as he says, “people have strong incentives to avoid sharing fake news when their reputations are at stake.” Instead, it looks like many folks who share fake news do so because of pre-existing partisan biases (not necessarily because of their gullibility about or ignorance of the facts). If this is true, then calls to regulate speech online (or elsewhere) in an attempt to mitigate the spread of fake news might end up doing more harm than good (insofar as they unduly censor otherwise free speech).

To be clear: despite the “clickbaity” title of this present article, my goal here is not to argue with Licon’s main point; the empirical evidence is indeed consistently suggesting that fake news spreads online not simply because individual users are always fooled into believing a fake story’s content, but rather because the fake story:

On some level, this is frustratingly difficult to test: given the prevalence of expressive responding and other artifacts that can contaminate survey data, it is unclear how to interpret an affirmation of, say, the (demonstrably false) “immense crowd size” at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration — does the subject genuinely believe that the pictures show a massive crowd or are they simply reporting this to the researcher as an expression of partisan allegiance? Moreover, a non-trivial amount of fake news (and, for that matter, real news) is spread by users who only read a story’s headline without clicking through to read the story itself. All of this, combined with additional concerns about the propagandistic politicization of the term ‘fake news,’ as when politicians invoke the concept to avoid responding to negative accusations against them, has led some researchers to argue that the “sloppy, arbitrary” nature of the term’s definition renders it effectively useless for careful analyses.

However, whereas Licon is concerned about potentially unwarranted threats to free speech online, I am concerned about what the reality of “fake news” tells us about the nature of online speech as a whole.

Suppose that we are having lunch and, during the natural flow of our conversation, I tell you a story about how my cat drank out of my coffee cup this morning; although I could communicate the details to you in various ways (depending on my story-telling ability), one upshot of this speech act would be to assert the following proposition:

1. My cat drank my coffee.

To assert something is to (as explained by Sandford Goldberg) “state, report, contend, or claim that such-and-such is the case. It is the act through which we tell others things, by which we inform an audience of this-or-that, or in which we vouch for something.” Were you to later learn that my cat did not drink my coffee, that I didn’t have any coffee to drink this morning, or that I don’t live with a cat, you would be well within your rights to think that something has gone wrong with my speech (most basically: I lied to you by asserting something that I knew to be false).

The kinds of conventions that govern our speech are sometimes described by philosophers of language as “norms” or “rules,” with a notable example being the knowledge norm of assertion. When I assert Proposition #1 (“My cat drank my coffee”), you can rightfully think that I’m representing myself as knowing the content of (1) — and since I can only know (as opposed to merely believe) something that is true, I furthermore am representing (1) as true when I assert it. This, then, is one of the problems with telling a lie: I’m violating how language is supposed to work when I tell you something false; I’m breaking the rules governing how assertion functions.

Now to add a wrinkle: what if, after hearing my story about my cat and coffee, you go and repeat the story to someone else? Assuming that you don’t pretend like the story happened to you personally, but you instead explain how (1) describes your friend (me) and you’re simply relaying the story as you heard it, then what you’re asserting might be something like:

2. My friend’s cat drank his coffee.

If this other person you’re speaking to later learns that I was lying about (1), that means that you’re wrong about (2), but it doesn’t clearly mean that you’re lying about (2) — you thought you knew that (2) was true (because you foolishly trusted me and my story-telling skills). Whereas I violated one or more norms of assertion by lying to you about (1), it’s not clear that you’ve violated those norms by asserting (2).

It’s also not clear how any of these norms might function when it comes to social media interaction and other online forms of communication.

Suppose that instead of speaking (1) in a conversation, I write about it in a tweet. And suppose that instead of asserting (2) to someone else, you simply retweet my initial post. While at first glance it might seem right to say that the basic norms of assertion still apply as before here, we’ve already seen (with those bullet points in the second paragraph of this article) that fake news spreads precisely because internet users seemingly aren’t as constrained in their digital speech acts. Maybe you retweet my story because you find it amusing (but don’t think it’s true) or because you believe that cat-related stories should be promoted online — we could imagine all sorts of possible reasons why you might retransmit the (false) information of (1) without believing that it’s true.

Some might point out that offline communication can often manifest some of these non-epistemic elements of communication, but C. Thi Nguyen points out how the mechanics of social media intentionally encourage this kind of behavior. Insofar as a platform like Twitter gamifies our communication by rewarding users with attention and acclaim (via tools such as “likes” and “follower counts”), it promotes information spreading online for many reasons beyond the basic knowledge norm of assertion. Similarly, Lucy McDonald argues that this gamification model (although good for maintaining a website’s user base) demonstrably harms the quality of the information shared throughout that platform; when people care more about attracting “likes” than communicating truth, digital speech can become severely epistemically problematic.

Now, add the concerns mentioned above (and by Licon) about fake news and it might be easy to see how those kinds of stories (and all of their partisan enticements) are particularly well-suited to spread through social media platforms (designed as they are to promote engagement, regardless of accuracy).

So, while Licon is right to be concerned about the potential over-policing of online speech by governments or corporations interested in shutting down fake news, it’s also the case that conversational norms (for both online and offline speech) are important features of how we communicate — the trick will be to find a way to manifest them consistently and to encourage others to do the same. (One promising element of a remedy — that does not approximate censorship — involves platforms like Twitter explicitly reminding or asking people to read articles before they share them; a growing body of evidence suggests that these kinds of “nudges” can help promote more epistemically desirable online norms of discourse in line with those well-developed in offline contexts.)

Ultimately, then, “fake news” seems like less of a rarely-shared digital phenomenon and more of a curiously noticeable indicator of a more wide-ranging issue for communication in the 21st century. Rather than being “dangerously overblown,” the problem of fake news is a proverbial canary in the coal mine for the epistemic ambiguities of online speech acts.

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Moral Authority in America

photograph of President Trump leaving podium at border wall event

Leaving office on January 20, a disgraced Donald Trump, enraged over the failure of his attempts to overturn the election result, chastised by his latest impeachment for incitement of insurrection, sulking at being denied a farewell military parade, will be able to gloat about one thing – Joe Biden’s inauguration crowd will be smaller than his.

Trump’s presidency began in January 2016 with the petulant and much-repeated lie that his was the biggest inaugural crowd ever, despite the evidence of photographs showing the size of the crowd attending Barack Obama’s inauguration clearly refuting the claim. This gave rise to Kellyanne Conway’s absurd remark that there are ‘alternative facts’ a phrase which encapsulates the Trump presidency.

This ridiculous lie, and many others like it that issued from the president and his administration over the last four years, seems petty and, compared to other false claims, laughable.

Things have taken a much darker turn since the November election with Trump’s campaign to convince his supporters that the election was rigged culminating in the horrific events of January 6, when what should have been a routine process of certifying the electoral college vote turned, at Trump’s urging, into a violent and deadly assault on Congress by an angry mob of his supporters.

Following this failed insurrection, as the FBI continued to arrest (suspected) participants and the president faced swift rebuke with the House impeaching him, disturbing reports have continued to surface about possible collusion from inside Congress, questions have been raised about the lack of preparedness of security forces, the disparity has been noted between the anaemic response on Capitol Hill the day of the riot and the heavy-handed response to BLM protests earlier in the year; as security services remain concerned about possible sympathizers within the US armed forces and the Pentagon attempts to vet all armed personnel ahead of Biden’s Inauguration, America looks like a different place.

In the hours leading up to the inauguration of Joe Biden as America’s 46th President the world watches on anxiously, shocked by footage of Washington DC, that beacon of democracy, where streets are lined with soldiers in fatigues, and government buildings are fenced off, heavily guarded by military vehicles.

This moment, in which America and the world holds their breath, is the culmination and intersection of many factors – Trump’s election fraud lies, his persistent years-long stoking and appropriation of people’s grievances, and the permissive normalization of white supremacy which has characterized his presidency together with the inexplicable presence in the US of citizen militias legally armed to the teeth.

This period of American political and social history will no doubt keep analysts, historians, and pundits of all kinds busy for a long time.

Something we have heard a lot over the past weeks, from US lawmakers, political observers and members of the public is that these events have somehow changed America. Whether it is being called an insurrection, a domestic terror attack, a riot or the storming of the Capitol, one thing is clear – something has happened to America that has deeply and indelibly affected the country’s claim to being a beacon of democracy. Counting the cost of these last four years (and especially the last two weeks of the Trump presidency), America’s moral authority has to be reassessed.

To talk about America’s moral authority as a free, liberal democracy, jingoistically, without acknowledging factors that complicate that claim – such as the deep vein of racism which runs through American history to the present as its legacy of slavery, and America’s interference in other country’s political processes with its involvement of coups d’état in Latin America during the Cold War era – would be naïve.

But eschewing the simplistic patriotism which leads to sloganizing of America as ‘the greatest country on Earth’ – a cliché that has long irked many non-Americans – still leaves room for America to be justifiably proud of the central role held by liberal democratic values like freedom, equality, civil rights, justice, and the rule of law.

As the era of the Trump presidency (if not of Trumpism) closes, those values have taken a hit. Whether the wounds are fatal is yet to be seen, and depends on what happens next.

However, as the Trump presidency has marched and stumbled inexorably towards the events of January 6, some of the country’s moral authority has been lost.

Moral authority is a difficult, somewhat fuzzy concept. It is not the authority of power, but of example. A person, institution, idea, or indeed a society possesses moral authority when it has over time exemplified some important moral stance. Moral authority exemplifies ‘the good’ not in the shallows of moralism but in the deeper waters of virtue.

Donald Trump has never had any personal moral authority. He has power, and authoritative sway in the form of might, but he does not possess the kind of authority that comes in principle and by example. He has in fact always mistaken power for authority. Of the many instances that demonstrate this confusion is the tone of his attempt to persuade Georgia’s secretary of state to change the election results in early January. Trump has used his power to demand loyalty at all costs, and the costs have been high.

As he has tried more and more to wield his power with sound and fury, real authority has become more and more remote from him.

Trump has of course not single-handedly caused the current crisis in American social and political life that has seen white supremacist extremism move from the fringes to entering the mainstream, but he has used the resentments boiling away in American life ruthlessly to his own ends – to gain power and feed his insatiable ego. As we try to unpack this whole mess, the question of America’s moral authority will have to be wrested back from that of Trump’s – and we have yet to see what is left.

In her book Too Much and Never Enough, Trump’s niece Mary Trump writes:

“The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviours so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would  require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never  sit for.”

Diagnosing Trump is one thing, diagnosing the state of the American democracy is another. I believe American democracy is resilient, and that it will win out against the dark forces not just at its door but well and truly inside the gates – but only if America is prepared to learn the lessons here.

Moral authority will not be preserved fully intact after these events, which may not yet be over; but neither will it be lost if we keep hold of the idea that authority is not about being faultless, and it is not about power, or strength in the form of power. Moral authority comes from the way a person, an institution, a country copes with its challenges, and how it responds to its own failings. For such authority to return, power and moralism, will have to step back.

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Truth and Contradiction, Knowledge and Belief, and Trump

photograph of Halloween event at White House with Donald and Melania Trump

At a White House press conference in August, the HuffPost’s White House correspondent, S.V. Dáte, was called on by President Donald Trump for a question. This was the first time Trump had called on Dáte, and the question the reporter asked was the one he had (he said later) been saving for a long time. Here is the exchange:

Dáte: “Mr President, after three and a half years, do you regret at all, all the lying you have done to the American People?” Trump: “All the what?” Dáte: “All the lying, all the dishonesties…” Trump: “That who has done?” Dáte: “You have done…”

Trump cuts him off, ignoring the question, and calls on someone else. The press conference continues, as though nothing has happened. Trump’s reaction to being challenged is familiar and formulaic: he responds by ignoring or denouncing those from whence the challenge comes. In a presidency as tempestuous as this one, that inflicts new wounds on the American democracy daily and lurches from madness to scandal at breakneck speed, this reporter’s question may have slipped under the radar for many.

But let’s go back there for a moment. Not only was it a fair question, it is a wonder that it is not a question Trump is asked every day. The daily litany of lies uttered by the president is shocking, though people who support Trump seem not to mind the lies, or at least are not persuaded thereby to withdraw their support. This seems extraordinary, but maybe it isn’t. As politics continues to grow more divisive and ideologically driven, versions of events, indeed versions of reality, which serve ideologies are increasingly preferred by those with vested interests over ones supported by facts.

Therefore, the answer to Dáte’s question was already implicit in its having to be asked. Given the sheer volume of lies, and given what we know of Trump’s demeanor, it seems clear that he harbors no such regret. Trump gave his answer in dismissing the question.

So, here we are then. The President of the United States is widely acknowledged as a frequent and mendacious liar. If you want to follow up on the amount, content, or modality (Fox News, Twitter, a rally etc.) of Trump’s lies, there are the fact checkers. The Washington Post’s President Trump lie tally database had clocked 20,055 lies to date on July 9. You can search the database of Trump lies by topic and by source. The Post finds that Trump has made an average of 23 false or misleading claims a day over a 14-month period.

Take the president’s appearance last month at an ABC Town Hall with undecided voters. In response to questions about his handling of the pandemic, and regarding the taped, on-the-record interviews with Bob Woodward in which Trump discusses his decision to play down the virus to avoid panic, Trump responds that he had in fact “up-played” the virus. He says this while making no attempt to square the lie off with what is already, in fact, on the public record. As with all Trump’s tweets, public speeches, rallies, press conferences etc., Trump tells lies and fact checkers scramble to confront them.

Of course, Trump should be fact-checked. Fact-checking politicians and other public figures for the veracity of their speech is, and will remain, a vital contribution to public and political discourse. However, it is also important to reflect upon the way the ground has shifted under this activity in the era of Trump; the post-truth era.

The activity of fact-checking, of weighing the President’s claims against known or discoverable truth, presupposes an epistemic relation to the world in which truth and fact are arbiters of – or at least in some way related to – what it is reasonable to believe. Truth and untruth (that is, facts and lies) are, in the conventional sense, at odds with one another – they are mutually exclusive. A logical law of non-contradiction broadly governs conventional discourse. Either “p” or “not-p” is the case; it cannot be both. Ordinarily for a lie to be effective it has to obfuscate or replace the truth. If “p” is in fact true, then the assertion of “not-p” would have to displace the belief in “p” for the lie to work.

But in the Trump Era (the post-truth era) this relation is no longer operative. Trump’s lies often don’t even maintain the pretense of competing with truth in the conventional sense – that is, they don’t really attempt to supersede a fact but rather to shift the reality in which that fact operates as such, or in which it has a claim on belief, decision, and action.

When Trump says he “up-played” the virus without addressing his own on-the-record admission that he downplayed it, he is of course contradicting himself, but more than that he is jettisoning the ordinary sense in which fact and falsehood are at odds with each other. This could be described as a kind of epistemic shift, and is related, I think, to any meaning we might make – now and in the future– of the concept of ‘post-truth’, and what that means for our political and social lives. The concept of post-truth appears to signal a shift in what people can, within political and social discourse, understand knowledge to be, and what claims they can understand it to have upon them. The consequences of this we can already see playing out – especially, for instance, in the pandemic situation in the US, together with the volatile election atmosphere.

Having a concept of epistemology is important here – a concept of what it would be to ‘know’ and what it would be to act on the basis of knowledge. Such a concept would have to demarcate an ancient philosophical distinction – between episteme and doxa; which is the distinction between knowledge and mere opinion or belief.

Post-truth is the ascension of doxa over episteme. In the well-known philosophical analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, for a belief to count as knowledge one must be justified in believing it and it must be true. Knowledge, under this definition which is rudimentary, and somewhat problematic, but nevertheless useful, is belief which is justified and true. But in the post-truth era it seems that the conditions of both justification and truth are weakened, if not dispensed with altogether, and so we are left with an epistemology in which belief alone can count as knowledge – which is no epistemology at all.

It is easy to see why this is not only an epistemic problem, but a moral and political one as well. What knowledge we have, and what it is reasonable to believe and act upon, are core foundations of our lives in a society. There is an important relationship between epistemology and an ethical, flourishing, social and political life. Totalitarianism is built on and enabled by lies and propaganda replaces discourse when all criticism is silenced.

The coronavirus pandemic has been disastrous for the US. A case can easily be made that the pandemic has been able to wreak such devastation because of Trump’s lies – from his decision to downplay the danger and his efforts to sideline and silence experts, to the specific lies and obfuscations he issues via Twitter and at press conferences or Fox News call-ins.

The US has recorded the highest number of infections, and deaths, of anywhere in the world. So, when Trump says “America is doing great” the question must be ‘what this could possibly mean?’ This is no casual lie; nor is it merely the egoistic paroxysm of a president unable to admit error. Repeating at every possible opportunity that ‘America is doing great, the best in the world’ It is a form of gaslighting – and as such is calculated to help Trump disempower and dominate America.

This is in itself quite unsettling, but where is it all going?

In another, particularly bizarre and sinister example of ‘Trumpspeak’ from a couple of weeks ago the president mentioned a plane that allegedly flew from an unnamed city to Washington, D.C., loaded with “thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear.” In the absence of any ensuing clarity from the president or anyone else on what this might have been about, and in the light of Trump’s oft-repeated claims of the presence of a ‘radical left’ contingent, of ‘antifa’ and ‘radical democrats’ etc., it seems to have been an intimation of some threat, directly or indirectly, the symbolism of which appeared to be drawn from the ‘law and order’ platform of his campaign. Frankly, it’s hard to say.

But vague lies and unverified claims with dark intimations are the stuff of conspiracy. If you line all that up next to the fact that Trump has generously hinted that if the election does not resolve in his favor, he will consider the result illegitimate, then you can see how the lies, the false stories, the obfuscations and intimations are the tools Trump is using to try to shift power. He is trying to dislodge power from the elite – which can be read as ‘people who know things.’

One way of characterizing the situation is to say that the post-truth situation is creating an epistemic vacuum where ideology trumps reality and it is in this vacuum that Trump will attempt to secure his win.

Take the oft-repeated mail-in ballot lie – that mail-in ballots are subject to widespread electoral fraud. This has been firmly refuted, even by Trump’s own investigation following the 2016 election. Yet it is widely recognized that this lie could foment a sense of resentment among Trump supporters should he not get across the line on November 3. Or it could facilitate his (by now fairly transparent) intention to declare victory on election night should the result be inconclusive as counting proceeds. These are the possible, or even likely, outcomes if Trump is able to create, feed, and capitalize on a situation in which truth and fact have no purchase on, or have no meaningful relationship to, people’s reasons for acting or making choices.

Trump’s lying is both a symptom, and part of the disease of his presidency – a pathology which has infected pretty well the whole Republican party and which is putting great strain on many of the organs and tissues of the American democracy. This really is a time like no other in America’s history, and the stakes are as high as they have ever been.

At this point the ethical dimensions of the question of why truth is important to a healthy and just society seem to be slipping from view as America struggles under Trump to keep an epistemic foundation in political discourse that is broadly governed by principles of veracity. Fact-checking alone cannot win that struggle.

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

photograph of bar graph made of various colored blocks

I want to draw your attention to a truly awful misuse of statistics. Published on the Markets section of the CNBC website, it looks like this:

For context, the preamble to the introduction of the chart states that,

“The US economy added a record number of jobs in May as it appeared to bounce off the bottom of the coronavirus recession, and now the chart of jobs gains and losses is starting to look like a ‘V’.”

“V-shaped recovery,” the article explains, is “a sharp fall in economic activity followed by a dramatic rise.” And while it would be great if that’s what this chart showed, it does not. Forget for a moment that it does not say what kinds of jobs have been lost and which have been gained. What’s far more misleading is that even if the change to the number of jobs in America was an increase of 2.5 million from the previous month, that would still mean that the total number of jobs lost since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic was approximately 18.2 million. That does not sound like a dramatic rise in economic activity and, when plotted properly, looks nothing close to a “V”.

The saying “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” comes most directly from Mark Twain (although its origin is unclear). Statistics can be a powerful and informative tool if used correctly, but they are also subject to misinterpretation and manipulation. It is unclear whether the above case was the former or the latter; perhaps most charitably we can chalk the misrepresentation of data up to an overeager hopefulness about the economy. Other recent events, however, have seemed to fall much more clearly into the third variety of Twain’s category of lies, representing cases in which statistics have been intentionally manipulated in order to promote a particular agenda.

Consider, for instance, a recent op-ed by Heather MacDonald. In response to the ongoing protests of police violence against black Americans, MacDonald argues that the apparent problem is overblown, and that, in fact, “there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias” by police officers. In making her case she provides plenty of statistical support, making reference to The Washington Post’s police shootings database. Her reasoning goes as follows: there are an enormous number of incidents of police encounters with individuals every year, and only a minuscule percentage of them result in someone being killed. Therefore, the recent killings that have been the impetus for the protests are not “representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians.”

Several news outlets have pointed out that this is bad reasoning. For one, the statistics from The Washington Post database clearly show that Black Americans are being killed by police officers at rates that are massively disproportionate, a fact that, far from debunking the view that there is widespread racial bias by police, reinforces it. Fox News opinion-stater Tucker Carlson similarly massages the data in a recent op-ed. In it, he attempts to show that the protests are overblown by appealing to the statistic that since 2015, “of the 802 shootings in which the race of the police officer and the suspect was noted, 371 of those killed were white, 236 were black.” Again, what Carlson fails to mention is that, given how many more white Americans there are, the rate in which Black Americans are killed by police is still double that of whites.

While these op-eds exemplify poor statistical reasoning, it is also difficult to interpret them charitably as honest mistakes. Carlson in particular has vocally opposed the protests, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement in general. But while it is perhaps not surprising that someone like Carlson would take the line that he takes, there is a reason why misusing statistics can be seen as one of the worst categories of lies.

There are different reasons for thinking that lies are morally wrong, but many involve a kind of disrespect of the autonomy of the person being lied to; in other words, by lying to you I impede your ability to make well-informed decisions, and in turn your ability to achieve your goals. Of course, some kinds of lies seem worse than others. Perhaps we can think of our three categories of lies in the following way. Take “lies” to be those straightforward cases in which I tell you something I take to be false, and in doing so attempt to deceive you. What Twain refers to as “damned lies” might be thought of as what some have called “bald-faced lies,” namely lies that are so obvious that they are not even intended to be deceptive. For instance, say that I have lost my favorite mug, but then catch you drinking from it in the break room. If I ask you whether you, in fact, took my mug, you may respond with a bald-faced lie, saying that you have no idea what I’m talking about while taking a sip. Here it seems that, at the very least, you have no preconceptions about getting away with lying; at worst, your lie is so transparent that you can’t be said to even be trying to deceive me.

Finally, misusing statistics seems to be a particularly egregious method of lying as one is not merely intending to deceive one’s audience, but is doing so in such a way that they purport to be expressing views that are supported by independent, objective evidence. By lying with statistics I thus attempt to shift responsibility for my claims from myself to the numbers. We can see this kind of behavior in those op-eds from Carlson: instead of taking ownership over claims that he is making, he takes himself to merely be a conduit for statistical truths, and thus if one has issues with those truths, he cannot be held accountable for them.

What is the best way to combat statistical lies? Perhaps most straightforwardly by paying attention to the context in which statistics are presented, and to take care not to mistake numbers for objectivity. Misusing statistics may be a particularly effective way of spreading misinformation because it may seem that numbers are incapable of lying. Of course, even if this is true, people who generate and present those numbers are more than capable of lying with them.

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Of Trump and Truth

photograph of empty US Capitol steps

Donald Trump, president of the United States of America, is a pathological liar. This is not a revelatory statement or controversial position. But it is occasionally worthwhile reminding ourselves, in case we become numb to it, how extraordinary a fact it is that continuous deceit is the widely acknowledged reality and defining characteristic of the 45th presidency.

Trump lies about big, important things and small, banal things. He tells transparent lies: “Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.” He tells absurd lies: “Now, the audience was the biggest ever. But this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.” He tells mendacious lies: “We’ve taken in tens of thousands of people. We know nothing about them. They can say they vet them. They didn’t vet them. They have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don’t know anything about them and you have no papers? How do you vet them? You can’t.”  He tells self-serving lies: “I am the least racist person ever.” He tells offhanded lies: “My father is German, Right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, and so I have a great feeling for Germany.”

The Washington Post has a lie tally. At time of writing the count is, for 993 days in office, 13,435 lies or misleading statements.  That is an average of 13.5 lies per day. That’s a lie every two hours. But that’s just the flat average; actually, the daily number of lies has been increasing exponentially – the average had risen from five a day during Trump’s first nine months in office to thirty a day in the seven weeks before the 2018 midterm elections.

But lying is not, it would seem, merely an idiosyncrasy of the president, but official administration policy. Following the now infamous remarks about the inaugural crowd size, Kelly Anne Conway first used the phrase ‘alternative facts’. Rudy Giuliani, in August 2018, dropped his bombshell: “truth isn’t truth.” And remember the lot of erstwhile press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who may not have been progenitor of such zingers as Giuliani or Conway coined, but who nevertheless gave a stolid performance night after night deflecting reality?

This is a deeply shocking situation, and yet, even as it (currently) culminates in the revelations of an impeachment trial that has outdone itself for shocking testimony, the fact that the US president lies continuously, relentlessly, daily, is taking up a position as the ‘new normal.’ But truth is so fundamental to our political and ethical lives that without it politics and ethics will become all but impossible. So what can the effect of this ‘new normal’ be?

The epistemological problem, the problem of knowledge, is a deep philosophical question of how we acquire knowledge and what counts as knowledge. Epistemological skepticism casts doubt upon the possibility of knowing the world around us; upon the origins or the foundational soundness of knowledge. Notwithstanding problems of verification that are philosophically intricate, the idioms ‘alternative facts’ and ‘truth is not truth’ are not cases of epistemological skepticism. These statements are not questioning the nature or origin of truth; they are attempting to undermine its moral authority.

Truth has a fundamentally moral character. According to Immanuel Kant, truth is a categorical imperative. We have a duty to tell the truth because we could not live in a world in which we would not will others to tell the truth. A world where truth was not a ‘moral law’ would cease to function. In this sense truth is a kind of cardinal moral category. It is not just moral in the special sense of being a binding duty unto itself, but in the practical and general sense of enabling the integrity of the very structures of morality to be possible at all. Morality needs truth; truth is a necessary condition for ethics.

The companion concept of truth is trust, similarly without which a moral system could hardly function, since justice and compassion depend upon it. Without truth there cannot be trust, and without trust the political and moral is degraded and social contracts are at risk of breaking down.

Can morality be irrevocably eroded by Trump’s litany of falsehoods? What effect will it have? How will the ‘moral fabric’ of American society be impacted?

In her book On Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes a remark about a famous anti-Semitic conspiratorial forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was widely believed and taken up. Arendt remarks that the circumstances of its production were not as significant as the forgery’s being believed by so many.

But surely, given that Donald Trump’s lies are mostly bald-faced, his supporters must know he is a liar? Certainly, George Conway thinks they do. In March he said in a tweet, “…Even his die-hard supporters… know he’s a liar. They just don’t care.”

Here, then, the situation may be worse: contrary to Arendt, the most important thing may not be the circumstances of the production of lies, or even that they might be believed, but that the lies are tolerated, brushed off, and factored in. This is not a moral failing, but a moral abrogation.

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On Lying When There is No Truth

A photo of a Pinocchio doll.

One of St. Augustine’s enduring gifts to ethics has been Just War Theory. “Thou shalt not kill” comes with an asterisk and a long explanatory footnote.  Augustine did not leave us a Just Lie Theory. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is almost absolute.

Augustine wrote about lying because, of course, everyone does it. And not just about little things. Even Augustine’s co-religionists were saying anything they could to win converts to their side. This was bad. Lying about faith and salvation degraded and debased Truth, the foundation of Augustine’s spiritual values. Augustine worried that a person converted by a lie had never accepted the Truth, and so might not really be saved.

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Government Leakers: Liars, Cowards, or Patriots?

James Comey, former Director of the FBI, recently testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding conversations that he had with President Trump. The public knew some of the details from these conversations before Comey’s testimony, because he had written down his recollections in memos, and portions of these memos were leaked to the press. We now know that Comey himself was responsible for leaking the memos. He reportedly did so to force the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor. It turned out that his gamble was successful, as Robert Mueller was appointed special prosecutor to lead the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

After the testimony, President Trump blasted Comey as a Leaker. He tweeted, “Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!” Trump later tweeted that Comey’s leaking was “Very ‘cowardly!’” Trump’s antipathy towards leaking makes sense against the background of the unprecedented number of leaks occurring during his term in office. It seems as if there is a new leak every day. Given the politically damaging nature of these leaks, supporters of the president have been quick to condemn them as endangering national security, and to call for prosecutions of these leakers. Just recently, NSA contractor Reality Winner was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified materials to the press. However, it is worth remembering that, during the election campaign, then-candidate Trump praised Wikileaks on numerous occasions for its release of the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

A cynical reading of this recent chain of events suggests that the stance that government figures take towards the ethics of leaking is purely motivated by politics. Leaking is good when it damages a political opponent. Leaking is bad when it damages a political ally.  Sadly, this may be a true analysis of politicians’ shifting stances towards leakers. However, it does not answer the underlying question as to whether leaking can ever be morally permissible and, if it can be, under what circumstances might it be?

Approaches may differ, but I think it is reasonable to ask this question in a way that assumes that government leaking requires special justification. This is for two reasons. First, the leaking of classified information is almost always a violation of federal law. Leaking classified information violates the Espionage Act, which sets out penalties of imprisonment for individuals who disclose classified information to those not entitled to receive it. As a general moral rule, individuals ought to obey all laws, unless a special justification exists for their violation. General conformity to the law ensures an order and stability necessary to the safety, security, and well-being of the nation. More specifically, the Espionage Act is intended to protect the nation’s security. Leaking classified information to the press risks our nation’s intelligence operations by potentially exposing our sources and methods to hostile foreign governments.

Second, as Stephen L. Carter of Bloomberg points out, “leakers are liars,” and there is a strong moral presumption against lying. Carter provides a succinct explanation: “The leaker goes to work every day and implicitly tells colleagues, ‘You can trust me with Secret A.’ Then the leaker, on further consideration, decides to share Secret A with the world. The next day the leaker goes back to work and says, ‘You can trust me with Secret B.’ But it’s a lie. The leaker cannot be trusted.”

The strong presumption against lying flows from the idea that morality requires that we do not make an exception of ourselves in our actions. We generally want and expect others to tell us the truth; we have no right ourselves, then, to be cavalier with the truth when speaking with others. Lying may sometimes be justified, but it requires strong reasons in its favor.

Ethical leaking might be required to meet two standards: (A) the leak is intended to achieve a public good that overrides the moral presumption lying and law-breaking, or (B) leaking is the only viable option to achieving this public good. What public good does leaking often promote? Defenders of leaks often argue that leaking reveals information that the public needs to know to hold their leaders accountable for wrongdoing. Famous leaker Edward Snowden, for example, revealed information concerning the surveillance capabilities of the National Security Agency (NSA); it is arguable that the public needed to know this information to have an informed debate on the acceptable limits of government surveillance and its relation to freedom and security.

Since leaking often involves lying and breaking the law, it must be considered whether other options exist, besides leaking, to promote the public good at issue. Government figures who criticize leakers often claim that they have avenues within the government to protest wrong-doing. Supporters of Snowden’s actions pointed out, however, that legal means to expose the NSA’s surveillance programs were not open to him because, as a contractor, he did not have the same whistleblower protections as do government employees and because NSA’s programs were considered completely legal by the US government at the time. Leaking appeared to be his only viable option for making the information public.

Each act of leaking appears to require a difficult moral calculation. How much damage will my leaking do to the efforts of the national security team? How important is it for the public to know this classified information? How likely is it that I could achieve my goals through legal means within the government system? Though a moral presumption against leaking may exist—you shouldn’t leak classified information for just any old reason—leaking in the context of an unaccountable government engaged in serious wrongdoing has been justified in the past, and I expect we will see many instances in the future where government leaks will be justified.

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Should Parents Lie to Their Children About Santa Claus?

photograph of Santa Claus ornament on tree

As the parent of an inquisitive 2½ year old, I currently find myself fumbling to explain Santa Claus to him, of whom he is now quite aware. Should I emphasize that he is a storybook character and not a real person? Would he even know what the difference between real and make-believe is yet? Ultimately, I find myself confronted by the perennial parenting question that divides many a household: Should we lie to our kids about Santa Claus?

My own parents always dutifully marked some Christmas presents as if they were from Santa Claus, even well after we kids were past the stage of believing in that jolly old elf. I do not personally feel damaged by my parents sustaining the myth of Father Christmas, but a recent essay in Lancet Psychiatry warns otherwise. Kathy McKay, a clinical psychologist at the University of New England, Australia and co-author claims: “The Santa myth is such an involved lie, such a long-lasting one, between parents and children, that if a relationship is vulnerable, this may be the final straw. If parents can lie so convincingly and over such a long time, what else can they lie about?”

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