I posted some initial thoughts about lying to voters in a recent post. In my book The Ethics of Voting, I argue that most voting is wrongful. In the recent post, I said that voters are kind of like the murderer at the door, and the principles that explain when you can lie to the murderer at the door explain when you can lie to voters. Of course, just when you can lie to murderers at the door is a complicated question, and the same goes for bad voters. You don’t owe murderers at the door the truth, but for strategic reason, you have to be careful in what you say to them. Same goes with voters.

Many of the commenters said that my position can’t be right because people will misapply it in dangerous ways. They are right that politicians will misapply it in dangerous ways. In fact, I bet some politicians who wrongfully lie do so because they think that they mistakenly fall under a murderer at the door-type case. But that doesn’t mean that the principle is wrong. It just means that people tend to mess up the application.

So, I say, “In special circumstances, it’s permissible to lie, if doing so is an effective means to protect the innocent from wrongfully-imposed harms.” Now suppose someone objects:

We are poor judges of consequences. We are prone to thinking we are in exceptional circumstances when we are not. We are prone to misapply principles in self-serving ways. We look for excuses when there are not. If Brennan’s position on lying to voters were widely believed, politicians would probably misapply the principles in dangerous ways. In most real-life scenarios, if a politcians believes himself permitted to lie to voters, he should recognize he is prone to error, and should be extremely skeptical of his conclusion that lying is permitted in this instance.

This objection says that my argument is self-effacing. If people believed it, they would misapply it. While trying to conform to my position on lying to voters, they would act in ways not actually authorized by this position.

This objection fails for the same reason self-effacingness objections usually general. The fact that most people would botch applying a theory does not show that the theory is wrong. So, for instance, suppose—as is often argued—that most people would misapply utilitarian moral standards. Perhaps applying utilitarianism is too hard for the common person. Even if so, this does not invalidate utilitarianism. As David Brink notes, utilitarian moral theory means to provide a criterion of right, not a method for making decisions.[i] Utilitarianism is supposed to explain what makes actions right and wrong. Whether it is useful—given flawed human psychology—for determining on the ground what to do is a different matter. Even if everyone consistently misapplied utilitarianism, this would not show the theory is false.[ii] (As an analogy, consider that certain physics equations explain why the baseball lands where it lands. However, most expert outfielders would never catch a ball if they tried to do so by applying the equations. The equations explain the ball’s path and explain where the balls will land, but do not provide a “decision procedure” for catching balls.)

[i] David Brink, “Utilitarian Morality and the Personal Point of View,” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 417-38.

[ii] For an extended argument that moral theory aims to explain rather than to provide a decision-procedure, see Jason Brennan, “Beyond the Bottom Line: The Theoretical Goals of Moral Theorizing,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 28 (2008): 277-296.

*As an example of this: Stakeholder theory is lousy as a criterion of right action. It’s not the correct theory of corporate social responsibility. Or, at least, there aren’t good arguments for it. However, because people suffer from moral blind spots, stakeholder theory is a pretty good decision procedure–thinking like a stakeholder theorists tends to reduce people’s blind spots, and makes it more likely they will avoid certain moral errors.

UPDATE: Since we’ve a slew of new Randian readers recently, I’ll use Rand’s theory as an example here. Rand says people should be independent thinkers, not conformists who just follow others slavishly. Suppose, for the sake of argument, Rand’s moral theory is true. However, it turns out, empirically, that many of the top Randians *were* slavish, non-independent, irrational thinkers, who followed Rand in a cult-like fashion. This doesn’t mean that Rand’s moral theory is wrong. Rather, it just meant that her inner circle of fawning disciples and she herself failed to live according to the precepts of her own moral theory. Her moral theory could be a valid criterion of right, but for Rand and her disciples, her moral theory was not a useful decision-procedure. A criterion of right is psychology independent and universal, but a useful decision-procedure is psychology-dependent and individualized, as it depends upon each individual person’s particular psychological flaws.

UPDATE 2: Another way to see the difference. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the correct moral theory is M. But now suppose an evil demon says, “A ha! I’m going to cast  a spell making it so that anyone who believes M will misapply M, thus causing all M-believers to act badly, in a way inconsistent with theory M.” In that world, M is still the correct moral theory–it still explains what makes actions right and wrong. However, you wouldn’t want to teach people M or ask them to use M on the ground. Instead, you’d want to use an independent decision-procedure, something that would tend to make them act in accordance with M, but without consciously thinking about or trying to apply M.

UPDATE 3: There’s a good quotation from Keynes I use in my PPE class about how we should preach free trade as an inflexible dogma to politicians. Keynes’s view was that there are some cases where free trade is not good, but we can’t trust politicians to distinguish the cases where free trade is bad from the cases where it’s good. Accordingly, since it’s rarely bad, and since politicians are dumb, economists should just tell politicians to do free trade no matter what, period. So, Keynes was in effect saying that “Free trade is always good” is strictly speaking false, according to the correct economic theory, but also saying that “Free trade is always good” is a good decision-procedure for politicians, given their lack of knowledge and their flawed psychology.