Bok, Sissela

Renowned philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok was born in Sweden. She was internationally educated at the Sorbonne, Université de Paris, from 1954 to 1955; George Washington University, B.A. in 1957 and M.A. in 1958; and Harvard University, Ph.D. in 1970. Bok is the daughter of two Noble Prize winners, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, and has served on the Nobel Prize board as chair or a member for nearly a decade. She is married to Derek Bok, former law professor and president of Harvard University, and has one daughter, Hilary Bok, who is also a philosopher. In 2012, Bok was a senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Bok is the author of numerous respected articles and books. Two publications of particular relevance to lying and deception are Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life, originally published in 1978 and reissued in 1989 and 1999, and Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, published in 1982. Lying was well received, earning the George Orwell Award and the Melcher Book Award.

Lying was particularly relevant when originally published because there were few, if any, modern-day texts focused on ethics and lying. Bok's work provided the first thorough investigation of everyday moral choices, including relevant quotations from philosophers and theologians from earlier centuries. And while there are many current texts analyzing moral choices, Lying is still regarded as one of the preeminent sources.

According to Bok in Lying, lying is any intentional stated message meant to deceive. This dramatically narrows the topic of lying. Not considered as lying are statements that a person did not create to deceive, statements that the person did not know were false, and all the ways that individuals deceive without relying upon words. Bok's new forward to the 1999 reissued Lying addresses this weakness, adding that a more accurate definition of lying exists between two extremes: a false statement deliberately presented as true and anything meant to deceive or create a false impression. This would greatly broaden the definition of lying from the original definition presented in Lying, though Bok acknowledges that she has addressed this broader definition in many of her written works since Lying.

The Principle of Veracity is a premise developed by Bok in Lying, which argues that lies should be given a negative weight; the moral presumption is against lying. This includes white lies and all other lies. Bok's justification is that individuals live in a world that relies on a system of trust, and lies violate that trust; individuals do not have the time to verify all information each time they hear it, thus veracity is a fundamental requirement of the communication system. When a person violates this trust, he or she fails to maintain their part of the societal system, and in so doing takes unfair advantage of others. Furthermore, the liar harms him or herself, creating a future propensity to continue lying, expending energy to create and maintain lies, and creating the possibility to harm the liar's credibility if caught in the lie. Thus, Bok argues, lies are harmful to society, the dupe, and the liar.

...