Lying, Accusations of

As Bernard Williams has pointed out, “lie” is a thick ethical concept, like “coward” or “kind” or “cruel.” A thick ethical concept both describes and evaluates. Thick ethical concepts are unlike thin descriptive concepts, such as “walk” or “water,” that only describe, and thin evaluative concepts, like “good” or “right” or “evil,” that only evaluate. “Lie” both describes a certain kind of action, and evaluates that action negatively. To characterize an action as a lie, as opposed to characterizing it as a misstatement, or even a falsehood, is not only to single it out as an intentional action but is also to condemn it. This is because a lie has what Sissela Bok has called an “initial negative weight.” To accuse someone of lying, to accuse someone of being a liar, is to accuse that person of acting in a way that violates ethical rules. To accuse someone of being a liar is to accuse him or her of wrongdoing.

Such is the negative weight attached to telling lies that it has traditionally been considered the worst form of insult to be accused of being a liar. As Michel de Montaigne said in the following:

Thus I have often considered what could be the source of that custom, which we observe so religiously, of feeling more bitterly offended when reproached with this vice, which is so common among us, than with any other; and that it should be the worst insult that can be given us in words, to reproach us with lying.

Immanuel Kant invoked an article by Richard Steele in issue number 6 of The Spectator when he wrote that, “The English Spectator maintains that no more insulting reproach could be made to a man than if he is considered a liar.” This is presumably the reason why, in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, no member is allowed to call another member a liar; it is considered unparliamentary language.

In the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) declared that “insulting or ‘fighting words,’” that is, “those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace,” belong to the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech” that are not protected by the First Amendment's prohibition on the abridgment of free speech. “Fighting words” can be prevented and punished by law, even if they are true. As the court said, “The English language has a number of words and expressions which by general consent are ‘fighting words’ when said without a disarming smile … Such words, as ordinary men know, are likely to cause a fight.”

[Page 609]The old New Hampshire statute at issue in this Supreme Court case harkened back to 19th-century attempts to ban American gentlemen from engaging in duels, which were brought on by insults to a man's honor, including accusing a man of being a liar. As Joanne B. Freeman has noted: