Dishonesty is a widespread phenomenon that occurs in various forms. Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology (AA 07: 332) considers it to be part of man’s original disposition. Kant distinguishes its linguistic forms, by which people conceal their own thoughts and deliberately present to others as true what they themselves consider to be false, in a climax from pretense to deliberate deception or misleading to lying.Today, we call them bullshit, misinformation, lies, and fake news. But although insincerity is probably as old as humanity itself and common throughout the world, the definitions of its various forms remain contested. The same applies to its moral assessment and the answers to the question of its political significance.

In addition to assertion, address, and insincerity, Kant considers the intention to deceive to be one of the features of the concept of lying. Only recently has most of the philosophical world been convinced to remove the intention to deceive from the list of defining features. This is because there are relevant contexts in which everyone knows that the speaker considers his assertion to be false, and everyone knows that everyone knows this. However, although deception is neither possible nor intended under these conditions, these statements are supposed to be lies, namely bald-faced lies. There is the dissident under political surveillance who blatantly and untruthfully praises the virtues of the dictator (Sorensen 2007). There is a student caught red-handed who rejects the accusation of cheating because he knows that the dean only punishes cheaters who confess. And then there is the witness who is threatened with death and, out of fear, testifies in court that she did not see the murder in question, even though it is clear to everyone present that this is not true (Carson 2010). According to recent opinion, all three cases are considered lies, none of them deliberate deception.

Philosophers who defend the traditional definition take different approaches. According to a first proposal, bald-faced lies do not aim to make someone believe propositional content that is considered false. Nevertheless, they are deceitful because they can, for example, prevent a court conviction (Lackey 2018). According to a second proposal, bald-faced lies are also intended to deceive. However, they are not addressed directly but aim to deceive so-called institutional listeners. Therefore, the dissident actually aims to deceive the secret service, the student seeks to mislead the university department, and the witness intends to deceive the court as a group agent (Rudnicki/Odrowąż-Sypniewska 2023). A more radical defense of the traditional definition considers the expression “bald-faced lie” to be a misnomer and disputes that it is a lie at all. This might be done in a straightforward but question-begging manner, pointing out that there was no intention to deceive. A more subtle objection is the idea that a bald-faced lie is not a genuine assertion (Keiser 2016). The speakers merely recite what is in the institutional setting to achieve a certain effect in their favor. They do not utter it with assertive force.

At this point, we see a similarity with the communicative act of linguistic misleading as another form of dishonesty. If we dishonestly answer Kant’s murderer at the door that our friend is not at home, we are lying. If we answer truthfully that we just saw him outside, we are trying to make the murderer believe, e.g., via conservational implicature, that he is still there, and our epistemic commitments differ from those of a liar (Viebahn 2021). This raises moral issues. Misleading someone is often considered morally less reprehensible than lying, for example, because the misled person is partly responsible for their false belief. However, the moral valence seems to depend on the individual case. In the case of a dish that has been laced with peanut oil with murderous intent, it is morally no better to mislead an allergy sufferer by saying, “There are no peanuts in this meal,” than to lie and say, “You can eat it safely” (Saul 2012).

Further important phenomena and variants of dishonesty must be taken into account. Bullshitting, as defined by Harry Frankfurt, is a disingenuous practice that is indifferent to the truth. Gaslighting is a manipulation technique that aims to undermine the epistemic autonomy of its victims by means of various forms of dishonesty. Initially studied with regard to personal relationships, collective gaslighting, fact-denying counter-narratives, and fake news have attracted philosophical interest in recent years as political tools (Rietdijk 2021). As an instrument of power and hybrid warfare, the mass dissemination of incoherent propaganda lies is not aimed at making people believe a particular falsehood but at making them doubt their sense of reality and unsettling their faith in their own judgment.

The Erfurt conference of the German-Polish Society for Philosophy on the topic of “Lying, Misleading, and Fake News: On Forms of Dishonesty” will be dedicated to questions of moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, and history of philosophy. How do we find the proper definitions and distinctions for forms of dishonesty? Can lies be true? Can all Cretans always lie? Are bald-faced lies lies? How does linguistic misleading work? Is bullshitting necessarily independent of facts? Is Kant’s view of lying defensible? Is Hegel’s critique of it justified? Is there a duty to lie? How should dishonesty be judged morally? However, from a philosophical point of view, questions should also be raised about the social and political function of dishonesty. When is dishonesty politically justified? How do irrational counternarratives (big lies) threaten open, democratic societies? What stance should we take on the social and political impact of mass propaganda lies? f you have any questions, please contact Prof. Dr. Guido Löhrer (guido.loehrer@uni-erfurt.de).