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Serious deceit can cause serious damage. Say, for instance, you've gone out on a dark evening all by yourself looking for sex, just a little normal, ordinary sex, and you're quietly cruising through the flashing-light district.
Since you're a male firefly of the Photinus consanguineus species, you are sending out your own distinctive signal of availability: a double-pulse of light, one separated from the other by two seconds, followed by a delay of four to seven seconds, then another double-pulse. And now you're just cruising about and looking for the responding signal of an available Photinus consanguineus female. About a second after the end of your double pulse, she should respond with a single pulse.
Oh! Over there! You see the responding signal. That signal quickly becomes a beacon, which you follow right to its enticing source until . . . arrgh . . . too late! You've been tricked by a large and predatory female Photuris firefly, craftily sending out a deceitful imitation of the female Photinus consanguineus signal, and now you're dead.
That's deceit in the extreme, and it demonstrates at least two things. First, it reminds us of the dyadic nature of truth and falsehood--or what I might call, in this case, honest communication versus deceptive communication. I describe such pairs as dyadic because each half is locked in a dependent embrace with the other. The deceptive signal of the Photuris predator firefly, after all, would be useless without the existence of an honest signal ordinarily sent by willing Photinus consanguineus females. Conversely, it's illogical to describe the signal of a willing Photinus consanguineus female as honest unless it stands in contrast with the potential of some dishonest signal somewhere. Honesty and deceit make sense only in tandem.
The case of the predatory Photuris female fatally fleecing the amorous Photinus consanguineus male demonstrates a second thing about honesty and deceit, which is the following: Honesty serves the interests of both parties, whereas deceit serves only one participant. In our human world, of course, this interesting difference between honesty and deceit means that we recognize the former as a pro-social and often a moral option, whereas the latter is likely to be seen as selfish, anti-social, and--if serious enough--immoral.
As I expect you've already concluded, however, the story of the predatory Photuris and a preyed-upon Photinus sanguineus may evoke the honesty-and-deceit dyad appearing in nature, but it is not a legitimate example of animal morality or immorality. Morality is ordinarily restricted to interactions among individuals of the same species. For a member of one species to deceive an individual of another is no different from a person catching a fish with a clever lure. No different from one creature using camouflage or stealth or any other piece of ordinary trickery in order to prey on or to avoid becoming prey of another creature of another kind. Other species are usually fair game. Moral rules do not usually cross the species barrier. That's the effect of species narcissism applied to morality.
No, if we're going to search for moral behavior in the realm of communication, we should look at communication between individuals of the same species. When we do so, we find that even at the simplest levels, the use of any forthright communication can provoke a deceitful alternative.
Domestic roosters sometimes make food calls in the absence of food as a clever if deceitful way to attract unwary hens. Frogs deceive one another, as do crabs. So do supposedly monogamous birds, with DNA assessments showing an average of 13 percent non-monogamous matings. Well, the universe is filled with communications honest and deceitful: a fact that becomes only too evident the minute we turn the looking glass back onto our own social world. Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, organized a survey in which 77 students and 70 non-students agreed to keep a week-long diary of all their social interactions and any lies told during that interaction. By the end of that time, the study's 147 participants had described telling some 1,535 lies, with an average of one lie for every five social interactions. Only one of the college students claimed not to have told a lie during the week, while six of the 70 non-students also reported being entirely honest during those seven days.
It's true that we rationalize some of our prevarications by describing them as necessary acts of kindness, as in: Did you really expect me to tell him he's a boring jerk? And indeed many of the lies in DePaulo's study appear to have been committed in order to avoid hurting someone by stating a painful truth. This sort of lie appears to violate one moral rule (against deceit) in order to favor a second moral rule (against inflicting unnecessary pain). DePaulo recognizes the existence of such lies, which she describes as being other-oriented--but even if we were to eliminate from her study all of those lies rationalized by an appeal to kindness, the data would still support a rough average of one lie per day per person.
It's also the case that most everyday lies are likely to cause little damage. Yet even if we were to classify minor lies as lapses in manners rather than in morals, we may still conclude that most people tell genuinely serious or harmful lies from time to time. These are deceits meant to advance one's own welfare, to hide one's secret activities, to harm one's adversaries. And among humans, at least, we understand very clearly that a moral principle is involved in serious lies.
Whereas a truth-teller may enjoy the fruits of that truth, and a liar might enjoy the results of some lie, no one--neither truth-teller nor liar--likes being lied to. Truth-tellling is socially welcomed, while telling a falsehood is only privately perpetrated. Thus, telling the truth will be found on the list of moral virtues, as a good and pro-social act, while lying belongs on the list of moral vices, as a bad or anti-social act. Of course, we recognize a tremendous individual variability in the inclination to deceive. Some people lie more than others. But in general, we can conclude that the human capacity for anti-social deceit is almost bottomless and endless, while, at the same time, the ninth commandment as written in Exodus 20 weighs in with a powerful if limited attempt at pro-social counterbalance: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."
For humans, though, lying not only increases our general anxiety, but it also requires a significantly engaged intellect. Yes, truth-telling also requires an engaged intelligence, since it considers someone else's knowledge and ability to understand. But real lying in the way of humans requires more. In truth-tellling, a person merely expresses what he or she has in mind. In lying, a person retains that one true idea while simultaneously conjuring a cover story presenting a second, false idea. Among humans, moreover, lying is not just a matter of creating such a misleading communication in spoken language. Since people communicate so much additionally through facial expressions and gestures, lying also means misrepresenting oneself facially and gesturally. Liars deliberately create a mask: a face of falsehood that, given the complexity of our normal facial communications, is in itself a remarkable achievement.
This post includes material from my recent book, The Moral Lives of Animals.
