Is a Lie a Lie if Everyone Knows it's a Lie?

According to a standard philosophical definition of lying, you lie if you make a statement that you do not believe with the intent to deceive (cf. Mahon 2008). Moral philosophers (e.g., Augustine 395, Kant 1797, Bok 1978, Korsgaard 2007, Carson 2010) are primarily interested specifically in lies that are intended to deceive, and in why it is wrong to tell such lies. However, a few philosophers (e.g., Sorensen 2007, Fallis 2009, Carson 2010) claim that intuitively “bald-faced lies” (i.e., lies that everyone knows are lies) are lies, despite the fact that they are not intended to deceive. In this paper, I argue that there are good philosophical reasons to classify such bald-faced lies as lies. Bald-faced lies are assertions that share an important moral commonality with lies that are intended to deceive. In particular, both sorts of lies attempt to manipulate people by violating an important social norm (viz., the norm against communicating things that one does not believe). Appealing to work in the philosophy of language on norms of conversation (most notably, Grice 1975), I propose a new definition of lying that explicitly captures this moral commonality.