Promises and Lies

This from David Fredosso:

Now embarrassed by his oft-repeated and false promise that “if you like your health plan you can keep it,” Obama has retreated to a new line of defense: Your old health plan had to be canceled because it was “junk.”

I object.  It was not a promise that Obama repeatedly made; it was a false statement about a matter of fact easily checked.  The matter of fact is what the PPACA says; it is easily checked by simply reading the law or having a staff member read the law and report on its contents to the president.  So what Obama  repeatedly did was make a false statement.  That by itself does not get the length of a lie.  But there are very good reasons to believe that he made his false statement time and again with the intention to deceive.  For had he not engaged in deception, the bill would not have passed.  It strains credulity to maintain that Obama did not know about a key provision of his signature piece of legislation, a provision without which the entire scheme is unworkable.    Of course he knew.  And being the consummate Chicago-machine political hustler that he is, he knew what he had to do to win, the glorious end justifying the contemptible means.

But what really interests me are the underlying conceptual and philosophical questions, and not  our morally challenged president and his serial lies, prevarications, and other offenses against truth and truthfulness. What is a promise?  What is a lie?  How does a promise that one fails to keep differ from a lie?  Many pundits confuse the former with the latter.  Bill O'Reilly the other night juxtaposed the Obama lie with the Bush the Elder's 1988 "Read my lips" unfulfilled promise, as if the one is assimilable to the other.  So let's think about it.  My main question is this:

If I promise to do X, and fail to fulfill my promise, have I lied?

To answer this question we need to analyze the concept of promising.

Promising is future-oriented: if I promise at time t to do X, then, if I fulfill my promise and do X, X occurs at a time t* later than t.  If I promise to drive you to Tucson, and I do in fact drive you to Tucson, then, necessarily, my driving you there occurs at a time later than the time of my promising.  In other words, there is no promising with respect to the past, or even with respect to the present.  Suppose I am just now sneezing without covering my mouth.  I can promise to not to do that again, but I can't promise to not do what I am in the process of doing.

Now suppose that I promise on Monday to drive you to Tucson on Tuesday, but my vehicle is 'totaled' Monday night and no other vehicle is available for my use.  Then I fail to fulfill my promise. But it doesn't follow that I lied when I promised to drive you to Tucson.  For one cannot lie about what has not yet occurred.  Here is an explicit argument:

a. Promises are about future contingent events
b. Future contingent events either do not exist or if they do exist they are not knowable now.
c. Lies are false statements made with the intention to deceive about events that are both existent and knowable now.
Therefore
d. No promise is a lie.

(b) requires a bit of commentary.  If presentism is true, then only the present exists, in which case future events do not exist.  If presentism is false and future events (tenselessly) exist, as they do on a B-theory of time, then they, or at least the modally contingent ones, are unknowable by us now.

I have been talking about sincere promises.  Suppose I make a promise I have no intention of fulfilling.  Or to be precise, I utter a form of words that are verbally of the sort one uses to make a promise, but these words are not animated by any intention to do as I appear to be promising.  This is not a lie either.  Deception is involved, but not a lie.  For to lie I must make a statement about some actual state of affairs.  But 'I promise to drive you to Tucson tomorrow' is not a statement about any state of affairs.  Promising and stating are quite different.  Promising is a performative: I make it the case that I promise to drive you to Tucson simply by uttering those words.  There is nothing external to the words to represent or misrepresent either intentionally or non-intentionally.

George Bush the Elder, back in 1988, famously said, "Read my lips! No new taxes!"  Did he lie?  Of course not.  On a charitable view, he made a promise he was unable to keep due to circumstances beyond his control.   But even if he had no intention of keeping his promise, he still did not lie.

Bill Clinton wagged his finger at us and said, "I did not have sex with that woman!"  Did he lie?  Of course.  He did in fact have oral sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. 

There are at least two ways of failing to fulfill a promise.  One can be prevented from fulfilling it by circumstances beyond one's control, or one can renege on the promise.  Suppose that on Tuesday morning I just don't feel like carting you to Tucson, and refuse to do so even after promising to do so.  Then I renege on my promise.  If a person reneges on a promise, we say he broke his promise.  A broken promise is not the same as an insincere promise.  I can sincerely promise, on Monday, to meet Jake for lunch on Friday, but then break the promise.

Did Obama renege on his PPACA promise?  No, for the simple reason that he made no promise.  He made a false statement about the content of the PPACA bill that then became law.

Fredosso above uses the phrase "false promise."  That strikes me as ambiguous as between 'insincere promise' and 'broken promise.'  We should probably avoid the phrase 'false promise.'  Truth-value does not come into the appraisal of performatives.  Suppose I say to Ed, 'I promise to repay you on Friday.'  If Ed says, 'Is that true what you just said,' then Ed shows that he does not understand the nature of promising.  For another example, 'I hereby pronounce you man and wife,' said by a Justice of the Peace,  is neither true nor false.  Of course, if he says it, then it is true that he said it; but the saying itself is not true or false; therr is no reality external to the saying that the saying is about.

Here is a quickie argument:

Lies are all of them false
Promises are neither true nor false
Ergo
No promise, not even a 'false' promise, is a lie.

Further question: Is 'insincere' in 'insincere promise' an alienans adjective?  Suppose I break my promise to you and you protest: You promised!  I say, 'But I didn't mean it.'  Is an insincere promise a promise? I am inclined to say that an insincere promise is not a promise while a broken promise is a promise.

Concluding Polemical Postscript.  Obama lied, and health care died!

Related articles

Obama Lied Last Night About Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Obama as Bullshitter

Obama, the Imaginary Man

He lies and then lies about the lies

Comments

[Alex Leibowitz]

Anscombe famously noted that statements containing the future tense are ambiguous and can, depending on the circumstances, express either an intention or a prediction. I think promises should be interpreted as explicitly expressing an intention and not only a prediction. If to say, "I will..." is equivalent to saying, "I intend to..." (and one does not have to be overly nuanced to see this meaning in the word), is that enough to make promises which are not kept into lies?

[Elliott]

Bill,

Your analysis of promises is very interesting. Do you hold that future-tense statements about future contingent events are either true or false?

It seems to me that, assuming the correspondence theory, future-tense statements about future contingent events are either true or false, and that we can have probable knowledge about at least some such events because we know with varying degrees of probability that some will exist (A-Theory) or do exist (B-Theory).

If this is the case, then (b) and (c) of your argument seem questionable. With (b), future contingent events don’t exist now (A-Theory) but we know with probability that some will exist, which provides grounds for statements about them to be either true or false; or such events exist tenselessly (B-Theory), we have probable knowledge of them, so statements about them are either true or false. With (c), if future-tense statements are true or false, then one can maintain that a lie is a harmful intention to bear false testimony to a person who has a right to the truth in a morally relevant situation, and that such false testimony can be made in future-tense statements about future events that are knowable with probability.

For example, if Jack promises to cut Frank’s grass tomorrow at noon, knowing with high probability that the state of affairs tomorrow at noon will not include his cutting Frank’s grass, and knowing he has no intention to do so, and if Jack’s promise is made with a harmful intention to deceive Frank in a morally relevant situation, then Jack is lying.

In sum, one might argue that all declarative statements that are: (1) false; (2) made with a harmful intention to deceive a person in a morally relevant situation; and (3) about past events, present events, or future events knowable with probability; are classified as lies. Some false promises are declarative statements made with a harmful intention to deceive a person in a morally relevant situation, and are about future events knowable with probability. So some false promises are lies.

The key question is: are future-tense statements about future contingent events either true or false?

[Chad McIntosh]

For the record, Obama did make claim the "if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it" as a promise. Just a few seconds in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpa-5JdCnmo

[BV]

Chad,

Obama used the word 'promise,' but that doesn't make what he said a promise. The bill states what it states, and he lied about what it states. It shows confusion to refer to “if you like your health plan you can keep it” as a promise.