Biden Broke his Promise, but Did He Lie? Promising, Lying, Predicting

I have no respect for Joe Biden, but a very high degree of respect for Jonathan Turley, who writes:

President Biden's decision to use his presidential powers on Sunday to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the president used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past controversies about the use of this pardon power, Biden has cemented his legacy for many, not as the commander in chief, but as the liar in chief. 

The question is not whether Biden is a liar; he is. The question I am asking is whether he lied when he promised not to pardon his son.  He did in fact make that promise on several occasions, and he did in fact break it.  Those are known facts. But did Biden lie when he made that promise? What Turley says implies that he did lie.  I beg to differ.

I should make it clear that I am not defending Biden. The man is morally corrupt to the core and a national disaster. I am merely using him to focus a question that interests me, namely, if a subject S promises to do X at time t1, and refuses to do X at some later time t2, did S tell a lie at t1 by his act of promising at t1? (I assume that the circumstances at t2 do not prevent S from delivering on his promise.  I also assume that no weightier consideration such as a death threat justifies a change of mind on the part of S with respect to X during the period from t1 to t2.)  

Can one lie about a future event? If not, then how could Biden's promising not to pardon his son be a lie? The pardoning was later than the promisings. It was therefore future relative to those promisings and had yet to occur. At the time of the promisings, there was either no fact for Biden to lie about, or no fact he could have known about. Either way, Biden did not lie when he made his promises, promises that he later broke.

On one natural way to think about the future, it ain't real until it happens.  If we think about the future in this way, there was no fact for Biden to lie about when he made his promises, in which case he did not tell a lie when he made his promises.

On another way to think about the future, all future events are tenselessly real.   If we think about the future in this way, then there is (tenselessly) a fact for Biden to lie about at the times of his promisings, but there is no way anyone not possessing paranormal precognitive powers could know what this fact is. 

I am assuming that to lie is to issue a verbal or written statement intended to deceive one's audience about a state of affairs that the issuer of the statement either knows or believes to be the case.  If so, then one cannot lie about what may or may not become the case, or about what is tenselessly the case but not accessible to our present knowledge.

Turley's response, based on the quotation above, would presumably be that Biden lied about his intention to pardon Hunter.  Now if one forms a firm intention at time t to do X (or not do X) in the future, then at t there is the fact of  the forming of that intention. That is something one can know about and lie about.  

It is reasonable to conjecture that Biden at the time of his public promisings had no intention of delivering on his promise not to pardon his son, or, equivalently, had the intention to not deliver on the promise. But then the problem becomes: how could anyone know what Biden or anyone intends?  Preternatural powers aside, one cannot peer into the mind of another and 'see' what is going on there.  

And so we ought to distinguish between promise-breaking and lying.  It is verifiable that Biden broke his promise: we simply compare the publicly accessible records of what he said with the publicly accessible record of his pardoning.  What we cannot know is the nature of the inner mental intention behind the outwardly expressed promises.  Hence we do not and cannot know whether Biden lied about his intention.  

Let's not forget that the man is non compos mentis, not of sound mind. He is suffering from dementia. It is entirely possible that the superannuated grifter forgot or suppressed an original intention to not pardon his worthless son.  If so, he broke a promise but did not lie.

And so, pace the estimable Turley, the massive case for Biden's being a liar cannot be and need not be augmented by citation of his pardoning of the apple that fell not far from the tree.

In sum, one can break a promise without lying. This argument-form is invalid:

1) S promised to do (or refrain from doing) X.

2) S broke his promise.  

Therefore

3) S told a lie.

Promising is relevantly like predicting. Both are future-oriented. Many predicted in 2016 that Trump would lose the 2016 election. They were wrong in their prediction. Were they lying when that made their predictions? Of course not.  Either the proposition Trump wins in 2016 had no truth-value prior to the election, or it had a truth-value, but one not known to the predictors. Either way, there as no lie.  That's blindingly evident.

Promising is trickier, and so it is harder to think clearly about it.  S's publicly accessible speech-act of promising  to do or refrain from doing X is animated by S's mental and thus publicly inaccessible intention to do or refrain from doing X. The difference is that while one can predict one's own behavior -- taking a third-person POV with respect to oneself -- one is the agent of one's own actions and omissions.

Comments

[EG]

Hi Bill,

You write:

"On another way to think about the future, all future events are tenselessly real. If we think about the future in this way, then there is (tenselessly) a fact for Biden to lie about at the times of his promisings, but there is no way anyone not possessing paranormal precognitive powers could know what this fact is."

What does "tenselessly real" mean? And can you explain how that relates to something in the future? Are you specifying some specific sense of possibility? If so, then I'd ask how fact and possibility interact here.

[BV]

See here: https://open.substack.com/pub/williamfvallicella/p/from-the-b-theory-of-time-to-eternalism?r=f3tzc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true