Author: Dan Peterson
Categories: Philosophy of Language, Ethics
Word count: 998
People sometimes lie. But what is it to lie?
How does lying differ from other forms of deception? Can we mislead but not lie? What is bullshitting, as philosophers understand it?[1]
And how do these forms of deception compare, morally?[2]
This essay reviews some influential philosophical answers to these questions.
1. Lying
An initial definition of “lying” might be “telling someone something false.”[3] This is a poor definition because honest mistakes aren’t lies. If I report the time from a clock I don’t realize is broken, I haven’t lied, because I thought I was telling the truth.
So we could call lying “telling someone something you believe to be false.”[4] But lies aren’t just believed falsehoods since we don’t call exaggerations (“You’ve grown three feet since I last saw you!”) and metaphors (“You’re such a pig!”) lies. Also, actors and storytellers aren’t lying when they say or write things that are literally false.
Given these concerns, we might define “lying” this way:
someone lies when (1) they say something they believe is false, and (2) they try to get people to believe this falsehood by saying it.[5]
Still, even this definition may be inadequate since some lies seemingly don’t aim at deceiving their audience. For instance, a witness might say something false on the stand not with the intention to deceive the jury but to signal their loyalty to the mob boss defendant. Similarly, to avoid punishment, students might tell their teacher that they didn’t cheat on a test, even if everyone involved definitively knows they cheated.[6] Most people would call the witness’s false testimony and the student’s denial lies, even though they don’t meet condition (2) of the definition above.[7]
2. Misleading
We might better understand different varieties of deception by introducing the concept of “misleading.” A person misleads someone when they try to get their audience to either believe a claim the misleader believes to be false or fail to believe a claim the misleader believes to be true, but without uttering a falsehood.[8]
Some forms of deception that don’t meet our definition of “lie” may instead be misleadings. For instance, imagine I am going on a work trip with, and want to prank my untrusting enemy. I tell him our flight leaves at 9 AM, which is true, knowing that he won’t believe me and may miss the flight. Telling the truth here may deceive, but, because what I say is true, I’ve misled, not lied to, him.
Similarly, lies of omission deceive not because a literal falsehood is stated but because the truth is omitted. If my father asks about my day and I mention visiting an art museum but omit wrecking his car, I have misled him but haven’t lied to him, at least according to the definition above.
By treating lying and misleading as distinct forms of deception, we can better understand the many ways people deceive and what may make some of these forms worse than others.
3. Bullshitting
Sometimes people say things to pursue hidden goals. Those that philosopher Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023) calls bullshitters don’t care whether they utter truths or falsehoods because their goals, like sounding knowledgeable or reassuring, have nothing to do with truth.[9] These speakers may not lie, or even mislead, because a liar intends their lie to be false to work as intended, but bullshit may be true or false.
Imagine a politician giving a campaign speech to a group of potential voters; he may bullshit if he cares only that his words convince the audience to vote for him, not about whether he’s uttering truths or falsehoods.[10]
Bullshitting, like lying and misleading, is deceptive, but it differs in what it is deceptive about. Liars and misleaders try to deceive us primarily about the truth of what they say and imply, respectively. Bullshitters try to deceive us about their intentions in speaking, acting like they care about saying true things when they have some other goal.[11]
4. The Ethics of Deception
We care about lying, misleading, and bullshitting because these deceptions are usually—but probably not always—wrong. People typically trust us to be honest, and we violate that trust when we deceive them.[12] It is usually worse to violate that trust than to uphold it, and so most ethical theories condemn lying, bullshitting, and misleading in most cases. This may be because the deceiver harms or disrespects others, or because they use people as a mere means to their own ends, or because deceptions are unfair, or because deceivers are vicious rather than virtuous.[13]
But some forms of deception seem generally worse than others.[14] For instance, Frankfurt argues that bullshit is worse than lying because liars, unlike bullshitters, care about the truth enough to try to convince their audience of a believed falsehood. Because bullshitters don’t deeply care about the truth and subordinate it to other goals in ways that erode our care for the truth, Frankfurt thinks bullshit is especially wrong.
Lying, however, often seems worse than misleading. To spare a terrible chef’s feelings, I might tell him that his was the best chili I’ve had all month, which isn’t a lie since his was the only chili I’ve had all month. Lying may be worse than misleading here because the chef’s false belief that I like his chili comes not from my (literally true) claim but from the erroneous conclusion he drew from it. One could argue that the chef’s false belief is his fault, not mine, and so merely misleading the chef isn’t as bad as outright lying about liking his chili.[15]
But arguments like this blame the victim: I intentionally said “best chili” instead of “only chili” for the purpose of deceiving the chef. So it is unclear whether lying is worse than misleading, and, if so, why.[16]
5. Conclusion
Deception, in all of its forms, is widespread, and often profoundly problematic. Better understanding lies, misleadings, and bullshit can help us better recognize deception from others, and ourselves, and what may make it wrong.
Notes
[1] For the purposes of this article, “deception” is understood as an action intended to lead someone to believe something false. While the three targets of this article (lying, misleading, and bullshitting) to be three common forms of deception, it is possible that there are others that this article does not discuss, so this article shouldn’t be understood as offering a comprehensive account of all forms of deception.
[2] Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one famous example of a philosopher who argued that lying is always morally wrong: see Kantian Deontology: Immanuel Kant’s Ethics by Andrew Chapman. Some believe the wrongness of lying is so closely connected to the concept of lying that they think lying is wrong by definition or otherwise essentially or necessarily wrong. For a discussion of such definitions and some of their challenges, see Carson (2006), p. 288-290.
[3] This position that lies must be actually false to be lies is sometimes called “objectivism.” Objectivists believe that, for instance, someone who shares information they believe to be false but which is actually true haven’t really lied. Some philosophers disagree with examples that objectivism fails like those presented here and instead embrace objectivism; see Turri (2021) for empirical evidence that most people accept objectivism about lying: most people think that a lie must be a false claim.
[4] The position that lies have to be believed false is sometimes called “subjectivism,” and it has a long history (see, for one very old example, St. Augustine’s treatise “Lying”); however, not all philosophers accept it; see Viebahn (2024) for more on the distinction between subjectivism and its alternative, objectivism, as well as some arguments that favor subjectivism.
[5] To be more precise, many philosophers take this first condition—the liar says something they believe is false—to actually be the more specific claim that the liar asserts a claim that they know to be false to another. An assertion is a contribution to a conversation that justifies the other participant’s belief that the speaker accepts the contribution and that they intend to cause the other participant to accept the contribution as well. See Chisholm and Feehan (1977) and Berstler (2019) for more on assertion and the importance of assertion for understanding lying.
Note too that, although this definition of lying is taken to be the standard definition by many philosophers, some philosophers, such as Stokke (2013) and Krstić (2019), have argued we have good reason to reject it. In addition to the challenges to this definition mentioned in this article, these authors often draw on examples like white lies, irony, jokes, and hyperbole to show how the definition fails. Footnote 8 of Viebahn (2021) provides a helpful list of philosophers who’ve offered or disagreed with versions of definitions like the one proposed here.
Note that on this definition of lying, to know that someone has lied we have to know their intentions or goals in speaking. Since it can difficult to know other people’s intentions, and we might sometimes not know our own intentions, it might be difficult to know if someone has lied: see Mindreading: Understanding Others’ Thoughts and Feelings by Emma Otterski and Self-Knowledge: Knowing Your Own Mind by Benjamin Winokur.
[6] See chapter 6 of Saul (2024) for more on how a lie may be used to signal loyalty or commitment to someone. See Carson (2006) for further discussion of the student case and others like them. Such cases give us further reason to modify or even reject our requirement that liars must be trying to convince their audience of something they believe to be false with their lie.
[7] These cases are not the only ones that pose a problem for our definition of “lie.” Consider bald-faced lies, lies so blatant that no one would reasonably believe them. A child caught with his hand in the cookie jar might claim that he wasn’t reaching for a snack, or a politician caught in a contradiction might claim she never said what everyone just heard her say. Some philosophers have argued that bald-faced lies are lies, so not all liars aim to deceive their audience. Bald-faced liars can’t seriously expect their words to fool anyone, so they fail condition (2) of our definition. For more on bald-faced lies and the threat they pose to standard definitions of lying, see Sorenson (2007).
Alternatively, however, we could require that, in some cases, liars may just hope that their lies deceives some part of their audience, even if success is unlikely. And not all philosophers accept that bald-faced lies are really lies–see Kenyon and Saul (2022) for an argument that bald-faced lies are really a kind of bullshit, in a sense similar to Frankfurt’s (discussed in section 3).
[8] Often, misleading, unlike lying, involves conversational implicature (see Gricean Conversational Implicature: What We Say and What We Mean by Thomas Hodgson), where the meaning of an utterance goes beyond what is literally said. For instance, if my friend asks whether I like their new shirt and I reply “I love that color on you,” the conversational implicature is that I do like their shirt; however, this may be my attempt to mislead my friend into thinking I like their shirt when I really don’t by focusing on what I like about the shirt (its color) instead of what I hate (the cut, the fabric, the message written on it, etc.). And so I might mislead my friend into believing that I like their shirt via conversational implicature even though I haven’t lied.
Lies of omission mislead for similar reasons: when I fail to tell my father about crashing his car, there’s a conversational implicature to the things I have said that I’ve told him everything about my day that’s interesting and relevant to my father. This implicature, of course, is false, making my lie of omission a case of misleading similar to other cases like my previous “I love that color on you!” example. See Chapter 1 of Maitra and McGowan (2025) for more on conversational implicature and its relationship to lying and misleading. For reasons to think that some instances of speech that take advantage of conversational implicature are still lies and not instances of misleading, see Viebahn (2021).
Finally, note that “misleading,” as the term is typically used, isn’t perfectly parallel to “lying” because misleading doesn’t usually require that the misleader have a specific intention to deceive; in other words, we can mislead people by accident, like the person who reports the wrong time due to a broken watch but unlike the liar. What’s more, “misleading” is usually a “success” term, meaning that I have only misled someone if they actually believe what I’ve implicated; liars, however, are still liars even if their lie isn’t believed by their lie’s target. To establish symmetry between misleading and lying for the purposes of this article, what I call “misleading” may be more precisely called intentional attempts at merely misleading as opposed to lying as this is closer to lying than unintentional misleading and is more often viewed as wrong in ways similar to lying. See Chapter 1 of Maitra and McGowan (2025) for more on ways in which this kind of misleading and lying differ.
[9] He develops this concept in Frankfurt (2009). It is worth noting that the notion of bullshit discussed in this section is not the only kind of thing that philosophers call “bullshit.” For example, Cohen (2002) identifies bullshit as language that is “unclarifiably unclear”—that is, it’s language that is meaningless or ambiguous and can’t be made clearer without changing it into something unrecognizable. This is different from Frankfurt-style bullshit, which may be perfectly clear in its content if not its speaker’s intentions.
[10] Though the examples of bullshit (and deception more generally) presented in this article have been from ordinary daily life and of relatively minor moral significance, it’s worth noting that lying, misleading, and bullshitting may be used for nefarious purposes and lead to devastating consequences. A bullshitter might be, for instance, a demagogic politician who doesn’t care whether what he says about some threat to the country is true as long as the public is whipped up into a frenzy of fear and so votes for him. Oil and gas companies might fund studies that mislead the public about the reality of climate change in ways that discourage public action on the issue. And a world leader’s lie about the weapon capacities of another country could be used as a pretext for war. Deception often plays a central role in some of the most serious forms of wrongdoing, from global atrocities to personal affronts.
[11] Fallis and Stokke (2017) disagree with Frankfurt on this point and argue that the bullshitter is characterized not by their indifference towards the truth but their indifference towards the project of inquiry.
[12] For more on the importance of trust for coordinating with others and sharing beliefs, see Take My Word for It: On Testimony by Spencer Case and Moral Testimony by Annaleigh Curtis.
[13] On these explanations, see Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz, Kantian Deontology: Immanuel Kant’s Ethics by Andrew Chapman, John Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice” by Ben Davies, and Virtue Ethics by David Merry.
[14] Note, however, that some of these differences seem to lessen or even disappear when the consequences of the lying, bullshitting, or misleading are either serious enough or mild enough. For instance, imagine that you are cooking food for a friend who has a deathly peanut allergy. Intentionally misleading your guest into eating a peanut-containing dish by asking “Would I serve you something containing peanuts?” seems just as bad as telling them “This dish contains no peanuts.” See Berstler (2019) for further discussion of this point, as well as Pragmatic Encroachment: Do Our Practical Interests Affect What We Know? by Alexandra Lloyd for related discussion.
[15] MacIntyre (1995) articulates one version of this position. See Berstler (2019) for others.
[16] There are several alternative reasons to think that lying may be worse than other forms of misleading. One is that lies may be unfair and take advantage of others’ trust in ways that other forms of misleading, generally speaking, do not. There is a social norm, or rule, that people should say true things, and that others should believe the things that they say. This norm allows us to coordinate our actions with one another beneficially; for instance, if I shout a warning to you that a rock is about to fall on your head, you may have time to avoid disaster, but if I violate the truthfulness norm and warn about a falling rock when there isn’t one, I may scare you over nothing. Liars, then, benefit from the truthfulness of others while failing to extend the same truthfulness to their targets, which makes their behavior unfair. See Berstler (2019) for a more fully developed version of this argument, as well as some similar nearby arguments that she finds less persuasive. Another alternative would be to argue that, in lying, liars take on a commitment that misleaders avoid; namely, liars, by lying, take on a responsibility to defend their knowledge of their lie, and that responsibility is stronger than the commitment made by misleaders when they mislead. The moral difference between lying and misleading roughly corresponds to the difference in force between asserting and suggesting. See Viebahn (2021) for more on this view. Note that these two responses (Berstler’s and Viebahn’s) may be compatible: part of the reason why it may be worse to assert rather than suggest something we believe is false is because the former violates our norms about speaking the truth worse than the latter.
References
Augustine (1952). Lying. Treatises on Various Subjects (Fathers of the Church, Volume 16). Trans. M.S. Muldowney. Catholic University of America Press. 45-110.
Berstler, S. (2019). What’s the good of language? On the moral distinction between lying and misleading. Ethics, 130(1), 5-31.
Carson, T. (2006). The definition of lying. Nous 40(2), 284-306
Chisholm, R. and T. Feehan. (1977) The intent to deceive. The Journal of Philosophy 74(3). 143-159.
Cohen, G. A. (2002) Deeper into bullshit. Contours of agency: Essays on themes from Harry Frankfurt, 321-339.
Fallis, D. (2009). What is lying? The Journal of Philosophy 106(1), 29-56.
Fallis, D., & Stokke, A. (2017). Bullshitting, lying, and indifference toward truth. Ergo 4(10), 277-309.
Frankfurt, H. G. (2009) On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.
Kant, I. (1930) Lectures on Ethics. Trans. L. Infield. Methuen & Co, London.
Kenyon, T. and Saul, J. (2022). Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump. From Lying to Perjury: Linguistic and Legal Perspectives on Lies and Other Falsehoods, De Gruyter, 165-194.
Krstić, V. (2019). Can you lie without intending to deceive? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 100(2), 642-660.
Maitra, I., & McGowan, M. K. (2025) Words in Action: An Introduction to the Social Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1995). Truthfulness, lies, and moral philosophers: What can we learn from Mill and Kant?. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 16, 307-361.
Saul, J. M. (2024). Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sorensen, R. (2007). Bald‐faced lies! Lying without the intent to deceive. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 88(2), 251-264.
Stokke, A. (2013). Lying and asserting. The Journal of Philosophy, 110(1), 33-60.
Turri, J. (2021). Objective falsity is essential to lying: an argument from convergent evidence. Philosophical Studies 178, 2101-2109.
Viebahn, E. (2021). The lying-misleading distinction: a commitment-based approach. Journal of Philosophy, 118(6).
Viebahn, E. (2024). True lies and attempted lies. Inquiry, 69(7), 1-12.
Related Essays
Gricean Conversational Implicature: What We Say and What We Mean by Thomas Hodgson
Kantian Deontology: Immanuel Kant’s Ethics by Andrew Chapman
Mindreading: Understanding Others’ Thoughts and Feelings by Emma Otterski
Self-Knowledge: Knowing Your Own Mind by Benjamin Winokur
Take My Word for It: On Testimony by Spencer Case
Moral Testimony by Annaleigh Curtis
Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz
Virtue Ethics by David Merry
John Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice” by Ben Davies
Ignorance and Blame: Can Ignorance Excuse? by Daniel Miller
Frege’s Puzzle and the Meaning of Words by Graham Seth Moore
Pragmatic Encroachment: Do Our Practical Interests Affect What We Know? by Alexandra Lloyd
About the Author
Dan Peterson is a philosophy instructor at Morehouse College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and specializes in the philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, and formal epistemology. He has research and teaching interests in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of education, and ethics. He is also the co-founder of Mind Bubble, an educational nonprofit in Atlanta that provides local students with free tutoring and educational workshops. DanielJamesPeterson.com
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