Are Convenient Fictions Harmful to Your Health?

Abstract

In the Republic, Socrates observes that the rulers of the Ideal State may be called upon to administer large dose of the medicine of deception for the good of their subjects. This willingness to prescribe wholesale duplicity has been shared by distinguished leaders and teachers from many other times and cultures. Then there are some Buddhists who see the doctrines of karma, reincarnation, heavens, and hells as merely expedient devices the use of which is justified by the results, and this policy is defended in the Lotus Sutra. A third expedient device is employed by those who appeal to intrinsic values and binding moral obligations but do not accept the objectivist implications of the moral language they use and teach. John Mackie, after arguing that there are no objective moral obligations or intrinsic values, invites us to consider what sort of morality we need to invent, and Simon Blackburn has recently defended quasi-realism, the view that while there are no objective moral properties, we should speak as if there are. He says that without a belief in objective morality, people might do terrible things. In this essay, I will concentrate neither on lying as such, nor on the larger topic of deception, but rather on the deliberate and widespread promulgation of false beliefs by those who know that they are false.' We have, without a doubt, been served countless convenient fictions by both cynical and well-meaning deceivers, but what is special about Plato, the Buddhist authors of the Lotus Sutra, and projectivists like Mackie and Blackburn is that they are explicit about the need to employ their preferred convenient fictions.