What if everyone lied under oath

With that request now seeming all but guaranteed , CNBC broke down the consequences of lying to Congress in five questions. A: Glad you asked. If you are testifying in front of Congress sometime soon, and are wondering how far you can bend the truth, there are a two key statutes governing perjury you need to be aware of: U. Code sections and of Title Section covers general perjury, and stipulates that anyone who "willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true" is guilty of perjury and shall be fined or imprisoned up to five years, or both.

Section covers false statements more generally, without requiring an oath. A more contemporary way of making this Kantian point would be to say that when it is a question of the wrongness of torture, it does not matter whether the person tortured is a terrorist or a torturer. Torture is simply wrong. We must not do it, no matter who the victim is. Or as the slogan has it: "It's not about who they are, it's about who we are.

Kant's claim about lying to the murderer at the door on the assumption that the falsehood is a lying declaration is analogous to this position about torturing. Political lying. As I have mentioned, the issue that appears to have really concerned both Kant and Constant is the duty of politicians and statesmen to be truthful in their official declarations.

Here we surely need no "trolley problems;" there is no shortage of crying examples all around us in real life.

Stephen Holmes , persuasively describes Constant's position in the dispute with Kant as the outcome of his experiences during the French Revolution, where the line separating police officials from murderers was not necessarily well-defined, and where declining to lie even, we may suppose, in a declaration to a policeman or in solemn declarations in a political context might easily result in you, or your friends, being sent to the guillotine.

Under those circumstances, Constant's position is certainly understandable. Looking at the dispute from this angle, Kant might be faulted for failing to appreciate the extreme conditions that motivated it. Kant's contrary view, however, belongs to his insistence in Perpetual Peace that for rulers and statesmen, political expediency must always be subordinated to principles of right, and that high office and political power -and the need to confront the kinds of decisions that go with the possession of such extraordinary power- earn no one an exemption from these principles.

Maxims involving deception, moreover -denying the wrongs you have done, for example, or concealing your true aims and policies from the public- are prominent in that discussion EF , Kant's position on these issues seems to me clearly correct 2. I find the dispute between Kant and Constant, considered in historical context, to be one in which each of the parties is making a valid point, but as I see it about quite different issues, though issues that can interact in real life.

To the extent that this is the case, both positions are deserving of respect, and the disputants are to some extent talking past each other. To the extent that they are not, the dispute is a troubling one, about which a sensible person should experience a good deal of unresolved conflict.

More recent real life examples of lying declarations by political leaders and government officials leave me feeling far less ambivalent. Outrageously wrong political lying has played a decisive role in the political life of the U. Lyndon Johnson obtained the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from the Senate with only two dissenting votes by straightforwardly lying about what had happened there. The Pentagon Papers disclosed a systematic pattern of official lying to the public about the reasons for the Vietnam war, war policies and the facts on the ground in Vietnam.

Gordon Liddy -convicted and imprisoned as a Watergate conspirator but now the popular host of a right-wing radio talk show- has repeatedly said that Richard Nixon and his associates were entirely justified in lying under oath to the U. Congress during the Watergate cover up. Oliver North -another popular figure in the far right media that now enjoy a near monopoly on the dissemination of public information in this country- has insisted it was right for him to lie to the Congress about covert sales of arms to Iran to finance also covertly and illegally the Contras in Nicaragua.

Bill Clinton's lies about his personal misconduct, since they involved no wrongful exercise of governmental power in the public realm, were not impeachable offenses, but they were clearly wrong. What should perhaps be uppermost in our minds is the outrageous political manipulation and falsification of intelligence leading up to the U.

This involved systematically untruthful declarations to the public by many officials of both governments, including the U. Further, we should know how to judge these same officials when they offer the excuse that they were misinformed by their intelligence sources. In light of the fact that they not only picked and chose among those sources but even manipulated the gathering of intelligence with a view to rationalizing the policies they had already decided upon, we should say that this is nothing but a further lie compounding the wrongs they have committed.

Reflection on recent history should make us more sympathetic with the position Kant takes in the right to lie essay. Rules and exceptions in philosophy and real life. Philosophers are always looking for counterexamples to general theses, and this makes them look hard for exceptions to every rule of right or morality that might be proposed.

For in moral philosophy it is an important truth in that due to the great complexities of human life, no moral rule simple enough to be practically useful can be framed so delicately as to be free of exceptions. But alongside this truth, philosophers should also appreciate another truth, which was always vividly before Kant's mind, and I think explains some of the things he says about lying as well as other subjects.

The following is a true empirical generalization about people's behavior in real life: People have a powerful tendency to use the fact that there are exceptions to moral rules in order to rationalize making exceptions when they should not. For this reason, the speech act of asserting truly that there are exceptions to rules is more often than not used to justify wrongdoing, while the speech act of asserting falsely that there are none is most often a rhetorical attempt probably unsuccessful to prevent wrongdoing.

Sometimes, on the contrary, the opposition is between inflexible moral prejudice and an open-minded reasonableness that is trying to take circumstances into account. Philosophers prefer to imagine the latter situation, since it flatters them by making their subtle reasonings a force for good rather than for evil.

But if we take human beings as they are, we must admit this is not the typical case. If we take proper account of this true generalization, it tends to justify those moralists who rhetorically exaggerate the strictness of important moral rules, and to cast doubt on the wisdom, and even the moral integrity, of philosophers who derive conceptual titillation from devising counterexamples to them and treat such counterexamples as reasons for relaxing strictness of the rules. Kant shows himself to belong to the former class of moralists, for example, when he denies we should teach children that there can be "necessary lies," since he says "they would soon take the smallest excuse for a necessity, and often allow themselves to tell lies" VP In this respect, people in power tend to be far worse than even the naughtiest of children.

When they argue for exceptions to important rules restricting their conduct - using murderer-at-the-door arguments to justify lying, or ticking-bomb arguments to justify torture, or weapons of mass destruction in the wrong hands to justify preventive war - then you can be certain that they will lie to your face when there is no murderer at the door, use torture on prisoners when there is no ticking bomb, and start wars of aggression when there are no weapons of mass destruction.

Constant claimed that Kant's position would make political life impossible. The charge seems exaggerated, but the decisive Kantian rejoinder, which is surely no exaggeration, is that the policy of politicians to permit themselves lying declarations for supposedly worthy ends is precisely what does make possible much of what is utterly intolerable in our actual political life.

However, I do not think the claims I am making here depend on which side of the dispute we take, as long as we are agreed on the undeniable fact that duties of right Recht and duties of ethics Ethik belong to two different spheres within Kant's entire theory of morals Sitten. For example, Carl Schmitt holds that the political has its "own criteria" which are distinct from those that can be traced back to moral concepts of good and evil.

When Kant speaks of "morality" in relation to politicians, as he does in Perpetual Peace, the standards he is using are never those of private ethics but always of public right. If Schmitt's claim is that politicians or statesmen are bound not by the criteria of private morality, but by standards appropriate to the political realm, then Kant agrees.

Kant thinks they are bound by the standards appropriate to their position as exercisers of public coercive force, which must be regulated by laws of right. These standards are looser than private ethical standards, since they relate to a system of laws that are in general coercively enforceable - and this is looser than the system of ethical laws through which each of us should inwardly regulate our private behavior.

As I have already mentioned, however, not all standards of right are coercively enforceable, and Kant is famous or infamous for holding that subjects have rights against heads of state, and heads of state have duties of right, that no one is in a position to enforce coercively as by violent revolution, which might be the only conceivable means for enforcing them. So Kant's position, while no doubt different from Schmitt's, is not as different from it or as vulnerable to criticism as people like Schmitt often think.

The problem is that for many politicians and the "realist" theorists who enjoy identifying with those who exercise great power over their fellow human beings , any constraint on the use of that power based on mere principle rather than arising from external constraints or political self-interest feels like an annoying incursion on their prerogatives according to "inappropriate" standards.

Constant, H. Des reactions politiques. France, Paris: Pauvert. Compliance, Complicity, and the Nature of Noni-deal Conditions. In, The Journal of Philosophy, 7 , All the contents of this journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

According to the agreement, after the interview with the panel, "Patten deleted documents pertinent to his relationships with the above-described foreign principals. Patten has not been sentenced for not registering as a foreign agent and had agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors.

Clemens, a seven-time winner of the Cy Young Award as a Major League Baseball pitcher for teams such as the New York Yankees and Red Sox, was indicted by a federal grand jury in for making false statements and perjury during his testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, when he claimed that he never used performance-enhancing drugs such as human growth hormone or steroids.

In , an initial trial involving Clemens ended in a mistrial. The following year, he was acquitted of all charges. Haldeman was sentenced to a maximum of 8 years in prison, which was later reduced to one to four years. If you answer strategically, then there is a good chance that you can avoid perjury without hurting your case.

Even a small lie can hurt your case. If you feel the urge to lie, then stop yourself. Then, compose yourself and tell the truth. Although you might not realize it, you can be guilty of perjury for signing a false document. If you know that a statement or document is untrue, do not sign it. Signing a false document is the same as lying under oath. Sometimes, a lawyer might ask you a question that you do not understand. Often, this is a technique to get you to say something that you regret.

The question might be a trick that could hurt your case. Instead of trying to answer it, ask for the lawyer to repeat the question. If you have a lawyer, then he will help you prepare for your time on the witness stand. During the preparations, take everything seriously. If you need to study notes on your own time, then do it. There is a strategic way that you can answer questions.