Lies and Liberal Democracy David Simpson Igor Primorac (ed.), Politika i moral [Politics and Morality, in Croatian], Zagreb: KruZak, 2011 1. Introduction Lying is difficult to account for as a moral phenomenon because our intuitions regarding it have an awkward tension. Almost everyone thinks that lying is wrong; but almost everyone thinks that it is sometimes justified, and perhaps on occasion obligatory; yet, even when lying is justified or obligatory, it remains wrong. Perhaps lying, as a moral phenomenon, shares features with killing. My second starting point is the observation that the governments of liberal democracies are routinely mendacious. They lie, make insincere promises, dissemble, misrepresent, allow falsehood to be expressed behind barriers of plausible deniability, and so on. Furthermore, a significant proportion of this behaviour is directed towards the governmentsʼ own citizens. My purpose here is twofold: to offer an account of the ethics of lying and intentional deception that accounts for the moral phenomenology; and to consider political lying in the light of that account. I will consider what justifications might be available in defence of political lies, and suggest that while they are hard to come by we ought to step back from an outright condemnation of political lies. 2. Deception and Lying The general category of act we are considering is intentional deception, an act carried out with the intent to bring it about that some person or persons believe as true what the deceiver takes to be false. Of course, lying is a special sub-category of intentional deception, and this has something to do with the role of language in a lie, but for the most part in this discussion I wonʼt emphasise the distinction, for two