Lies and back-door lies Rae Langton Thinkers and liars Seana Shiffrin offers a formidable ‘thinker-based’ argument for the value of free speech, whose controversial corollary is that free speech does not protect a right to lie. Shiffrin’s argument has attracted attention. I once witnessed scandalized responses at Harvard Law School, which Shiffrin answered with grace and force. My attention here will be more constructive. I shall run with Shiffrin’s argument, and explore some implications further afield. Her argument bears on a political culture that, since the time of her writing, has brought ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ to our dictionaries. And it bears on speech acts that are not lies—not, at least, by her lights. 1 Because speech is special, in a good way, lies are special, in a bad way, she argues. If her argument holds, it holds for more than lies: what is bad about lies, on the grounds she cites, may not be special to lies. Shiffrin’s argument extends to other speech that damages our thinker-based interests (Section 2). It extends, in particular, to ‘back- door lies’, as we may call them, achieved by implicit means (Section 3). 2 1 Seana Shiffrin, Speech Matters (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014). Her argument for a ‘thinker-based’ approach is chiefly in Chapter 3, implications for free speech developed in Chapter 4. 2 ‘Back-door lies’ are a theme of Rae Langton ‘Blocking as Counter-speech’, forthcoming in New Work on Speech Acts (Oxford University Press 2018), where the hand-waving metaphor is defended, and its relation to presupposition, implicature and not-at-issue content discussed in more detail. It is worth noting here that, as I am using it, the phrase ‘back-door lies’ does not simply imply that a back-door lie is a lie. As will become clear, determining whether ‘back door lies’ are always, or usually, lies is a substantial matter on which Shiffrin and I disagree.