If we wonder why notions of truth and falsehood have become more vague, more relative, more flexible, our legal system is an important influence to consider. For those who are not familiar with this system, taking part in a legal proceeding can be ethically breathtaking. At the heart of this shock is the realization that even though establishing truth and exposing lies is the stated goal, it is not only one. Nor are “truth” and “lies” understood to mean in court what they do on the street. From a legal standpoint, any lie that isn’t told under oath is no lie at all. Legally speaking, truth is what evidence and testimony corroborate. If enough evidence and witnesses can prove that water is dry and dust wet, then legally speaking, dust is wet and water dry.
For all practical purposes, truth inside a courtroom consists of whatever a judge or jury decides is true. Whether legally established truths are factually accurate is beside the point. As any lawyer will tell you, legal truths do not always correspond to actual truths. There is even a concept in American jurisprudence called “legal fiction,” which, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, refers to “an assumption that something is true even though it may be untrue.” In their own way, lawyers are no less indifferent than therapists to literal truth. Bill Clinton once observed that in their conflicting testimony before the Senate, neither Anita Hill nor Clarence Thomas was a liar; each simply told the truth as he or she saw it. What a layperson might consider a lie, said Clinton, a lawyer such as he might see as simply an “alternative version of reality.” Clinton’s two terms as president were like an eight-year seminar in the difference between truthfulness as most people understand that term and truthfulness as a legal concept. The culmination was Clinton’s assertion that his testimony denying he’d harassed Paula Jones was “legally accurate.”
It is this type of comment that makes so many nonlawyers think that lawyers inhabit their own ethical universe. As one character in Linda Bames’s novel Big Dig says of another, “I wasn’t sure about his honesty, but what the hell, he was a lawyer so it didn’t count.” This is a bum rap. It’s not as though lawyers are born with defective honesty genes. Rather, they take part in a system of law that virtually requires its participants to work at ethical cross-purposes. On the one hand, they are expected to engage in a search for truth, and not suborn perjury. At the same time, they must vigorously advocate the case of clients even when this means manipulating facts, if not actually condoning lies. That forces lawyers to operate on a two-tier ethical system (assuming they are personally honest): one of their own, and a second on behalf of clients.
**
Few contemporary lawyers would disagree. A bedrock principle of legal counsel is that their job is to represent clients, not to judge them. Judgment is the job of the court.
**
In a unique critique of the adversarial system of justice, Frankel wrote that it was a rare trial in which anyone involved wanted the whole truth to be revealed. What’s worse, Frankel added, “many of the rules and devices of adversary litigation as we conduct it are not geared for, but are often aptly suited to defeat, the development of the truth … . The process often achieves truth only as a convenience, a byproduct, or an accidental approximation.”
**
A propensity to dissemble characterizes politicians left, right, and center. This is more a personality trait than a political tendency. Former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey thought the real source of political artifice was a craving to be liked. That and a hunger for attention. An uncommonly high proportion of narcissists can be found among those who run for office. (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter once said her father wanted to be the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.) Indifference to truthfulness is a known narcissistic trait.
To politicians, most of their falsehoods are mere petty fibbery, lies of exuberance so insignificant that they hardly even qualify as lies. “Rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith,” Al Gore called them. It’s been suggested that Gore’s well-known tendency to take liberties with facts was a result of growing up in a political family (his father was a longtime senator from Tennessee), where stretching the truth was not considered any great sin. Among themselves, politicians take a certain philosophical approach to matters of honesty. In their own minds this doesn’t mean they lack this trait, simply that they define it differently than their average constituent does (alt.ethics again). By this ledger-book standard, if you tell the truth more often than not and are an upright sort of person, you’re honest.
**
When politicians double as celebrities we care less about their moral standards than their glamour quotient. A good head of hair can attract more votes than a sound set of ethics. (Quick: Who was the last bald president?) Winning smiles can impress us more than the truthfulness of words that emerge from those smiles. It is well known to those who study deception that the way we judge lies depends on who told them and how we feel about that person. In this sliding scale of judgment, the lies of liars we like are understandable. Those of liars we don’t like are contemptible.
