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Books
A History of Lying by Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel
Stuart Hannabuss looks for truths in a book on lies.
Many of us would prob ably say that lying is a matter of moral choice – to tell the truth or not. We might go on to qualify this by saying that the morality of it depends on context – public or private, perhaps to protect or maintain a valued relationship – and intention – is it inadvertent or deliberate? There are weasel words and omissions, lies and statistics and white lies and false analogies. Then there are things we wrongly believe are true but accept in ignorance, or which rest on mistakes or on inadequate evidence. But mention lying and you trigger long-standing morally loaded arguments about right and wrong, good and bad, and ‘truth-telling and deceiving in ordinary life’ (which is the title of a useful study by David Nyberg, worth reading alongside books by Sissela Bok and Harry Frankfurt). In A History of Lying (2022), Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel takes us in a different direction, which he calls ‘non-moral’.
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