“It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.”
John Locke (1690). Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter X, 34.
The word ‘deception’ comes loaded with negative baggage: deception is unethical, it’s immoral, it’s bad, it’s wrong, it’s unfair, and it causes harm to its ‘victims’. Deception is vilified in most settings, including religion, relationships, work, and sport. Its practice is popularly associated with conmen, criminals, shady salespeople and a fair few politicians.
Cultural archetypes about deception are ancient and underpin deeply many societies’ values regarding right and wrong behaviour. Such archetypes include the biblical account of Adam, Eve and the apple, and Dante’s description of Hell in his The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s work, the eighth, and penultimate circle of Hell, ‘Fraud’, is reserved for Fraudsters. Counterfeiters, hypocrites, grafters (conmen), seducers, and sorcerers (magicians) are viewed as the very vilest of sinners and are consigned to the deepest, innermost, and very worst circle in all of Hell – the ninth circle, ‘Treachery’.
Deception is a transactional relationship in which a deceiver gains advantage from the resultant behaviour of their target. Amongst a range of positions arguing that deception is unethical, one of the strongest is that deceptive transactions occur without the target’s consent. Such consent may either be declared explicitly by the target or is implied by the context in which the transaction takes place. For example, audience members paying to watch a magic show are considered to have consented implicitly to being deceived by the magician – although this is an assumption that is itself fraught with complexity and subjectivity.
Importantly, the absence of consent does not, in and of itself, render a transaction unethical. Acting upon individuals or groups without their consent may be considered ethical if such actions ultimately benefit the ‘greater good’ (ad maius bonum, and pro bono publico). In these cases, the target themselves, others they interact with, or society more broadly benefits from the outcome of the deception.
Examples abound of people being influenced, coerced or acted upon without their consent with the intent that such actions contribute to the greater good. For example, children are, without their consent (frequently withdrawing it) made to eat their greens. Criminals are, without consent, sent to jail to protect society, to teach them a lesson, and to rehabilitate them. And people’s journeys to work are, without their consent, routinely disrupted by roadworks so that more parts of the country benefit from fibre broadband.
Similarly, there are countless examples of benevolent applications of deception. Critically, the very same strategies that underpin malevolent applications can be employed benevolently to do good, bringing about a significant benefit to the target and or to others upon whom the target has an impact.
Some examples of ethical deception include:
- An oncologist deceiving a patient’s cancer cells into binding with decoy molecules that misdirect and lessen the spread of the disease.
- An endocrinologist who treats a patient’s obesity with a course of Semaglutide injections, that hijacks the body’s appetite levels by mimicking a hormone released after eating a filling meal.
- A neurologist administering a placebo to lessen dramatically the impact of Parkinson’s disease on a patient’s motor control functions.
- People with a missing limb using a prosthetic to increase functionality and reduce stigmatisation.
- Use of hormones to deceive female mosquitos into believing that they have already mated, thereby disrupting their reproductive cycle and reducing the spread of malaria (mosquitos only mate once, and the parasite Plasmodium Falciparum is only spread by females that bite to obtain blood to nurture their eggs).
- Using odours to overload, desensitize and disrupt mosquitos’ carbon dioxide detection machinery, thereby masking human breath and preventing the insects from detecting and infecting human hosts.
- Simulated wooden furniture that is made from recycled plastic to increase durability, prolong usage, and reduce cost.
- Warfighters fooling their enemy into surrendering without the need for bloodshed.
- An undercover police unit infiltrating and disrupting a people trafficking and modern slavery operation.
- Cybersecurity specialists tricking a hacker into disclosing their real identity, leading to an arrest and the protection of critical information (such as individuals’ personal health records).
- Increases in self-confidence and self-esteem resulting from wearing concealer, makeup, lipstick, high heels, slimming clothing, accentuated clothing, perfume, etc.
- Bluffing in poker, feints in fencing, sacrifices in chess, dummy runners in rugby, dummy free kickers in football (soccer), dummy plays in American football, disguised drop-shots in tennis, badminton and squash, cycling coaches giving their cyclists modified GPS watches that show artificially low power output, pace and mileage, to promote surreptitiously overtraining and increased performance, etc.
- A writer crafting a novel with a huge twist at its climax.
- A filmmaker using special effects to create amazing scenery which does not, and can not exist for real.
- An audio engineer who re-records an actor’s dialogue for added clarity months after shooting has wrapped then dubs this onto the movie soundtrack.
- Parents spinning their children tales about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.
- The white lie all of us regularly tell to make somebody feel good.
This is only a small set of examples. Cases of pro-social deception exist everywhere one looks, yet we rarely notice, let alone consider these positive applications of deception.
Deception is value-neutral. Instead of responding with a knee-jerk negative reaction to the mere presence of deception, careful ethical scrutiny should instead consider:
- the intent behind the deception,
- the justification for its use (necessity, legality, proportionality, etc),
- how it was planned,
- how it was executed,
- the effects it achieved (positive and or negative), and
- the resultant outcome (positive or negative).
Deception is like a house brick. You can use it to build somebody a house, or you can use it to hit them over the head. The house brick itself has no intrinsic ethical value. It is how the brick is used and how deception is used that both necessitate ethical inquiry.
Reginald Scott alluded well to the dual potential inherent in deception in the title of Book 13, Chapter 12 of his 1584 work, The Discoverie of Witchcraft:
“Of illusions, confederacies, and legierdemaine, and how they maybe well or ill used.” (Original Elizabethan grammar and spelling).
Reginald Scott (1584). The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Booke 13, The Twelfe Chapter, p.307