The release of WikiLeaks documents triggered a debate between two perspectives on truth and transparency. One side wanted to know what was happening. More importantly, they wanted the truth. This view was opposed by another insisting that secrets were necessary – transparency and truth would be destructive in the wrong hands – and that we did not need to know everything. After all, they reasoned, a little deception can be a good thing! And in this, there was a kernel of truth: we often find it comforting to forgo truth in order to find safety in our ignorance or in defense of threats to our worldview. Much of modern politics seems to rely on deception, intentional or not, intended to avoid confronting the supposed truths that sustain our world. The distinction between withholding and putting forward false information is blurred. It is commonplace to assume that we do not want to be deceived, but the WikiLeaks debate demonstrated plainly that the desire to end deception and find truth is hardly as clear – and desired – as it might seem. «We cannot imagine social intercourse without opacity» writes Robert C. Solomon in his chapter «Self, Deception, and Self-Deception in Philosophy,» which serves to introduce many of the areas of contention throughout the book (p. 21). Here The Philosophy of Deception, a highly diverse and strong collection of many of the leading thinkers on the philosophy of lying and deceit, intervenes. As Clancy Martin explains in the introduction, «Lies and self-deceptions seem to exist along a continuum,» from the direct lie that is not self-deceived – We did not do this (even though we know we did) – to the other extreme, where one is entirely self-deceived – That is not why we’re doing this (even though it is) – «and in the middle the many cases where the lies we tell others are inseparably mixed up with the lies we tell ourselves» (p. 3). Philosophy of Deception engages this idea thoroughly, and from varied perspectives: Mark A.

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书评

维基解密文件的发布引发了关于真相和透明度的两种观点之间的争论。一方面想知道发生了什么。更重要的是，他们想要真相。这种观点遭到另一人的反对，他们坚持认为秘密是必要的——透明度和真相在坏人之手会造成破坏——而且我们不需要知道一切。毕竟，他们推理，有点欺骗可以是一件好事！在这里，有一个真理的核心：我们经常发现为了在我们的无知中找到安全或为我们的世界观面临的威胁辩护而放弃真理是令人欣慰的。现代政治的大部分似乎都依赖于有意或无意的欺骗，旨在避免面对维持我们世界的假设真相。隐瞒和提供虚假信息之间的区别是模糊的。假设我们不想被欺骗是司空见惯的，但维基解密的辩论清楚地表明，结束欺骗和寻找真相的愿望并不像看起来那么明确和渴望。罗伯特·C·所罗门（Robert C. Solomon）在《哲学中的自我、欺骗和自欺欺人》一章中写道，“我们无法想象没有不透明的社会交往”，该章介绍了整本书中的许多争论领域（第 21 页）。在这里，《欺骗哲学》（The Philosophy of Deception）是许多关于谎言和欺骗哲学的主要思想家的高度多样化和强大的集合，进行了干预。正如克兰西·马丁在引言中解释的那样，“谎言和自欺欺人似乎存在于一个连续统一体中”，从不是自欺欺人的直接谎言——我们没有这样做（尽管我们知道我们这样做了）——到另一个极端，一个人完全是自欺欺人的——这不是我们这样做的原因（即使是这样）——“在中间，我们告诉别人的谎言与我们告诉自己的谎言密不可分地混在一起”（第 3 页）。欺骗哲学从不同的角度彻底地阐述了这个想法：Mark A.