Mobilizing Falsehoods

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION

In July 1852, on the occasion of the American Independence Day celebration, the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered a blistering attack on his contemporaries' continued toleration of slavery. In this celebrated speech, Douglass famously accused his contemporaries of failing to honor the ideals championed by the American “Founders”:

The signers of the Declaration of Independence […] were great men […] great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. […] They were statesmen, patriots and heroes […] With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty, and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them! [But] [m]y business, if I have any here today, is with the present […] I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! […] America is false to the past […]1

Central to Douglass's denunciation, here, is the contrast between Americans' “glorious” past and their “degenerate” present. What is striking about this contrast, moreover, is that it relies on a clearly distorted and idealized picture of the past. It is evidently false that the Founders were paragons of virtue, for whom “justice, liberty, and humanity were ‘final’; not slavery and oppression.” Indeed, the vast majority of them were—as Douglass well knew—slaveholders. Yet, Douglass's idealization serves a crucial rhetorical function. It helps construct a moral gulf between his contemporaries, on the one hand, and the Founders they revere, on the other. And, by doing so, it helps shame his contemporaries into taking action against slavery.2

Douglass's speech exemplifies an important rhetorical practice. Public speakers often use their speech to mobilize their audience—in other words, to motivate their audience to take action, collectively, in support of a political cause. Yet, in non-ideal circumstances, successfully mobilizing a group can be extremely difficult. This might be, for instance, because taking action is costly for potential participants (e.g., if protestors would face arrest or violent retaliation); because the odds of achieving political change are very low (e.g., if powerful decision-makers have insulated themselves from pressure); or simply because the mobilizer's audience is suffering from weakness of will. To overcome such obstacles to motivating people, mobilizers often resort to deploying falsehoods: that is, they put forward propositions that misrepresent reality.

Now, in practice, mobilizers frequently deploy falsehoods accidentally: they intend to say something true, but are mistaken, and therefore say something false instead. For instance, mobilizers who promulgate false conspiracy theories to motivate their audience (e.g., by claiming that climate change is a hoax) often believe these theories.3 Yet, my focus will be on intentional falsehoods, where the speaker believes that the false proposition they are putting forward misrepresents reality. Thus, in the Douglass case, I am assuming, as seems very likely,4 that Douglass believed that his declaration misrepresented the Founders' record on slavery. While accidental falsehoods can be morally problematic—particularly in situations where the speaker is culpable for their mistake—I consider intentional falsehoods to be prima facie more troubling, and therefore more difficult to defend, for reasons outlined in Section II.5

Note, furthermore, that mobilizing falsehoods can be communicated directly (e.g., by being stated or asserted) but also more indirectly (e.g., by means of conversational implicature). The defense of mobilizing falsehoods developed below is in principle meant to apply to both.6 In practice, however, most of the cases I will examine involve falsehoods that are asserted or stated, which many consider to be more morally problematic than falsehoods that are merely implied.7

The practice of deploying intentional mobilizing falsehoods—that is, of deliberately asserting or implying falsehoods to mobilize political action—is a common feature of real-world public discourse. For one thing, such falsehoods are widespread in the context of national narratives. As Douglass's speech illustrates, national stories are often rife with misrepresentations of past events and historical figures.8 For example, by intentionally idealizing prominent national figures and characterizing them as exemplars of justice, speakers can tap into the motivational reservoir constituted by feelings of national belonging and direct it toward just causes.9

But the use of mobilizing falsehoods extends far beyond the case of national narratives. Indeed, public speakers often mobilize groups of people by intentionally disseminating falsehoods that are unrelated to national events and heroes. For instance, because achieving political change can be extremely difficult, social movement leaders who wish to mobilize their movement sometimes need to misrepresent the political situation that they currently face.10 This might involve, say, knowingly downplaying the risks associated with political action (“We have nothing to lose.”); or knowingly exaggerating the odds of success associated with a given political cause (“If we pull together, we are guaranteed to succeed.”).

So mobilizing falsehoods are pervasive in real-world public discourse. And, as will be shown, they can provide powerful resources for mobilizing action in non-ideal circumstances. Yet the practice of deploying such falsehoods is regarded by many with suspicion. In his influential exploration of democratic leadership, for example, Eric Beerbohm rejects the idea of intentionally using false or misleading assertions to mobilize a group. Likewise, Arash Abizadeh severely criticizes the deployment of historical claims that deliberately misrepresent a nation's past, even if these claims help motivate unified political action.11

I wish to bracket two immediate concerns that risk confounding the assessment of mobilizing falsehoods. The first relates to the justice of the cause being pursued. Encouraging people to promote injustices seems clearly problematic. Hence, it seems intuitively wrong to use falsehoods as a way of mobilizing support for unjust causes (e.g., by embellishing a nation's imperialist past to mobilize support for colonialism; or by falsely alleging, as Donald Trump's “big lie” has done, that an election is fraudulent to mobilize an anti-democratic coup). Since the wrongness of such pronouncements seems relatively uncontroversial, I wish to focus instead on the practice, exemplified by Douglass's Fourth of July speech, of knowingly deploying falsehoods to mobilize action in support of a just cause.

The second concern relates to vilification. A speaker might motivate their audience to pursue a just political cause by falsely representing opponents of that cause as subhuman or ineradicably evil. Lawyers and philosophers disagree about whether such hateful utterances should be legally restricted. But they nonetheless typically agree that they are morally undesirable.12 My focus will therefore be on the more contested case, where speakers deploy falsehoods that mobilize action without vilifying opponents.

Is it ever permissible to intentionally deploy (non-vilifying) falsehoods in order to mobilize action that serves a just cause?13 Even when qualified in this way, the use of mobilizing falsehoods remains deeply controversial, for reasons to be introduced shortly. But I will argue that such falsehoods can be permissible in a meaningful set of cases—including, most controversially, in cases where they constitute deception. Opposition to mobilizing falsehoods notably tends to overlook the diversity of ways in which falsehoods can mobilize action, as well as their potential integration within a broader system of democratic contestation. My purpose, in delivering this argument, is therefore threefold. It is, first, to enhance our understanding of the diverse ways in which mobilizing falsehoods operate; second, to defend the moral permissibility of deploying some of these falsehoods in a democratic society; and, third, to identify the conditions in which, in such a society, it is permissible to deploy these falsehoods.

My argument will proceed as follows. Section II outlines the central challenge to mobilizing falsehoods: namely, that they are deceptive, which in turn makes them problematic for reasons relating to both autonomy and democracy. I then develop two complementary responses to this challenge. Second III demonstrates that some falsehoods, which I refer to as “transparent” falsehoods, can mobilize without purporting to be true—and so, without deceiving. On its own, however, this first response does not go far enough, not least because it leaves undefended many highly potent mobilizing falsehoods. Section IV therefore goes on to argue that some mobilizing falsehoods are justified despite being deceptive, and, by extension, that transparency is not a necessary condition of their permissibility.