Kant’s Modal Asymmetry between Truth-Telling and Lying Revisited

Abstract

The modal asymmetry between truth-telling and lying refers to the impossibility of a world in which everyone lies, while on the contrary, a world in which everyone tells the truth is possible. This ethical issue is relevant to modern concerns about epistemic security, or the safety of knowledge. The breakdown of epistemic security leads to the erosion of trust and, hence, to an ‘impossible’ world since a willingness to believe in others is essential for the functioning of society. Here, we examine the threat of disinformation to epistemic security using an individual-based model in which individuals are both senders and receivers of signals and are characterized by their credulity and deceptiveness, which are targets of natural selection. The possible worlds are those favored by natural selection. Lies that significantly harm believers lead to the Kantian scenario: trust is completely eroded and the winners of the evolutionary race are incredulous. However, if the lies are not too harmful, our game evolutionary model predicts a world in which the individuals are both credulous and mildly untruthful. These two possible worlds are separated by a discontinuous phase transition in the limit of infinite population size.