A Case Against Santa Claus
In this post, I offer a case for thinking that children should not be deceived into believing that Santa Claus exists. It will be necessary to first consider briefly the ethics of lying, in general. As I see it, there are strong non-consequentialist and consequentialist reasons for supposing that lying there is always a very strong moral reason not to lie, such that, probably, lying is usually wrong.
1. A Kantian Perspective
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is well-known for holding that lying (which I understand as the act of asserting a proposition one believes to be false, with the intention of deceiving) is always impermissible.1 To lie, Kant believes, is to endorse (implicitly) the universalization of something like the maxim
(L) I will lie, when doing so will help me to attain some desired end.
In terms of the Universal Law Formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, (L) cannot be universalized consistently because to imagine its universalization would be to imagine the annihilation of the very convention of truthful communication, upon which finite, limited creatures like ourselves depend (given that we must, in order to survive and flourish, be able to cooperate with one another).
In terms of the Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, lying is impermissible because to lie to another person is to treat that person as a mere means to one’s own selfish ends, rather than as an autonomous agent worthy of moral respect. If I tell you a lie, then I treat you as a mere object, rather than as a fellow moral agent.
Kant’s case against lying, as he conceived it, is surely too strong: it seems that it can be permissible (even obligatory) to lie, if the moral stakes are sufficiently high. For example, it would be necessary to lie to an inquisitive murderer at the door, if one were harboring his would-be victim inside (though it would be necessary to craft the lie carefully, so as to avoid inadvertently endangering other innocents; lying is a tricky business, even when justified).2
We should, therefore, reject Kant’s rigorism, according to which the moral duties are absolute. This does not undermine the objectivity of morality: moral duties can be entirely objective (i.e., stance-independent; not “up to” anyone") and non-arbitrary, despite admitting of certain exceptions.3
A more reasonable view about lying would be something like the following:
(K) One should lie only in such circumstances as those in which lying is the only means by which it is possible to prevent the occurrence of some evil, the prevention of which which all rational beings have decisive reason to will.
2. A Consequentialist Perspective
There is also a broadly consequentialist case against lying (i.e., a case against lying grounded in considerations about the bad consequences of lying) - and, thus, a case in favor of a strong presumption that one ought to say what one takes to be true. This case, as I see it, is grounded in three primary considerations.
First, there is the fact that lying is often directly harmful – both when it is successful (i.e., when it results in someone believing the lie), and when it is not (i.e., when it does not result in someone believing the lie).
Second, there is the fact that we are generally quite bad at identifying the instances in which we ought to lie (the Nazi-at-the-door scenario is, after all – and thank goodness – not a common one for most of us in daily life).
And third, there is the fact that lying provides a kind of moral camouflage, enabling one to do in secret what one would never do in public, and thus reap the social rewards of being perceived as upholding a certain set of norms without paying the costs associated with genuinely doing so.
For present purposes, it is the first of these wrong-making feature – the harmfulness of lying – upon which I will focus.
When successful, a lie burdens someone with a false belief – and things generally (not always, but generally) go worse for us, in the long-run, to the extent that there is a poor fit between our beliefs and objective reality. Navigating successfully (by virtually any reasonable standard) through life requires understanding the actual nature of the terrain that we are traversing.
Even those lies generally regarded as innocuous can serve to impede such understanding because, by their nature, they often serve to give us an inaccurate view of ourselves and our circumstances.
When unsuccessful, a lie undermines trust and harms relationships. To learn that someone is the sort of person who will lie for personal gain, or to spare someone else’s feelings – or even (as is more pertinent here) for the ostensible purpose of bringing happiness – is to incur the burden of having to second-guess much (if not most) of what that person says. This is, among other things, cognitively demanding, emotionally draining, and time-consuming.
Although the truth can surely hurt (given that the world is quite evidently not engineered with human well-being in mind), it is a great gift to have people in one’s life who can be relied upon not to engage in willful deception – not least because praise and positive feedback from such people is actually meaningful.
3. The Santa Claus Deception
The parent-child relationship is among the most important of all human relationships. Parents are charged with the stewardship of their children from infancy to adulthood – and parents’ success depends to a very great extent upon the extent to which they can earn their children’s trust. For when a parent does not have a child’s trust, the former’s authority is tyrannical in its nature, grounded merely in the threat of punishment and the promise of reward, rather than in respect. This is, to say the least, not an ideal state of affairs for a host of reasons that should be obvious enough.
Given this, in conjunction with the preceding reflection on the ethics of lying, I think it is easy to see why there is at least something potentially worrying about the tradition of systematically lying to children about the existence of an elderly, bearded man from the North Pole who, aided by flying reindeer, annually traverses the night sky in a sleigh, distributing toys to children across the world.
Granted, it’s all in the name of good fun, and it’s certainly not among the worst of the extant human traditions – nor, for that matter, is it among the worst things that parents often do to their children. But: consider what children learn once they discover that it has all been an elaborate ruse. They learn that their parents (and other adults who have collaborated) - however loving and well-intentioned - are people of such kind as are capable of lying to them in a systematic and coordinated fashion, over the course of many years.
Might this not, plausibly, serve to erode trust, to some extent, between parents and children (and adult authorities and children, more broadly) – at precisely the moment in life when this trust is, arguably, needed the most? Anecdotally, some children do feel seriously betrayed and scarred by the years of Santa-related deception; because of this application of the precautionary principle would suggest erring on the side of truth-telling rather than deception (especially considering that there should be a presumption in favor of truth-telling, regardless, for the normative reasons cited above).
Moreover, in maintaining the ruse for as long as possible, parents are essentially - at least in this one respect - training their children to be poor reasoners (given the preposterousness of whole story).
A final consideration is that, in deceiving children about Santa Claus, adults thwart their children’s moral interest in expressing proper gratitude to those adults in their life who actually are responsible for their receiving Christmas gifts. There is reason to worry that this might, to some extent, impede moral development.
And all of this is to say nothing of the wisdom (or lack thereof) inherent in making material acquisition the chief focus of the Christmas season.
I should hasten to add that, by my lights, moral culpability on the part of parents here is extremely minimal, given that a) deceiving children about Santa is totally normalized within the culture (and there’s a plausible enough thought that individual culpability is limited in cases in which one performs a wrong act that is not generally regarded as such), and that b) this particular form of deception is certainly not seriously wrong (I shouldn’t be misunderstood as suggesting that children are being deeply scarred for life by being made to believe in Santa).
Conclusion
Am I suggesting that Christmastime should be devoid of any mention of Santa, whatsoever? No! It’s a fun story — but, I think, one which can be enjoyed precisely as that: a story. It’s possible — especially for children — to engage with a story in a robust manner which, nevertheless, involves no genuine blurring of the line between truth and falsehood and no deliberate deception. It seems to me that we could easily tell stories about Santa, watch films about Santa, sing songs about Santa, engage with the actually history underlying the legendary figure, and so on — without suggesting to anyone that Santa is (literally) coming to town.
Most importantly, see his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and “On the Supposed Right to Lie From Benevolent Motives”.
Somewhat incredibly, Kant himself denies this explicitly in “On the Supposed Right to Lie From Benevolent Motives”.
As it happens, it’s really not clear that Kant’s own commitments require him to oppose lying in all cases: by his own lights, it seems that there are cases in which I can lie to someone while respecting this person’s autonomy, and – as suggested above – without actually endorsing anything like (L). Kant would not have been the first philosopher to misunderstand one of his own views.