Who even says alternative facts? I thought. Almost immediately, the answer popped into my head: authoritarian regimes. Lying, controlling access to information, spinning falsehoods that better suit their narrative—these are all strategies that dictators use to spread disinformation, weaponize truth, and solidify their power. Normalization of “alternative facts” weakens the rule of law and threatens democratic institutions. It was clear to me that we were at an era-defining moment: When truth becomes an option, the whole ethics edifice collapses.

An hour later, I wrote to Stanford’s public policy program director to propose a new course. When the spring quarter began less than three months later, I would teach Ethics of Truth in a Post-Truth World for the first time. Even then, I couldn’t have imagined the degree to which alternative facts would seep into our discourse and our decisions. In late March 2017, as I walked across the center of the Stanford campus on the first day of my new class, students were giving out hot pink rubber bracelets stamped with “Truth Matters” in white letters. At the time, it was stunning to me how obvious this statement would have seemed just a few months earlier. But by then, the phrase “alternative facts” had already gone viral, adopted into the American vernacular. It was a chilling signal that, as citizens, we should be prepared to tolerate untruths even at the highest levels of government. I grabbed a handful of the bracelets to share with my class.

Over the years that I’ve been teaching Ethics of Truth in a Post Truth World, my students have continued to surprise and impress me as they tackle themes such as subjective versus objective truth, truth and identity, authenticity, and truth and history. The class culminates with a final paper topic: “Does truth matter? And, if so, why and how?” Thus far, only one person has tried to argue that truth does not matter. What the students conclude is: There is no such thing as alternatively factual ethics. This chapter makes the case for truth as the essential foundation for ethical decision-making. Truth undergirds the framework and the allocation of responsibility for ethics, as well as the positive deployment of the other five forces. Conversely, on the edge, we face unprecedented threats to truth and a dangerous normalization of the idea that truth is optional. In the stories ahead, we will also probe core questions such as: Who gets to decide our truth? And what is our ethical obligation to society with respect to truth? The epidemic of “alternative facts,” or what I call “compromised truth,” is one of the most insidious and dangerous global systemic risks of our time. Compromised truth is the single greatest threat to humanity: It topples our ability to make ethical decisions. It undercuts trust and our distinction between right and wrong. It sets every one of the drivers of contagion of unethical behavior into motion, weakening our ability to integrate the other five forces driving ethics into our decision-making. And it undergirds every societal risk we face, from climate change to global pandemics to the demise of democracy.

Many important philosophical and historical works have explored and defined “truth.” But my focus here is the link between truth and ethical decision-making. I take truth to mean verifiable, objective fact—“the actual facts or information about something rather than what people think, expect, or make up,” as the Macmillan English Dictionary deftly defines truth. To be clear, a fact-based approach to truth does not preclude how a difference of opinion, emotion, and personal bias can lead to different experiences of reality. As one of my students pointed out, if the thermometer reads 60 degrees Fahrenheit, then it is 60 degrees Fahrenheit for everyone, even if some people feel warm and others cold at that temperature. No individual experience can change the scientific fact that the temperature is 60 degrees. Everyone  is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts, to paraphrase Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For centuries, truth has been our assumed common reference point, arbiter of relationships, and foundation for social trust. Truth is the scaffolding for regulation, policy, leadership, and cooperation in our day-to-day lives. We ask witnesses in a U.S. court of law to take an oath to testify to “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” We expect, and legally require, one another to respond truthfully in job applications, driver’s licenses, voter registration, immigration forms, and college admissions applications. Corporate and nonprofit organization codes of ethics hinge on truth. Parents instill in their children the central principle to “tell the truth.” The year 2016 marked a historic and dangerous shift away from our common acceptance of the importance of truth. It’s not that we didn’t have versions of “fake news” and other forms of rampant dishonesty before.

But by 2017, we had a confluence of antagonistic politics, contagious social media, and an absence of ethical decision making in the top seats of corporate and governmental power, leading to widespread normalization and acceptance of compromised truth. Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as its international word of the year in 2016. Usage of the term in the news and social media had increased 2,000 percent compared to 2015. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In practice, “post-truth” has also included cherry-picking the facts that are convenient. The Oxford editors said: “The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States.” Truth is a prerequisite to understanding and protecting our shared humanity. Truth is the nonnegotiable part of ethical decision-making that undergirds our connections. But compromised truth is the great disconnector. It literally disintegrates human connection, severing personal  and societal links to the past while corroding our ability to plan for the  future. It destroys trust in institutions and leaders—and in each other.  In 2016, as we began a historic and dangerous shift away from a common respect for how truth matters, we also significantly accelerated  divisiveness.

Excerpted from The Power of Ethics: How to Make Good Choices in a Complicated World, Simon & Schuster (January 5, 2021)

Author(s)

  • Dr. Susan Liautaud is an innovative ethics and resilience expert, keynote speaker, author, and professor. With over 25 years of experience, she advises global leaders, companies, governments, and organizations on complex ethics and governance challenges, specializing in the ethics of technology, including AI. Her firm, Susan Liautaud & Associates, offers practical, solution-oriented ethics advice applicable in both professional and personal contexts.
    Susan chairs the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Council and teaches ethics at Stanford University. She is the author of The Power of Ethics and The Little Book of Big Ethical Questions. She also serves on advisory boards such as Stanford HAI, SAP’s AI Ethics Advisory Panel, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Additionally, Susan founded The Ethics Incubator, a non-profit platform that explores ethical questions through interviews with renowned artists and leaders. Her academic credentials include a PhD in Social Policy from LSE, a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, and degrees from Stanford University.