Lying to Children about Santa
...some epistemic reasons in favor of the practice
Should Parents and Teachers Lie to Their Children and Students?
Every year, millions of parents and teachers tell children a big fat lie: there is someone named ‘Santa Claus’ who lives at the North Pole with his wife, and a bunch of elves who make toys all year long. And every Christmas eve, Santa Claus distributes toys to deserving children, across the global, with the aid of flying reindeer required to pull the hefty sleight. And the parents and teachers know full well that this story is false. What gives?
There are a couple of solid reasons to doubt that parents are justified lying to their children. The first is one that many philosophy students learn about when they study what is known as the ethics of belief: the rough idea is that we have an ethical obligation to form belief in accordance with the best evidence, e.g., believing the moon is made of blue cheese, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, would violate the ethics of belief. It would be a strange world, indeed, if it were permissible to believe whatever one wanted, despite the evidence against the belief—there is something wrong with believing whatever one wants despite the salient evidence. As the philosopher, W. K. Clifford, wrote in his famous essay, ‘The Ethics of Belief,’
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it […].
This is a strong version of the ethics of belief. Even scaling back the view a bit, it is still intuitive that the beliefs we hold should be governed, to a large degree, by the evidence we have for that belief. And yet, when parents and teachers encourage, even incentivize, belief in Santa Claus, they encourage children to form a belief in Santa Claus based on what the parents and teachers know is poor evidence that Santa exists: the attestation of alleged authority figure. So, the first problem is that abusing one’s authority to encourage (gullible) children to violate the ethics of belief, and form a (false) belief based on weak evidence.
There is a second problem: presumably, parents have a robust moral obligation to do what is in the best interest of their children since they are responsible for bringing the children into the world (with few exceptions like rape and incest), such that the children wouldn’t exist but for the actions of the parent. This robust moral obligation, for parents to do what is in the best interests of the child, presumably extends to matters of truth and deception: parents often have a moral obligation to tell their children the truth (when appropriate), since the truth will often help children better navigate the world, make better decisions, and learn to trust others. Just as one would have a stronger obligation to a dog they adopted, compared to a random dog on the street, parents have particularly strong moral obligations to their children.
It looks, then, like parents and teachers have a moral obligation, where not too socially costly, to tell children that there is no Santa Claus—or at least not to incentivize believing the deception—in virtue of their obligations to their students. However, there are epistemic benefits that accrue from the Santa deception that wouldn’t without the Santa deception (or something like it).
Better to (Sometimes) Be Deceived?
Dropping a cup on a tile floor sometimes produces shattered glass due to the fragility of the glass. When stressed, the cup shattered. Immune systems, on the other hand, need stress to learn, to adapt, and to fully develop—immune systems not exposed to viruses and bacteria tend to be weaker than those systems with the right amount of exposure to viruses and bacteria due to the anti-fragile nature of the immune system.
Our epistemic practices—forming beliefs, evaluating evidence and the reliability of evidential sources—are more like immune systems than glass cups. They need to be challenged to grow and function properly. And of course, like the immune system, too much stress and challenge can be dire for our epistemic practices, but just the right amount of stress—the goldilocks zone of stress—can act as a catalyst for the development of one’s epistemic practices.
The same applies to children and the Santa Claus deception. When adults and their playmates claim to believe in Santa, this affords children the chance to experiment with, and develop good epistemic practices on their own, rather than relying on others—an opportunity for the children to think for themselves. Aristotle taught us that acquiring virtue, whether moral or intellectual, acquiring knowledge and avoiding deception, requires practice and patience. Many epistemic lessons can be gleaned from the Santa Claus deception:
(A) Even trustworthy people sometimes deceive: just because someone has been and appears trustworthy doesn’t rule out deception—one need not investigate every piece of testimony if the source looks trustworthy, but one should be aware of the possibility of deception at least.
(B) There is an important difference between truth and belief: something can be believed, even by everyone, yet still be false. What one believes, and the nature of reality, can come apart.
(C) Lying can be based on good and bad intentions: the simple fact that someone deceived one is insufficient to conclude they have bad intentions; perhaps they are trying to spare someone they care about the pain that would result from honesty.
(D) One has the ability to detect deception, lies, and rumor: the fact that one was deceived by adults about the existence of Santa, yet eventually discovered the deception, is good evidence that one is developing to ability to find and discard false beliefs.
These are the kind of lessons children should learn about themselves as epistemic agents: folks who are capable of finding and evaluating evidence, forming beliefs based on the evidence, and avoiding falling for deception or pleasant falsehoods. These are skills required to navigate the world successfully and thrive, and yet would be hard to acquire these epistemic insights had one not been deceived and given the opportunity to overcome that deception.
The exercise of thinking about ethical obligation of parents and teachers, and learning how to think and reason better through the process of being deceived highlights something interesting: teachers and parents faces a tradeoff between, on the one hand, refraining from the deception of their children, and on the other, providing a robust chance to learn how to detect and overcome detection, something of practical value and without which they would be worse off as epistemic agents making their way in the world.