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Perpetuating the Santa Deception

Jimmy Alfonso Licon wonders whether pretending there’s a Santa is naughty or nice.

Every year, millions of parents tell children a big fat lie: There’s someone called 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 distributes toys to deserving children across the globe with the aid of flying reindeer pulling a hefty sleigh. The parents know full well that this story is false. Why are millions of parents being unethical every year? What gives?

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There are a couple of solid reasons to doubt that parents are justified in lying to their children. The first is one many philosophy students learn about when they study what’s known as the ethics of belief. The rough idea is that we have an ethical obligation to form our beliefs in accordance with the best evidence. Believing the moon is made of blue cheese, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, would violate the ethics of belief, for instance.

It would be a strange world indeed if it were ethically permissible to believe whatever one wanted despite strong evidence against the belief. Rather, there’s something wrong with the practice of believing whatever one wants irrespective of the evidence. Or as the philosopher W.K. Clifford wrote in his famous essay, ‘The Ethics of Belief’ (1877), “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence…”

This is a very strong version of the ethics of belief. Even scaling the idea back a bit, it’s 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 others encourage, even incentivize, children’s belief in Santa Claus, they encourage children to form a belief based on what these parents and others know is poor evidence – namely, merely the attestation of an alleged authority figure. So, the first problem with the Santa deception is that of abusing one’s authority to encourage (gullible) children to violate the ethics of belief and form a (false) belief based on weak evidence.

There’s a second problem, too. Since they are responsible for bringing the children into the world, such that the children wouldn’t exist but for the freely-chosen actions of the parents (there are some exceptions), parents have a robust moral obligation to do what’s in the best interest of their children. Even more generally, adults have moral responsibility for children who are under their care. This robust obligation upon parents and others to do what is in the best interests of the child, presumably extends to matters of truth and deception. Parents have a moral obligation to tell their children the truth (when appropriate), since as well as being valuable for its own sake, the truth will often help children better navigate the world, make better decisions, and learn to trust others. So by telling their children that there is such a person as Santa Claus – even if this helps the child fit in with playmates who believe likewise – parents inhibit the growth of the ability of their children to navigate the world, make better decisions (hard when operating under a deception), and to trust others as a source of accurate information. In virtue of accepting the role as their educators, teachers too have moral obligations to their students, especially with respect to teaching them properly, and this would presumably include bans against practices like deception and lying.

It looks, as if in virtue of their obligations to their charges, parents, teachers, and others have a moral obligation, where not too socially costly, to tell children that there is no Santa – or at least, not to encourage their believing the deception.

Having said that, there are epistemic benefits that wouldn’t exist without the Santa deception, or something like it.

Better to (Sometimes) Be Deceived?

Dropping a glass cup on a tile floor sometimes produces shattering results, because of the fragility of glass. When stressed, it shatters. Immune systems, on the other hand, need stress to learn and 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. Because of this, we say that the immune system is anti-fragile.

Our practices of acquiring knowledge – such as evaluating the reliability of evidence, and forming beliefs – are more like immune systems than china cups. To grow and function properly, our belief-forming systems need to be challenged. Of course, just as with the immune system, too much stress and challenge can be dire; but just the right amount of stress – the ‘goldilocks zone’ of stress – can act as a catalyst for the healthy growth of one’s epistemic practices.

This applies to children and the Santa Claus deception. When adults or playmates claim to believe in Santa, this gives children the chance to experiment with, and develop, good epistemic practices, such as having a degree of skepticism and asking awkward questions. In other words, it’s an opportunity for the children to think for themselves. Aristotle taught that acquiring virtue – here in the intellectual sense of acquiring knowledge and avoiding deception – requires practice and patience.

Many epistemic lessons can be gleaned from coming to recognize the Santa deception:

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 at least be aware of the possibility of deception.

There’s an important difference between truth and belief

Something can be believed, even by everyone, yet still be false. In fact, what one believes about reality and the real nature of reality can easily come apart.

Lying can be from good or bad intentions

The simple fact that someone deceives is insufficient to conclude that they have bad intentions. They may have nobler reasons. Perhaps they’re trying to spare someone the pain that would result from some specific honesty, for instance.

I have 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 the ability to find and discard false beliefs.

These are the kind of lessons children should learn about as epistemic agents: as folks who are capable of finding and evaluating evidence, forming beliefs based on the evidence, and avoiding falling for deception or for pleasant or useful falsehoods. These are skills required to navigate the world successfully and thrive; and yet it would be hard to acquire these epistemic insights had one not occasionally been misled, and given the opportunity to overcome that deception.

This exercise of thinking about the ethical obligation of parents and others to children, and of children learning how to think and reason better through the process of being deceived, highlights something interesting, ethically speaking. Parents and others face a tradeoff between, on the one hand, refraining from the deception of children, and on the other, providing a robust chance for them to learn how to detect and overcome deception – something of practical value without which they would be worse off as epistemic agents making their way in the world. So perhaps the Santa Claus deception is a Christmas gift.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy at Arizona State University.