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Ethical liars
Our morality is not quite so black-and-white as we sometimes like to believe
One of my earliest memories, I must have been four or five, is when my mother, to her embarrassment, forgot her hairdresser’s appointment. As she rang to make a new one, she made up an excuse for missing it, involving a wholly fictitious sudden illness of my baby sister. “Isn’t that lying?”, I asked her as she put the phone down. That was the moment my moral compass acquired the notion of the white lie.
I like to think that I have not abused the concept in the many years since that time, but I would be lying if I said I have never used it. (Strangely, I cannot quite recall any particular instance at this very moment, though that may well be a case of motivated amnesia.) Nevertheless, the lesson my parents and other educators tried to instil in my youthful person — that lying is wrong — still dominates my sense of morality, and that view is one I most likely share with the vast majority of my fellow humans throughout the ages, regardless of their nationality or culture.
Lying is wrong, except when it isn’t
It is not hard to see why lying seems to be universally condemned. A community in which lying would be the norm, or more precisely, in which adherence to the truth was optional (so you would…
