Lying Deja Vu

I was taking a break from writing this afternoon and sat out on the deck reading some more of The Sunday Philosophy Club.  I came to the passage in which the main character Isabel reflects a bit on lying (she is the editor of an ethics journal, so she tends to do that sort of thing).  I thought to myself, "I should paste this passage into the blog and write about it."  So I opened up the blog and had a sense that I had done this before.  I went down to the cloud of labels at the bottom of the page, and sure enough there was one on lying.  Clicking on it took me here, where back in June of 2007 I had pasted in the exact same passage.  I didn't say much about it though.  I will now, just enough to provoke and aggravate:

One of my favorite discussions in Intro to Philosophy classes is on lying.  Plato seems to defend in The Republic that it is necessary and OK for governments (or ruling authorities in general) to lie to its citizens for their own good.  Students don't usually like that.  For most students the issue of lying seems so clear-cut, black and white.  Then once we bring up examples like lying to the Nazis about hiding Anne Frank in your attic or lying to the customs agent about smuggling Bibles into China, it gets a little more complicated.  Add to that a definition of lying that includes non-verbal deception, and we have to start considering cases like leaving a light on when you're not home to deceive would-be burglars, or as one of my friends has done for the same purpose, putting a "Beware of the Dog" sign in the yard even though he has no dog.  Maybe even slowing down when we see a policeman counts as lying, because we're trying to make it appear that we were driving more slowly than we really were.

I laughed pretty hard at The Invention of Lying.  It is pretty irreverent and even sacrilegious, but it does a good job of showing how lying is embedded into the fabric of society.  Are all of these bad?  Certainly not all of them are "bearing false witness" in the legal sense intended by the ninth commandment.  Should we always tell the truth when someone asks how we are doing?  What about at birthdays and Christmas?  What if there is a greater evil that would occur if we didn't lie?  If I told you I had an easy answer to all of these questions, I'd be lying.  And I wouldn't do that.

Lying

One of my wife's and my favorite contemporary novelists is Alexander McCall Smith. Last night we were reading his Sunday Philosophy Club and came across these two paragraphs about lying:

"Of course, not all lies were wrong, which was another respect, Isabel thought, in which Kant was mistaken. One of the most ridiculous things that he had ever said was that there was a duty to tell the truth to the murderer looking for his victim. If the murderer came to one's door and asked, Is he in? one would be obliged to answer truthfully, even if this would lead to the death of an innocent person. Such nonsense; and she could remember the precise offending passage: 'Truthfulness in statement which cannot be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage accruing to himself or to another.'...

The answer, surely, is that lying in general is wrong, but that some lies, carefully identified as the exception, will be permissible. There were, therefore, good lies and bad lies, with good lies being uttered for a benevolent reason (to protect the feeling of another, for example). If somebody asked one's opinion of a newly acquired--but tasteless--possession, for instance, and one gave an honest answer, then that could hurt feelings and deprive the other of the joy of ownership. So one lied, and praised it, which was surely the right thing to do. Or was it? Perhaps it was not as simple as that. If one became accustomed to lying in such circumstances, the line between truth and falsehood could become blurred."

Tomorrow I'll try to get back to the morass I've gotten into regarding the flesh and spiritual formation (the folks on Facebook, where this blog automatically posts, are jumping all over me!).