In the abstract there may be some excuse for a
lie. As a matter of fact, certain lies
are enshrined in law and used every day.
It is okay to lie to a criminal suspect, for instance. Lies are all around us as claims of “the best”
and the “most effective’ swirl around advertising and advocacy of all
kinds. Lies are generally permitted when
national security is genuinely involved.
It is more difficult to justify or countenance lies in
public and political discourse. Few of
us would even try to say that lying is a good thing in the context of political
speech.
If very few of us can find an excuse for lying, what
is our response when our guy is caught in a lie?
Mostly,
we just change the subject. We employ a
mechanism that essentially says: “You say my guy is lying but your guy lies
too.”
See? There is
no justification made here for the lie.
We merely arrange the question in such a way as to divert attention from
my guy’s lies to your guy’s lies. By
this mechanism, we don’t bother with some lies by pointing out other lies.
Let me propose that lying is generally both wrong and
unjustifiable. Lies do not cancel one
another out. Rather, each specific lie,
no matter the speaker, stands alone and naked as wrong.
The ditty we learned in our youth is instructive here:
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”. In Walter Scott’s epic poem, the lie first
told to justify an indiscretion within a love triangle, finds its way
inevitably and assuredly to a fight and loss of life that could have been
avoided absent the lie.
Lying is bad for us. Just so, tolerating a lie
implicates us in that lie.
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