Written by Bo Winegard.
Your grandmother is on her deathbed. Being a devout Catholic, she asks, “Surely you believe in Jesus? Will you pray for me?” You, however, are an atheist. And not a reverent, conciliatory atheist, but a Hitchens-reading, fire-breathing atheist. How should you respond? Should you say, “No, I think Jesus is irrelevant and religion is hocus pocus.” Or should you respond, “Yes, of course grandmother. I will pray for you. And I hope you will soon be at peace in the arms of God.”
I have only my intuition here, but I suspect most of us would find the second response more loving, more humane, more moral. Yes, it is technically a lie. But it seems to be a benevolent lie, a lie not for one’s own advantage, but to protect the feelings of another.
Immanuel Kant, the great Prussian philosopher, famously disagreed. For Kant, every lie, regardless of its motivation, was wrong. He took this principle to extreme lengths, arguing that even if a murderer came seeking your friend who was hiding in your house, you could not lie to him. For Kant contended that a lie destroys trust and so any lie — however small, subtle, or selflessly motivated — violates the rational foundations of contract and public discourse. Without trust, society collapses.
Sam Harris would likely also disagree with my intuition. In an entertaining essay titled, “Lying,” he argued that most lying is unethical1 because:
By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make — and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.
Even white lies, those myriad lies we tell to ease social tensions and reassure others, are wrong:
But what could be wrong with truly “white” lies? First, they are still lies. And in telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding — these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
Since I have argued elsewhere that lying or dissembling about supposedly unpleasant truths, such as racial differences in intelligence, is wrong, one might expect me to agree with Harris. Yet I do not.
