Ethics in Action

To advocate dishonesty or deception as occasionally morally acceptable or even praiseworthy is a tricky business for both philosophers and laypersons. Since successful lies depend upon a presumption of truthfulness, it seems imprudent to announce the possibility of lies and deception in advance.

Despite such worries, many recent moral and psychological accounts of honesty have argued that deception (including self-deception) is integral to our interpersonal relations. David Nyberg's book The Varnished Truth questions the assumption that “truthfulness and morality go together in a clear and simple way” (Nyberg 1993, 10). Charles Ford's Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! sympathetically examines the psychology of lying and deception. In The Liar's Tale Jeremy Campbell argues that “for better or worse, lying... is not an artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life” (Campbell 2001, 14). On such accounts, dishonesty with oneself and with others is a natural phenomenon often serving a useful and necessary function in human life.

While these critiques of absolute honesty have introduced much-needed complexity and realism into the debate about its moral worth, they overlook some of the more subtle consequences of our choices between truth and falsehood. Unseen harms and benefits lurk in these choices because they concern the messy intersection of interpersonal relations, self-assessment, and moral life. Indeed, such complexity illustrates that a consequentialist justification for honesty cannot rely upon any single argument, but rather depends upon a patchwork of overlapping arguments, some broadly applicable, others more narrowly so.

We find such hidden complexities in one familiar type of lie: the false excuse. In telling a false excuse, a person denies responsibility for a misdeed through deliberate deception, thereby shielding himself from the negative consequences of that misdeed. False excuses are common because of the often powerful inducements to tell such...