An issue that has been highly controversial regarding honesty has been whether it is ever right to lie. Some people would argue that lying is not always morally wrong. From this perspective, telling a lie can be beneficial because the truth sometimes causes more damage than a lie would. To illustrate, a person might lie about how someone looks so that they are not offended. However, others argue that it is never morally right to lie. Stephanie Ericsson, who maintains this view, argues in her essay “The Ways We Lie” that “When someone lies, someone loses” (425).
According to this view, a lie always leads o someone being negatively affected. Therefore, lying is wrong because it always results in someone being harmed. In sum, the issue is whether lying is moral or immoral. I think that lying is morally wrong. While I admit that it may not always be ideal to tell the truth, still maintain that being honest is ultimately the right thing to do. Although telling the truth might seem to be harmful at first, I claim that lying is never morally right because it eventually causes significantly more harm to someone, whether it is the liar or the person being lied to.
In an ideal society, everyone would be honest with each ther, preventing tension from building up and causing damage. Lying can never be justified because it is always wrong. Ericsson addresses this issue in her essay, stating “But if I justify lying, what makes me any different from slick politicians or the corporate robbers who raided the S&L industry? Saying it’s okay to lie one way and not another is hedging” (425). Ericsson argues that lying is unjustifiable, and that attempting to justify lying is wrong because it harms others.
She also states that justifying one kind of lying but not another is hedging, or limiting and restricting. She implies that one should not hedge, and separate one form of lying from another. I agree with Ericsson that justifying one type of lying is wrong. To illustrate, there are multiple levels of severity for crimes. For killing, there is first- degree and second-degree murder, in addition to manslaughter. Each level is different, but all are still crimes. Similarly, lying might take different forms with some being more severe than others, but all are still wrong.
My point is not that lying is a crime, but instead that all types of lying are harmful, just like all types of crime are harmful. Therefore, there is not a situation where lying is ever right – all lies are wrong and harmful. White lies may seem harmless, but in reality they are just as wrong as other lies. Ericsson goes into detail about white lies, asserting that “The white lie assumes that the truth will cause more damage than a simple, harmless untruth.. But, in effect, it is the liar deciding what is best for the lied to.
Ultimately, it is a vote of no confidence. It is an act of subtle arrogance for anyone to decide what is best for someone else” (425). According to Ericsson, a white lie is not any less harmful than a harsh truth. White lies deny people from making their own judgment on the truth, and they assume that the person will be better off not knowing the truth. Basically, what she means is that the person making the white lie is essentially thinking for the person being lied to. I think that people should be able to take the facts and decide their opinion for themselves.
White lies deny information which people do not seem to like. For example, there was a nationwide outrage when the details about the NSA were leaked by Edward Snowden. In other words, people do not like it when they are not told the truth. Thus, white lies are harmful ecause they prevent the person being lied to from knowing the entire truth and from coming to terms with it by themselves. Instead, they end up finding out later when they are not as prepared to handle the truth. Furthermore, lying might seem better than telling the truth at first, but in the long run it is not.
In Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Lady with the Dog”, Anna and Gurov are dishonest with their partner so that they can be with each other. “Every two or three months she left the town of S. , telling her husband that she was going to consult a specialist on female diseases, and er husband believed her and did not believe her” (476). Here, Anna explicitly tells a white lie to her husband in order to see Gurov. While the husband believes the lie, he also suspects that something is going on and thus also does not believe Anna.
In my opinion, the lies that Anna tells eventually will cause a greater amount of damage than the truth would. The husband already senses something wrong which might cause distrust. Personally, I would rather know the truth if my partner was unhappy because we would be able to talk it out and possibly resolve the issue. Instead, the person being lied to thinks omething that is not true because of the lie, causing tension to build up over time. Hence, while a lie might seem beneficial at first, the damage eventually builds up to the point that the truth would have been less harmful.
In addition, lying causes more damage for the liar than simply telling the truth would. In “The Lady with the Dog”, Anna and Gurov’s dishonesty ends up coming back to bite them: “Then they discussed their situation for a long time, trying to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting. How were they to shake off these ntolerable fetters? ” (478). Here, we see that while Anna and Gurov were content being with each other at first, eventually the lie catches up with them.
They are put in fetters, or chains, caused by the lie that restrict them. Another way to put it is that they are not able to live comfortably because they live in fear. I believe that lying always has consequences. In this case, the lie ends up harming the liar, rather than the person being lied to. In the end, rather than telling the truth to their partners, Anna and Gurov chose to lie and it ends up harming them more than honesty would have. If they were honest, they would have been ble to resolve the issue peacefully and not have to live in fear.
So, while at first lying might seem like an easy way out of a problem, it will eventually backfire on the liar. Many people would argue that a lie can sometimes do less harm the truth. Therefore, it would be justified in that situation to tell a lie in order to help the person emotionally. While it may seem that a lie would be more beneficial than the truth, in reality, lying will end up being more harmful. Instead of telling the truth and allowing the person to come to terms with the situation, there is a risk that they find out later and become upset. For example, ay I were to accidentally break a friend’s expensive cup.
It might seem like a good idea to lie so that they do not become angry and possibly harm the friendship. However, if the friend were to find out about the lie, they would realize that I was dishonest and they probably would not trust me, completely ruining the friendship rather than going through a rough patch. Therefore, although the consequence of telling the truth might seem large in some situations, telling a lie would have an even larger consequence in the long run. The lie ends up being extremely harmful, so in order to avoid such harm, one should never lie.
