Take it one day at a time. You can tell the truth without telling all. Consider the goal of the lie. If you do not tell a person something that you should or just telling part of it when asked about it, so that they no a liitlebit, but not the whole truth and you call it hiding it. Is it just hiding or lying? As fio says, it is deception, and deliberately misleading, and the result would be just the same as a lie. However, a large difference exists between black lies and white lies: With black lies, the deceiver tries to gain something at the cost of the deceived.
In other words, the deceiver exploits the deceived out of self-interest. Liars often remove themselves from the story by referencing themselves less when making deceptive statements. How to get someone to tell you the truth Meet one-to-one. Nobody confesses to a crowd. Cultivate short-term thinking. Hold up your hand if they deny they are lying to indicate they need to stop talking.
Do not accuse; use a presumptive question. Signs of Lying Being vague; offering few details. Repeating questions before answering them. Here's his list, with the least forgivable lies at the top:. Thomas Aquinas also thought that all lies were wrong, but that there was a hierarchy of lies and those at the bottom could be forgiven. His list was:. The reason for lying that gets most sympathy from people is lying because something terrible will happen if you don't lie.
Examples include lying to protect a murderer's intended victim and lying to save oneself from death or serious injury. These lies are thought less bad than other lies because they prevent a greater harm occurring; they are basically like other actions of justified self-defence or defence of an innocent victim.
Since such lies are often told in emergencies, another justification is that the person telling the lie often has not time to think of any alternative course of action. Threatening situations don't just occur as emergencies; there can be long-term threat situations where lying will give a person a greater chance of survival.
In the Gulag or in concentration camps prisoners can gain an advantage by lying about their abilities, the misbehaviour of fellow-prisoners, whether they've been fed, and so on. In a famine lying about whether you have any food hidden away may be vital for the survival of your family.
When two countries are at war, the obligation to tell the truth is thought to be heavily reduced and deliberate deception is generally accepted as part of the way each side will try to send its opponent in the wrong direction, or fool the enemy into not taking particular actions.
In the same way each side accepts that there will be spies and that spies will lie under interrogation this acceptance of spying doesn't benefit the individual spies much, as they are usually shot at the end of the day. This legalistic device divides a statement into two parts: the first part is misleading, the two parts together are true - however only the first part is said aloud, the second part is a 'mental reservation'.
One common occasion for mental reservations was in court, when a person had sworn an oath to tell the truth and expected God to punish them if they lied. If they'd stolen some sheep on Tuesday they could safely tell the court "I did not steal those sheep" as long as they added in their mind "on Monday". Since God was believed to know every thought, God would hear the mental reservation as well as the public statement and therefore would not have been lied to.
Sissela Bok says that this device is recommended to doctors by one textbook. If a feverish patient, for example, asks what his temperature is, the doctor is advised to answer "your temperature is normal today" while making the mental reservation that it is normal for a person in the patient's precise physical condition.
The Dutch philosopher and lawyer Hugo Grotius taught that a lie is not really wrong if the person being lied to has no right to the truth. This stemmed from his idea that what made a wrong or unjust action wrong was that it violated someone else's rights. If someone has no right to the truth, their rights aren't violated if they're told a lie. This argument would seem to teach that it's not an unethical lie to tell a mugger that you have no money although it is a very unwise thing to do , and it is not an unethical lie to tell a death squad that you don't know where their potential victim is hiding.
In practice, most people would regard this as a very legalistic and 'small print' sort of argument and not think it much of a justification for telling lies, except in certain extreme cases that can probably be justified on other grounds. If someone lies to you, are you entitled to lie to them in return? Has the liar lost the right to be told the truth? Human behaviour suggests that we do feel less obliged to be truthful to liars than to people who deal with us honestly.
Most moral philosophers would say that you are not justified in lying to another person because they have lied to you. From an ethical point of view, the first thing is that a lie is still a lie - even if told to a liar. Secondly, while the liar may be regarded as having lost the right to be told the truth, society as a whole still retains some sort of right that its members should use language truthfully. But is it a pardonable lie?
The old maxim 'two wrongs don't make a right' suggests that it isn't, and it's clear that even if the liar has lost their right to be told the truth, all the other reasons why lying is bad are still valid. But there is a real change in the ethics of the situation; this is not that a lie to a liar is forgivable, but that the liar himself is not in a morally strong position to complain about being lied to.
But - and it's a big 'but' - even this probably only applies in a particular context - if I tell you lies about the number of children I have, that doesn't entitle you to lie to me about the time of the next train to London, although it would make it very hard for me to complain if you were to lie to me about the number of children in your family.
Nor does it justify lying to someone because you know they are an habitual liar - once again all the other arguments against lying are still valid. There are cases where two people or groups of people willingly engage in a mutual deception, because they think it will benefit them. Sisela Bok puts it like this:. Such deception can resemble a game where both partners know the rules and play by them.
Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Andrea Borghini. Professor of Philosophy. Andrea Borghini, Ph. His research focuses on metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of biology. Updated February 18, Cite this Article Format. When people know you for a liar, your reputation is basically ruined.
Getting caught telling lies is embarrassing, and it makes you look like a light-headed person. At first, lying can seem rewarding. Because you got away with lying once, you may feel tempted to lie again to see what you can gain from it. There are negative consequences associated with it. Yet once you become hooked on lying, breaking the pattern can be difficult. While telling the odd white lie is unlikely to get you into trouble with the law, more serious lies could. However, when someone gets into the habit of lying, it usually starts with small lies and slowly escalates.
The lies you tell today might not get you into trouble with the law, but what about the bigger lies you may tell in the future? How do you feel when you find out that somebody else has been lying to you? When the person that lied is someone that supposedly loves you, the lies can even cause emotional pain. Many loving relationships between good friends, family members and lovers have been completely ruined because of a lie told by one person to another.
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