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Never lie. That’s what we’re told. That’s what we say.
But we don’t mean it. We know there are times to lie – a lot sometimes, consistently for an extended period of time and with extreme distortions. To keep the peace or restore it, to lead, to persuade, and to maintain hope in difficult times we distort the likely to make it more likable. Cultural and romantic myths depend on such distortions and we depend on such myths – even the myth of free speech that holds a partnership or nation together: We can talk honestly about anything (so long as we don’t). Anyone who says they never lie is lying.
Still, of course, lying is usually evil. We’re right to discourage lying. We’re just wrong to recklessly condemn lying as though you can just round usually-bad to always-bad and have done with it.
Pathological liars condemn lying recklessly. They curse anything they don’t want to hear a lie and anyone they don’t want to hear a pathological liar. Being accused of pathological lying stings, but only those who aren’t pathological liars. Pathological liars are not stung when accused. They can just keep lying to brush it off. Our culture’s reckless failure to distinguish between good and bad lies affords a huge advantage to pathological liars.
How should we distinguish between good and bad lies? Or really between any moral opposites. Honesty and lying? Positivity and negativity? Tolerance and intolerance? Trust and distrust? War and peace?
We prefer one in each pair of opposites: In general, for ourselves and society, we prefer honesty, positivity, tolerance, trust, and peace. But we can’t just round up to them. There are times for lying, negativity, intolerance, distrust, and war. Sometimes it’s best to take the opposite option, but when?
One clue can be found in recursion, applying the concept to itself. If tolerance is better than intolerance we should be intolerant of intolerance. It sounds hypocritical but it’s true. If ever there’s a time to be intolerant it will be when you’ve got to fight the intolerant. Likewise war with the warring –hypocritical but true. Warring with Hitler was the only choice. War is a no-no, a negative, just say no to negatives – also hypocritical, also truish. Distrust the untrusting? There’s something to that one, too.
Recursion suggests a way to err toward the positive while making exceptions. It’s not a recipe for surefire success. Rather it’s a recipe for less mess that still can get messy. Warring with the warring was necessary in WWII, but it can get very messy with opposing factions claiming that they’re just warring against the warring. Being intolerant of the intolerant justifies being anti-fascist and anti-racist, but you’ll also end up with messes in which opposing factions are claiming the other is intolerant as we see today.
Still, if you want a rule of thumb for when to be most open to the possibility that you should do what you mostly think you shouldn’t do, recursion is pretty good: Err on the side of honesty except when dealing with the dishonest, err on the side of tolerance except when dealing with the intolerant.
Recursion also suggests a new use for an unfortunate phrase: “The lesser of two evils,” by which we merely mean a choice between two options that have costs, not that both are absolutely evil.
Most choices have benefits and costs, not just trade-offs we can foresee, but unforeseeable positive and negative outcomes we can’t foresee. Sometimes lying turns out to be a high virtue, sometimes lying turns out to be a low evil, and often we can’t know in advance which it will turn out to be. You can ruin or save a very good marriage by lying.
To lie or be honest? Either way, it could turn out to be good or bad. Still, we know which way we want things to go in general: We want to help create a more honest society. Honesty is the lesser of two sometimes good evils. In the long run, we want to minimize lying and maximize honesty but in the short run that may require some lying.
In the 2016 election, many voters chose third party candidates because they said (unclear on the concept) that “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” (It’s not). Many voters rationalized their vote for one candidate by focusing on the opposition’s lies, an indulgence in reckless moral posturing, an extreme manifestation of cancel culture, the pretense of absolute purity canceling the impure.
Applying a recklessly sweeping moral standard, such voters didn’t bother to compare the relative lying of both candidates. They pointed at the candidate they opposed, saw lies, and pretended that theirs was a vote for moral purity. That’s a reckless sweeping oversimplification. The recursion rule of thumb helps us err toward the lesser of two potentially good evils.
Here's a video about the difficult challenge of figuring out when to make exceptions to moral rules:
And here's an example of good lying from a comedy team called, appropriately, The Good Liars:
