Radley ponders the implications of pretending

Little White Lies
by Radley Balko

Note: Josh London is off this week in observance of Yom Kippur.

Sirs:

A question on a survey being asked of potential candidates for office at my school reads thusly: "When, if ever, is it okay to lie?"

When is it?

--J.L.

Radley

The exact details escape me, but some time ago, I heard a story about lying that involved the mother of former president Jimmy Carter. It seems a reporter was interviewing Mrs. Carter about the president’s honesty. When asked, Mrs. Carter said she couldn’t remember even one occasion of her son lying as a child. "Never?" the reporter asked. "Well," Mrs. Carter is alleged to have said, "maybe little white lies." The reporter’s face lit up.

The reporter pressed on, much to the irritation of Mrs. Carter, who found the questioning ridiculous. "Well... what would you consider a ’little white lie?’" Mrs. Carter thought for a moment and said, "well... remember when I greeted you at the door?" "Yes," the reporter said. "...and remember when I said how nice it was to see you?"

Such conversational fibs are part of our course of interaction with one another and an ingrained part accepted social behavior. When we ask "how are you?" or "how’s it going?" none of us really expects an honest answer and, if we get one, we find the answerer unusually forthcoming, something of a social misfit. I once worked with a woman who, when asked how she was doing, would give a itemized list of every pain, cramp, wheeze, inconvenience and mishap to befall her since the last time you’d seen her.

No, we expect a "fine" or a "great... yourself?" and we go on our respective ways.

A lie in and of itself is an act of moral deviance. It is on its face a deception and, therefore, to be justifiable, a lie must effect a moral interest that at least overcomes the inherent deviance of the act itself. In other words, some good must come of a lie for it to be "okay."

At the top of the scale then, or those lies that not only are acceptable, but are in fact desirable. As one reader suggested in the American Partisan’s discussion forums, war would be a scenario in which lying at times would not only be acceptable, but a necessity (provided the war is just and the liar is lying for the right side). In the Persian Gulf War, for instance, allied forces leaked to the American media plans for an amphibious attack on the Iraq’s eastern coast. There were no such plans. Schwarzkopf and the gang obviously suspected that CNN was far more reliable to Saddam Hussein than Iraqi intelligence. The lie, as it turns out, well served its purpose. It would be hard to argue that a lie to Mr. Hussein, to Hitler, or to Slobodan Milosevic would be of questionable morality if its purpose was to somehow inhibit their ability to effect evil.

Next, then, would come lies like that Mrs. Carter relayed to her interviewer. These are the day-to-day lies that circumvent hurt feelings and deflect animosity—lies that do little more than create goodwill between people. The good these little lies do (or, sometimes, the ugliness they avoid) outweigh any moral deviance of the deceptive act itself. Telling your Aunt Gertie she looks lovely, even when she doesn’t, even when it isn’t asked of you, does enough good to offset the fact that you lied to her to begin with. Likewise, the husband/boyfriend is justified when asked by his love interest "how do I look?" to respond with an unhesitant "beautiful," even if his first inclination is something more akin to "well... your ass is getting a bit thick, isn’t it?"

Next, and perhaps the most morally ambiguous of deceptions, are the conversational "embellishments" we offer up to impress acquaintances, win favor from the opposite sex, or just generally make conversations more colorful or interesting. Such lies as glorifying mediocre accomplishments, overstating our relationships with people of influence, or co-opting others’ stories and experiences (likely embellished to begin with) as our own--all fall into this category.

A sociology professor of mine once asked our class conduct an experiment. He asked us to make a conscious effort to catch ourselves in these little lies and, at the moment we’d caught ourselves, we’d reveal to whomever it was we were talking that we had just told a lie.

"I’m sorry, that’s not true," we se were to say, "I just lied to you."

We collected some strange looks over the course of the experiment.

Um... okay. That actually never happened. I just lied to you. Easy, isn’t it?

These little embellishments happen with such frequency and innocence, it would be difficult to call them moral outrages. The only objective, after all, is to endear ourselves to one another, and no third party directly suffers as a consequence. Still, that such lies achieve no useful purpose, and that their primary purpose is self-promotion, makes it difficult to defend them. I’d say that they’re quite forgivable, but not defensible.

This brings us then to the realm of lies that are simply unjustifiable—and what I suspect was the motivation behind this question to begin with. These are the lies that are solely self-serving and deliver measurable injustice to one or more third parties as a consequence. Since this is a political publication, I’m guessing the questioner would like me to address the lies of President Clinton. And, to serve space constraints, I’ll specifically address those lies he told in conjunction with the Monica Lewinski scandal and subsequent impeachment trial.

President Clinton’s defenders attempted to mitigate the moral repugnance of his lies by saying he told them only to protect his family. In other words, the good he thought would come of his lying outweighed the deviance of the lies themselves. Or, more simply, any man in the same position would have done the same thing.

I have several problems with this defense. First, any man--in fact no man--will ever be in the position President Clinton but himself. Only forty-two men in the history of the world have been president of the United States. No others we know have had an affair with an intern. None other has had a sexual harassment suit brought against him while in office. None other has had the sexual bravado of President Clinton that would require such questions to be asked of him to begin with. (Others had affairs but were, at least, discreet.) To say that any man in a similar position would have done the same thing is tough to swallow (pun fully intended) because no man ever has, or likely ever will be, in a similar position.

My second problem with Mr. Clinton’s justification for lying (or, "misleading," as he called it) is the fact that the deception took place during a proceeding in the pursuit of justice. Alan Derschowitz’s "expertise" aside, there is never justification for dishonesty during a criminal or civil trial, a pre-trial deposition, witnessing before an arbitrator, or while testifying before Congressional committees. Truth is vital to the function of American jurisprudence. This is why there are privileges available (spouse/clergy/attorney-client) when truthful testimony conflicts with other, more compelling interests.

The consequence of Mr. Clinton’s lie, then, was to corrupt the distribution of justice--a moral morass that far exceeds the possible benefits any lie could muster.

I’m highly suspicious of Mr. Clinton’s claim that he lied to protect his wife and daughter from his own misconduct. But for argument’s sake, let’s accept Mr. Clinton’s explanation as fact. Even so, Mr. Clinton’s position as the chief enforcer of the law of the land, that his lie set a dubious precedent for future sexual harassment (and divorce) trials, and that his lie obstructed Paula Jones’ access to justice, all far outweigh any obligation he may have had to spare his family discomfort. Even accepting his explanation, his lies—his "misleadings"—were wholly inexcusable.

But I can think of a lie even worse than Mr. Clinton’s.

A few years ago, Ron Fitzimmons, national director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, testified before Congress in opposition to legislation that would ban the partial-birth abortion procedure. Mr. Fitzimmons asserted that procedure in question was employed only under the direst of circumstances and, even then, occurred only a countable few times annually. Mr. Fitzimmons later admitted that he effectively "lied through my teeth" in said testimony. President Clinton, several esteemed newspapers and a good number of lawmakers cited the testimony of Fitzimmons and others in rhetoric that ultimately killed the ban on the procedure. It was a dirty lie told to tip the scales in a debate of enormous moral consequence.

There then, your long answer. Lies are justified if they effect enough good to overcome the moral deficit incurred by lying itself. Lies told during a proceeding in the pursuit of justice are never acceptable. And lies that take direct victims or undermine our faith in public institutions while otherwise serving only the liar are the muck-and-mire filthiest of them all.

Now let me say something about statistics...

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