an lying be virtuous and not merely excusable?  I shall argue that it can.  I proceed in two steps, beginning first with an example where the truth is withheld, but no lie is told.  Then I shall modify the example a bit so that in point of fact a lie is told.  By the second example, I hope to have provided a case where the lie is not merely excused but is motivated by and reveals a truly virtuous character.  If this is right, then we can have a case for lying where the justification for lying is not tied to the thesis that the person had no right to the truth. 

Suppose that Gabriel learns some very bad news regarding his health just three days prior to the wedding of Jeffrey, his very dearest friend.  Gabriel learns that he has terminal cancer, with no more than 8 months to live.  Normally, Jeffrey would have been the first person to find out.  But not this time.  Gabriel flies in for the wedding and serves as Jeffrey’s best man, as had been planned.   A few months later, Jeffrey learns the truth and is very upset that Gabriel had not breathed a word about this to him.  Gabriel’s response, of course, is simple enough: “I was not about to ruin your wedding.  And your knowing would not have changed a thing”.  Without lying, Gabriel withheld information from Jeffrey; and this he did for the good of Jeffrey.  Yet, this hardly seems wrong.  Quite the contrary, it seems to have been the ever so decent thing to do.  Moreover, although Jeffrey is upset, the reason why he is upset is not that he thinks that he has been wronged by Gabriel.  Quite the contrary, it is simply that he would much rather have been there to help his friend cope with the devastating news. 

Of course, there was no lie told.  But we can easily imagine that this happens.  Modifying the example, things proceed as follows: Gabriel flies in for the wedding and serves as Jeffrey’s best man, as had been planned.  Jeffrey notes that Gabriel is looking a little pale and inquiries as to why.  Gabriel lies, though, and claims that he is just getting over a bout of influenza.  When Jeffrey finds out the truth a few months later, he is very upset.  Alas, Gabriel remarks: “I was not about to ruin your wedding and the starting of your new life.  Your knowing about my illness would not have changed a thing”.  Given the lie, does Jeffrey now have more of a reason to be upset than in the preceding case?  Does the lie reveal Gabriel to be more devious or malicious in some way?  Does the lie taint his moral character in any way at all?  Absolutely not.  We do not have a remarkably decent person in the first scenario who is willing to keep his tragic pain to himself for the sake of a dear friend’s most precious moment in life, but a fallen angel, as it were, in the second one; for the lie adds nothing whatsoever that is negative to Gabriel’s motives. 

In both scenarios, information was withheld.  But, of course, no one would argue that in the first scenario Jeffrey had a right to the information that Gabriel withheld.  Had Gabriel waited until his final moments of life to speak to Jeffrey about the matter, this would have been odd.  Perhaps disturbingly so.  Still, no right would have been violated; no wrong would have been done. 

With the modified scenario, there is the obvious difference that Jeffrey has been lied to.  But it seems that we can admit that and ask: Has Jeffrey been wronged?  For what we get with Gabriel’s lie is not a quite extraordinary coincidence where a lie turns out to be beneficial, but much more.  Notice that no one could have blamed Sebastain or called him self-centered had he lost all composure upon learning that he has terminal cancer.  But what Gabriel in fact did is saintly, showing at once both a level of selflessness and a level of integrity that is rare among human beings.  And the lie that he told was pressed in the service of the realization of these virtues.  Anything but the lie would have been the undoing of Jeffrey’s wedding; and Gabriel simply was not having that. 

The second scenario with Gabriel reveals the seminal point that in lying a person can actually exhibit behavior that rightfully elicits our moral admiration precisely because it reveals the kind of deep and extraordinary character whereby a person is willing to make a considerable sacrifice for the good of another.  The idea, then, that all lying is crass and morally base is simply mistaken.  Far from revealing a weakness, Gabriel’s lie evinces remarkable self-command.  To be sure, Gabriel did not jump upon a hand grenade in order to save a friend’s life, but in terms of motivational structure what he in fact did is ever so parallel to that sort of sacrifice.  The lie in this instance, far from destroying trust, profoundly underwrites it.  In Gabriel, Jeffrey has one extraordinary friend.  The example also brings out that we make the case for lying without supposing that the person to whom the lie is told is not owed the truth, in that the intended results of the liar are being counteracted.[1] 

At its best, respect for the truth is not just about telling the truth, but about showing respect for the other.  This is why it matters not just that we tell the truth but how and when we tell it.  For as was observed at the outset, the truth can be told in a mean and hurtful manner or in a thoughtful and considerate manner; and one does not show respect for another by telling the truth to her or him in a mean and hurtful manner.  This is the reason why there are lots of truths that we simply do not say.  In fact, we sometimes refrain from saying things that are obviously true about ourselves precisely because we come across as arrogant or mean-spirited in doing so.  Everyone knows, for instance, that University X is better than University Y.  Yet, it is very rare for a professor at University X to say “The institution at which I am a faculty member is vastly superior in terms of academic excellence to the one where you are a faculty member”.  Generally, doing so would be seen as a form of crass arrogance.  We can easily think of numerous other examples of this sort.  It may, for instance, be manifestly obvious that Zephyr is vastly more attractive than Adalon.  Everyone knows this, including Zephyr and Adalon.  Just so, there are very few scenarios, if any, where Zephyr could say this to Adalon without coming across as mean-spirited.  Differentials in body weight provide us with another example of this sort. 

It goes without saying that we cannot respect a person by lying to the individual for no other reason than to advance our own interest or to harm the person.  Nor can we respect a person by withholding information from the individual that she needs in order to make decisions about her very own life.  This is why paternalism in medicine is seen as so objectionable.  Nor, again, can we respect a person by presenting a false picture of the kind of person that we are in terms of our character, personality, or station in life; for this is tantamount to a vicious form of manipulation.  Yet, from none of this does it follow that lying to a person necessarily entails failing to have the proper moral respect for that individual, as a lie need not violate any of the moral precepts just articulated.  And one way to see this is to notice, as the remarks of the preceding paragraph make abundantly clear, that respect for the truth is utterly incompatible with being unscrupulous about what truths we tell and when we tell them or how we tell them. 

The argument of this blog-entry brings into sharp relief the truth that the moral opprobrium that we attach to lying has much more to do with motives than is generally acknowledged.  It is very rare that anyone prevaricates for the reasons that moved Gabriel (in the second scenario) to do so.  And this tells us what we already know, namely that it is quite rare for a person to have morally legitimate motives for lying.  The same also holds for killing an innocent person.