The Morality Of Lying

People have innate tendencies toward both sin and virtue, and it's these competing urges and how we react to them that form the core of our moral life. Most people feel guilt when they lie, and well-raised people try to be truthful as much as they can. But there are situations where the instinct and the ethical training toward truthfulness is misplaced.

A high school teen realized he had inadvertently brought a pocket knife to a baseball game, and proactively sought out a security guard and handed it over. There were no metal detectors, no pat-downs. In all probability he could have just left it in his pocket and nobody would ever have known. But the kid was obviously raised to try to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, his moral education was incomplete. Most people realize that there are times when it is OK to lie.

When someone has broken in to your home and is threatening your family, if he asks you if there is anyone else in the house, do you have an ethical obligation to inform him of your young daughter, hiding in the basement crawlspace? No, of course not.

If you are held up and have your wallet taken by a mugger, and he asks if you have more, are you obligated to mention the envelope of cash in your inside coat pocket that you were taking to pay your rent? Of course not.

You are not obligated to be honest with criminals who mean you harm.

I posit that in many cases, government has become equivalent to a criminal adversary in our lives. Government creates thousands of technical violations and regulations that criminalize innocent behavior, then uses those regulations to rob us of our incomes and freedoms.

The pocket knife was doing no harm. It wasn't going to jump out of his pocket and stab somebody, but the criminal public school system is not this boy's friend. He has no more obligation to fess up about the knife than someone in the mugger and home invader examples above. You don't have to admit to an offense when there is no actual moral wrong being done.

You don't have to obey arbitrary authority.

When the government takes your money against your will, with threat of force, they don't call it stealing, they call it taxation, or regulatory costs.

When you lie to the government about a harmless activity to spare yourself from punishment, it's just protecting yourself.

Our government has lost legitimacy because it has criminalized harmless actions, thus making technical "criminals" out of good people. You don't have to go along with that any more than you have to offer your money to a mugger or your child to a home invader.

I think that this was understood better by older generations. We weren't raised to be as respectful of arbitrary authority. We didn't spend our lives in schools with crazy zero tolerance policies that had no relationship to reality. We didn't get punished with the force of law for normal teenage acting-out.

A few years back, I went to a local club with some friends, all of whom were at least ten years younger than me.

One of the friends had just bought several of us bottles of water right before we decided to leave. I hadn't even opened mine yet.

I saw at the door that they were refusing to let people to leave with any drinks, including these very pricey bottles of water. I wasn't about to just abandon it -- it was mine, it was paid-for -- or stand there guzzling it. So I very pointedly absolutely ignored the bouncer when he told me I couldn't take the water with me.

The bouncer really didn't know what to do. It was obvious he was used to being obeyed. But there's no law against leaving a club with a bottle of water. Their business policy doesn't carry the force of law; he couldn't lay a finger on me. "You can't leave here with that bottle!" "I just did." All he could do was bluster at me and tell me that I better never come back to the club. As if they don't want my money, or as if I couldn't live without going to that club. I think my young friends were as aghast as the bouncer. They had all just internalized that if someone in authority tells you to do something, you do it.

When did it get this bad? In my father's generation, the proper response would have been to tell the over-stepping bouncer to take a hike. Even in my generation, we had a general suspicion of arbitrary authority. But I don't think these kids do. They have grown up in a world where so many exercises of authority are arbitrary and defy common sense that they don't differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate authority. They obey authority because it is authority, not because the authority makes sense.

The downside of this is that when they do start disrespecting authority, they don't do it from any place of sound moral judgment -- they just reject authority in general. You get the Occupy movement. They weren't sure exactly what they wanted and what they were rebelling against, but  boy, they sure felt strongly about it!

I have all the respect in the world for people with the authority to catch thieves, rapists and murderers, or who collect reasonable taxes for legitimate purposes, like roads. But I don't have respect when the law becomes arbitrary. If your rifle's barrel is 16" you're a fine, upstanding citizen. If your rifle's barrel is 14" you better have a permit for a short-barreled rife or you're a despicable felon! Short-barreled rifles don't do anything (except reduce the speed of the bullet and make more noise). You don't look at a rifle and see a self-evident moral wrong due to the length of its barrel! It's arbitrary. It's capricious. It criminalizes something meaningless, and makes criminals of people who never hurt anyone. You can't respect that.