Lying

by Sam Harris

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.

professor, Ronald A. Howard.

Is it wrong to lie?

I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

Deception can take many forms, but not all acts of deception are lies.

By wearing cosmetics, a woman seeks to seem younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty does not require that she issue a continual series of disclaimers—“I

Elisions

We may skirt the truth at such moments, but we do not deliberately manufacture falsehood.

it is even possible to deceive with the truth. I could, for instance, stand on the sidewalk in front of the White House and call the headquarters of Facebook on my cellphone: “Hello, this is Sam Harris. I’m calling from the White House, and I’d like to speak to Mark Zuckerberg.” My words would, in a narrow sense, be true—but the statement seems calculated to deceive. Would I be lying? Close enough.

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.

it is in believing one thing while intending to communicate another that every lie is born.

the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view.

Honesty is a gift we can give to others.

The besf present that we can give each other is our presence. Erhan Yet, it has to be our honest and authentic selves.

Lying is the lifeblood of addiction.

Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow, but haven’t.

Two Types of Lies Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly. The origin of this imbalance remains a mystery, but it surely relates to the value we place on a person’s energy and intent.

redound

lies of commission:

lies of omission

If what you say in the heat of the moment isn’t quite right, you can amend it. I have learned that I would rather be maladroit, or even rude, than dishonest.

children do not learn to tell white lies until around the age of four,

But what could be wrong with truly “white” lies? First, they are still lies. And in telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.

By lying, we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.

Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

“Do I look fat in this dress?”

The woman is simply saying, “Tell me I look good.” If she’s your wife or girlfriend, she might even be saying, “Tell me you love me.” If you sincerely believe that this is the situation you are in—that the text is a distractor and the subtext conveys the entire message—then so be it. Responding honestly to the subtext would not be lying.

A white lie is simply a denial of these realities. It is a refusal to offer honest guidance in a storm. Even on so touchy a subject, lying seems a clear failure of friendship. By reassuring your friend about her appearance, you are not helping her to do what you think she should do to get what she wants out of life.

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.

honesty demands that we communicate any uncertainty we may feel about the relevance of our own opinions.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about

Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he can know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?

When we pretend not to know the truth, we must also pretend not to be motivated by it. This can force us to make choices that we would not otherwise make.

tiny erosions of trust are especially insidious because they are almost never remedied.

Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten. We can apologize, of course. And we can resolve to be more forthright in the future. But we cannot erase the bad impression we have left in the minds of other people.

A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves that we would prefer to keep private. If someone asks how much money you have in your bank account, you are under no ethical obligation to tell him. The truth could well be, “I’d rather not say.”

To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden.

philandering

uncanny

People who could no longer abide him because of his unconscionable treatment of his wife nevertheless helped maintain his lies.

I disagree.. Wbo says or knows the truth or the nature of the relationship between husband and wife. Unless directly solicited, it is none of anyone's business.

In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a real relationship with this person to be nonexistent. For most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever. And even when they seem to, it is often possible to worry that lying was the easy (and less than truly ethical) way out.

When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory,

“illusory truth effect.”

credence.

war and espionage are conditions in which human relationships have broken down or were never established in the first place; thus the usual rules of cooperation no longer apply.

exiguous

The role of a spy strikes me as a near total sacrifice of personal ethics for a larger good—whether real or imagined. It is a kind of moral self-immolation.