Lying and Other Virtues

A Personal Account of a Moral Choice to be Dishonest

Lying to spare the feelings of another — therefore lying from an impulse to do good — is a familiar part of human experience, and I am sure that everyone reading this has experienced it, or, at very least, has experienced the dilemma. Such lies are so common we sometimes call them “little white lies” (this is what we called them when I was a child). Some moralists affect to condemn lying even when undertaken for the good of others, and certainly there is a profound moral discomfiture whenever we arrogate ourselves to the position of, “…it’s for your own good…” This kind of attitude usually outrages the recipient of the dubious “good,” and for good reason.

I realized that I have an explicit memory of the first time I knowingly and consciously lied in order to spare the feelings of another person. I may well have done so prior to the this event, and I certainly have done so a great many times after this event, but this particular event stands out in my mind. And for this to make sense, I have to provide some background — not only the micro-history of the event, but also a certain background on my own feelings on the matter.

First of all you must understand that I hated school. Many children claim to hate school, but I really hated it — hated it with a passion. I found no redeeming value either in the academic content or the extracurricular activities of school. The extracurricular activities, which are for many children the only thing that makes going to school worthwhile, were something I hated even more than my hated school work. I hated the institution of school and the details of its implementation and administration. This was an abstract, impersonal and indeed a spiritual hatred. I do not recall hating any of my teachers, much less hating any of them as individuals, though it was very common among the children with whom I went to school to casually say, “I hate Miss/Mr. So-and-so.”

At an age of about twelve years, when I was in sixth grade, the school arranged (or perhaps I should say that some of the teachers at the school arranged) for the entire sixth grade class to attend a camp for an entire school week, Monday to Friday. Note that this was not a private summer camp, such that parents pay for their children’s attendance (and possibly also pay for the privilege of getting their children out of the house during summer vacation), but rather a school-sponsored and school-administered camp during the regular school calendar and involving the regular school population.

So this “camp” experience was like lifting up the school and setting it down entire into a camp setting, and then not being able to get away for a week (without taking extreme measures, such as flight, which I considered). Since you already know, then, that I hated school, it should be pretty obvious that I really hated this camp. More than forty years later the memory of it still fills me with anger and revulsion.

Two teachers at my school were especially involved in this camp experience, and after we had returned from the camp (whether weeks or months later I cannot recall) one of these teachers claimed to have invested his own money into making the camp happen for the students, and that a car wash (or some other sort of similar event) would be held in order to recover some of these cash outlays. I do not know if any of this is true, but I do know that teachers commonly claim to spend their own money on their students, and however difficult I find it to believe this, I have heard it from enough credible sources that I believe it to be at least occasionally true.

The teacher who claimed to have spent his personal funds on the camp wanted all his students to be present at the fund raising event to assist. I approached this teacher at his desk and asked him directly about participation in this fund-raising event. He looked at me and said something like, “You enjoyed camp along with everyone else didn’t you? Don’t you think that you should help to pay for it.” (I say, “he said something like,” because this is not a quote but the best paraphrase that I can recover after the lapse of more than 40 years.)

At that moment I paused because I knew that I was faced with an explicit choice, and even at that age I knew that it was a moral choice with conflicting claims on each side of any possible outcome. I could be honest and say, “I hated camp,” or I could lie and tell him that I too enjoyed camp.

Why would I even consider lying under these circumstances? I could tell from his manner, his expression, and his tone of voice that he really and truly believed that he had helped to bring a valuable experience to his student’s lives, and it probably never crossed his mind that he might have been rather inflicting a traumatic event on others that they would not soon forget. If I told the truth, that would mean either that I would puncture his delusion or that he would be forced to become defensive (and to do so in the presence of a child, which would lower him, morally speaking, to below my level) in order to maintain his delusion.

So I lied. I lied to spare his feelings, because I didn’t want him to think that the time and effort and money he had put into this pet project of his was an abject failure (at least in my case). After I paused, I looked down at the desk (at that age I was not yet accomplished at looking a man in the eye and lying to him; I’m much better at that now) and hesitatingly admitted that, yes, I too had enjoyed camp with the rest of the class.

One of the interesting features of this particular dishonesty of mine is that it occurred in a profoundly unequal situation. Usually in human affairs, it is the stronger and advantaged party that lies to spare the feelings of the weaker and disadvantaged, perhaps out of a sense of noblesse oblige. But there I was, a skinny, twelve year old kid, lying to spare the feelings of my teacher. And I believe that my lie was “successful,” in so far as it passed unnoticed; there was and has been no need to revisit that particular instance of dishonesty (except in so far as I am rehearsing it now).

If I had made my true feelings known at the time I can imagine that these youthful revelations would have been treated with contempt and savage disparagement. This was, at the time, the accepted practice for dealing with young people who spoke their minds rather than conforming to the status quo. It would not have occurred to anyone at the time that coercing others into financing (and therefore justifying) their own traumatization constitutes a height of injustice, relieved only by the fact that, as an adult, one can set such things aside and see them in proper perspective.