Why we lie

Most of us grow up believing that we must never lie.

The truth is we lie  every day simply in order to keep ourselves moving forward. My ambitions would be very modest if they were determined entirely by my past achievements—and many of my achievements were possible only because I believed, with no good reason, that I could accomplish them. 

Nietzsche is intellectually refreshing in a way so few thinkers are precisely because he refuses to oversimplify and because he is honest—honest enough to admit that he has to lie in order to create a truthfulness that captures the world as he understands it.

 But let us be clear: Lies can inflict terrible harm. Lies by the government, for instance, can lead to moral bankruptcy and ruin (I’m thinking of Bush’s assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction). As  Saint Augustine pointed out, back in the fourth century in his treatise On Lying, that there are at least eight different kinds of lies, and each type may have a different moral valence. (Compare Bush’s self-deceptive lie about WMDs with Clinton’s bold-faced “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”) Real life requires more nuance about truthfulness and lying.

Of course, it is easier to tell the truth when not much is at stake—and indeed, the immorality is what we call “little white lies,” where what is at stake seems to be of little consequence. But telling small lies can become habitual, and lead to much larger lies. A person who believes a little white lie about his appearance in a swimsuit might not address his accelerating weight problem.. But the real concern has to be that whether it is a little fib told by a friend or a whopper told by the government, a lie undermines our trust in one another, and trust is essential for human flourishing. Nietzsche offered a more nuanced, pithier version of this argument when he wrote: “Not that you lied to me, but that I can no longer believe you, has shaken me.”

Nietzsche here emphasizes that trust is crucial for human interaction,  but only some kinds of lies are destructive of trust. (And of course there are lots of other ways of destroying trust, even while telling the truth.) In this sense, a lie that a scientist tells in a professional paper is very different from the lie she tells her four-year-old about Santa Claus. The first lie really does interfere with our ability to trust that scientist, and the moral and professional censure she suffers, if found out, is justified. The second lie is an example of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “the living truth” in his Ethics: using falsehood to communicate what could not be effectively (or as effectively) conveyed truthfully.

 In order to communicate, we often lie to one another and to ourselves. Deception, communication, and trust are all interwoven—and truthfulness, rather than being the rule, starts to look like the exception. After all, mightn’t that be precisely why we place such a premium on the truth? In arguments against lying, it is often claimed that to lie requires too much mental effort. (“Oh, what a tangled web . . .”) But I think just the opposite is the case: Lying is usually the easier way out. Maybe we prize the truth because it is difficult and rare. It is often hard to know the truth, hard to accept it, hard to tell it.

People—not just salespeople—lie to us all the time, and yet we continue to trust them. In certain circumstances, we will even trust them to lie to us. The truth is that all adult moral life consists of our long-practiced (while admittedly imperfect) ability to distinguish what is ethically urgent from what is morally innocuous.

It might even turn out that the belief that it is wrong to lie is itself simply a particularly useful, even necessary, self-deception. Perhaps we widely insist that lying is wrong because lying only works if we all generally flatter ourselves that, at least most of the time, we are telling the truth. “O love’s best habit is in seeming trust,”

Shakespeare wrote in sonnet 138—seeming trust—“so I lie with her and she lies with me / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.”

Aristotle, who distinguished four kinds of liars in his Nicomachean Ethics thought that a noble person wouldn’t compromise himself by telling a falsehood. I think this is why most of us have a knee-jerk reaction to lying: We feel like our pride, our dignity, is preserved when we tell the truth. If you tell me a truth I don’t want to hear, I might not like you for it, but I’ll often respect the fact that you had the courage to be honest with me."

"Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler." Albert Camus.

According to the purpose to tell lies, they can be divided into three types: beneficial lies, spiteful lies, neutral lies.

Beneficial lies usually mean to help. They are told out of kindness and people benefit from them. They help avoid hurt, sadness, insult, and impersonality. A peasant lied to the Nazi army that no Jews were hiding in his place; parents lie to the children that their beloved grandpa is living happily in heaven. These do cheat the listeners, but the liars ought to be praised instead of being criticized.

Spiteful lies mean to gain benefit and hurt people. They may come in the form of deceit or rumor. As for deceits, they are mostly made by liars to gain benefit. Lawyers lie on the court to help his criminal client win the lawsuit; sellers lie to their customers to talk them into buying the fake and shoddy products. These liars just benefit from the lies and get reputation, profit or toleration. In comparison, rumors are more vicious. Liars make them to revenge or pull their rivalries down. 

Protective lie which shields liar from danger.

Heroic lie that protects someone else from danger.
Playful lie that enhances the story.
Ego lie that prevents embarrassment. Gainful lie that enriches the liar.
Malicious lie that hurts someone.
The motive for that is purely most evil.

There is another type of lie that is most destructive - lying for the sake of lying...

But the sad fact is that liars even when they speak the truth are not believed.