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WillowOne's Positions

Lying

Overview

A short essay, barely a hundred pages, arguing that we should not tell lies, including the small, kind, social ones that almost everyone considers harmless. Harris' claim is that white lies are not harmless: they deny people information they need, they commit the liar to maintaining a false picture of the world, they corrode the trust that makes relationships worth having, and they are usually told for the liar's comfort rather than the listener's. He works through the hard cases, the terminally ill relative, the friend's bad novel, the murderer at the door, and concludes that honesty, delivered with care, is almost always available and almost always better.

Notes

The book that changed my behaviour more than any other on this list, which is a strange thing to say about a book this slight. I had assumed, as most people do, that social lubrication required a certain amount of untruth. Harris' point that you can almost always find something true and kind to say, and that doing so is a skill that improves with practice, turned out to be correct in my own experience. It fits with the rest of my thinking: if I expect beliefs to track evidence, I should not be in the business of feeding other people false evidence, however pleasant.

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