Is it always wrong to lie? What if it’s for a good cause? Are white lies ever justified? These are questions that we likely ponder about when ethical issues come to mind. Likewise, the neuroscientist Sam Harris has pondered about them and has decided to tackle them in a short treatise on why lying is almost always wrong.

Harris’ conviction seems hopelessly hard-line at first. However, some clarification about what his definition of lying is and some nuances at the edges of his argument soften his stance somewhat. This allows the reader to appreciate the value of his argument more than first appearances allow.

But his entire argument is still hard to convince. I’ve had some reservations and wished he elaborated on parts of his treatise which seemed simplistic relative to his call to not lie in that context. I will relate his general argument about not lying and redound its value before flagging my concerns.

To appreciate Harris’ argument, we must first grasp his definition of lying. It is the intention to mislead others when they expect honest communication that is at the heart of lying. This means, first, that deception and lying are dissimilar. Magic tricks, simple etiquette like saying ‘I’m fine, thank you’ to a ‘How are you’ question even when we are not fine, and wearing makeup are forms of deception: the truth is being concealed. But they are not usually performed with the intention to mislead others when they expect honest communication.

Second, lying and omitting the truth don’t always overlap. One could imagine situations where telling the truth in its entirety would be impossible or infeasible. Harris notes that people on the internet sometimes erroneously label him a neurologist. He is, in fact, a neuroscientist. But it is impossible for him to go around the internet and correct everyone who mislabels him every time.

Third, the truth can also be used in a lie. I recall my mother banning me from playing handheld video games like Tetris when I was a child. One time I asked my mother if I could exercise my fingers. She said yes. I took her response as her unbanning me from playing Tetris and got on with it. I spoke the truth but used it to mislead my mom when she expected honest communication.

Fourth, lying and keeping secrets don’t necessarily overlap. Sticking to a promise to keep a secret isn’t lying, though it may be unethical for other reasons. In professional contexts, adhering to the norms of a profession, like maintaining patient confidentiality, or strategically emphasizing and de-emphasizing bodies of information to bolster a client’s case, aren’t considered lies.

These caveats do not cover instances when, for personal profit, professionals, public servants, and the like go beyond the norms of their profession and take advantage of their credentials to mislead others when they expect honest communication.

Fifth, lying and other kinds of immoral behavior don’t overlap. Some people live lives of breath-taking immorality. But if they are open about it, no lies are committed. They are scandal proof. Lies come in pretending to be someone we are not and betraying the honest expectations of others. Think of Josh Duggar’s sex abuse scandal and others like it.

Finally, not lying doesn’t mean speaking only the truth. We may be speaking truthfully, but our words could still be false. Maybe we’re sincerely mistaken about a fact and misspoke. Maybe we’re simplifying something complicated as a matter of necessity, for example, when scientific information is communicated to stakeholders who don’t have specialist knowledge of the science. In either case, we did not intend to mislead honest expectations. We are not lying.

To sum up, on Harris’ definition of lying, intentions and expectations are key. We intend to mislead, and the lied to is expecting honest communication. Positive consequences are deliberately skewed in favor of the liar at the cost of the lied to. As a result, the latter’s well-being is somehow diminished.

It is this kind of lying that Harris argues we should stop doing completely. He applies this definition to various kinds of lies and their effects to bolster his case.

We may justify typical lies to ourselves by thinking that the consequences to the lied to are unremarkable. However, when the tables are turned, and we are the ones lied to, we almost never share that view with the liar. Even if the consequences are tiny, we would still feel betrayed.

Just remember what it felt like when a friend was straight-up lying to you and you knew it while the lie was being told. It corrodes relationships. Trust has broken however small the lie: the lied to realizes that the liar is someone who will lie when it suits their needs.

Lies have the pernicious effect of lowering relationship quality in the other direction also. We have psychological defenses that help us maintain a positive self-concept. When we lie to others, we begin to trust and like them less. To protect our self-concept, we justify our lies by deprecating the people we lie to. The more damaging the lie, the more we come to dislike our victims.

The above effects apply to white lies as well. In addition, when we lie out of compassion for our friends, to not injure their feelings or to encourage them by praising them for something they’re not good at, we hurt them in ways we do not expect. For example, they may act on our encouragement and make bad career decisions.

If you’ve ever watched talent shows like American Idol, untalented singers sometimes report to the judges that they’ve been told by their friends and colleagues that they have wonderful voices. While a source of comedy, it reveals the harmfulness of white lies to the lied to in domains that are far more serious.

Certain actions, such as saying last goodbyes before passing from a terminal illness, can only be taken when the relevant true information is made available. By white lying, we are denying the lied to the best tools – that is, our truthful intentions – we can give them to make free life choices. We are denying their autonomous pursuit of well-being.

But what if our truthful intentions are distorted? Taking the American Idol singing example, what if we misjudged a friend’s singing ability? Because they were performing in a style we do not appreciate, we tell them that they can’t sing. I’m tempted to think this when I hear rapping.

Harris notes that honesty demands that we communicate the uncertainty of our opinions by first acknowledging to ourselves the prejudice or sloppy thinking behind them. So, our truthful intentions must include claims of fallibility in our opinions whenever they are, in fact, fallible. Communicating uncertainty also stops us from causing offense when no offense is intended.

But there are circumstances where lies seem necessary. At the personal level, we consider it necessary to lie when telling the truth dangers our well-being in dire fashion and that of innocent others.

Imagine a known psychopathic murderer escaping from prison and asking us about the whereabouts of a friend whom he is intending to kill. Most will agree that we should lie to the murderer and then tell the police about his whereabouts in order to protect both ourselves and our friend. For similar reasons, undercover crime work or spying for the sake of national security are forms of lying which we likely endorse.

In every other case, Harris condemns lying. He points out that lying is by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others: ‘it condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.’

In addition to the downsides of lying, there are upsides to communicating only our truthful intentions. Honesty is a refuge. People trust our opinions and feedback. They know our praises are genuine. And they find solace in the fact that we won’t say anything behind their back that we wouldn’t also say to their face.

Speaking honestly leaves little to prepare for. We don’t have to keep track of our lies. We avoid long term relationship problems. Being honest – and this includes speaking our minds when asked – forces us to take stock of how judgmental, self-interested, and petty we may have become. It forces us to come to grips with the struggles we face, for example, in abusive relationships or with addictions. It reveals to us the ways we can grow, and it motivates us to change.

Understood this way, Harris’ injunction to not lie seems more convincing and doable than first appearances suggest. However, I still have reservations.

Concealing reality is part of the fabric of human life. We bolster our self-image on communication platforms. We strategically emphasize and de-emphasize our skill sets or experiences to meet our goals. We embellish stories of our past to excite and intrigue. We don’t advertise our greatest flaws (flaws we are undoubtedly working to fix) up front on a first date or at a job interview. We tell white lies to our children to get them to do what we want. We withhold information about budding romantic relationships to friends or family for fear of the rumor mill. We put on our best selves for the sake of others even if we’re not always 100%. We have social graces; we don’t speak as if we have the social ineptitude of a child.

Research shows that we “lie” in the above fashion ubiquitously. Note, however, that Harris’ definition of lying carefully tries to exclude these. But Harris’ demarcation criteria are themselves open to question. There are circumstances above that include harboring misleading intentions and betraying honest expectations, for example, to avoid embarrassment or to protect ourselves from possible backlash. I leave it to you to recall such instances from experience.

Furthermore, while he concedes that we aren’t necessarily committing lies when omitting the truth, he demarcates such instances strictly. Only when omitting the truth is infeasible or impossible is “lying” permitted. What about when omitting the truth is simply a matter of social graces or convenience?

Imagine an elder in your community talking to a group of people, including yourself. You notice that he is making some glaring factual errors. Imagine also that he tends to pause lengthily, speak very slowly, and, as a result, make, on average, one point every ten minutes. Would choosing not to take the time out to correct him at that moment, knowing that this diversion will lengthen the group conversation another half-hour and inconvenience everyone, be considered lying? Why not wait for a better time to bring this up? 

What if the glaring error won’t detriment listeners in the slightest? Would anyone rush to correct facts in a eulogy given by someone who just lost her loved one right after she steps off the podium? Anyone who has lived in the real world will recognize many such situations when choosing to speak truthfully is not only inconvenient but inappropriate. Acting like that will only invite suspicions that we are compulsively disordered, suffering from some other mental illness, or that we’ve had a terrible upbringing.

Harris assumes for the sake of argument that the goal of human communication is to convey true information. Our truthful intentions approximate this ideal. He does not, however, seem to appreciate the fact that, historically, the primary function of human communication in our evolutionary history has been to keep up our survival prospects by lubricating our relationships, building cohesive coalitions, and resolving dangerous conflicts. None of these require an unbending commitment to the truth.

Our primate cousins spend hours engaging in peacemaking activities like grooming after inevitable episodes of conflict arising from jealousy, infanticide, and the like break out and relationships have to be slowly mended. We use culture and sophisticated language to do the same thing but at a far greater scale.

We engage in the reciprocity norms that are set by our culture. We exaggerate truths about absent others to build bonds with our fellow gossipers. We ‘like’ things on social media that we don’t actually like to maintain good relations with friends and to subtly convey disapproval to the friends we don’t ‘like.’  We use censorious language to get members of our social community to toe-the-party-line and adhere to what we want the community’s norms to be.

None of the above require a commitment to convey true information. By contrast, some require the use of false or exaggerated information to be effective.

Harris acknowledges the ubiquity of the above forms of “lying” and the social ineptitude attributed to those who only speak truthfully. He also accepts that conveying true information has not been the primary function of human communication throughout our evolutionary history. He simply believes that, for the sake of a better world, we can and should strive to do better today. Here are his comments about this in full:

Some readers may now worry that I am recommending a regression to the social ineptitude of early childhood. After all, children do not learn to tell white lies until around the age of four, after they have achieved a hard-won awareness of the mental states of others. But there is no reason to believe that the social conventions that happen to stabilize in primates like us around the age of eleven will lead to optimal human relationships. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that lying is precisely the sort of behavior we need to outgrow in order to build a better world.

At the personal level then, even if it cannot fully convince, Harris’ argument if altered slightly to accommodate the primary function of human communication, is well taken. For the sake of a better world, we should strive to lie as little as we can without stomping on social propriety. This balancing act is something we must calibrate to fit the norms of the social worlds we inhabit. Because our habitations are all different, Harris cannot advise us here.

But what about outside the personal context? We can take issue with the fact that, even in the professional context, adhering to professional norms like keeping patient confidentiality or simplifying scientific results to non-technical stakeholders are, by Harris’ strict definition, lies. The necessity for such norms might soften the blow. But Harris himself cites the harmful consequences of lying even when they are in line with said norms.

For example, governments in the West have a reputation for concealing information as a part of their norms to protect the public’s interest. Harris argues that such concealments have later caused difficulty in their spreading the truth about the MMR vaccine against anti-vaxxers. As vaccination rates plummet, children who would otherwise be alive today have fallen sick and died. Harris clearly condemns such concealments also.

So, his demarcation line between permissible concealment and impermissible lying is blurred. This is a problem for Harris because he takes a hard-line against lying. But if we cannot determine what lies are, how can we follow his advice? What if we work in an industry where the norm, deviant from the original standard “best practices” for that industry, is for information to be embellished for the sake of attention and profit? Is Harris’ advice then that all such people who work in those industries quit their jobs? What if their families depend on their income?

As much as we’re afraid to admit reality, not everyone can survive and provide for their families by living a perfectly truthful life (defined by Harris), professional or otherwise. This is especially so for those who live in impoverished circumstances. Jean Valjean’s plight in Les Misérables comes to mind. Does Harris advocate the unbending legalism of Javert?

His comments about Kantian deontology suggest not. The philosopher Immanuel Kant forwarded the principle of universalizability in ethics. The principle requires that if an action has been determined to be ethical, it must be performed in all circumstances. This includes, for example, not lying to a tyrannical authority that you are hiding innocent refugees they intend to torture and kill (for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that they entered your house without your consent, thus nullifying secret-keeping as a mitigating factor). Harris points out that this kind of universalizing principle is only something a psychopath would endorse.

Under regimes which feature terribly unjust laws, honest people have to lie to avoid, and to help others avoid, being punished for otherwise blameless behavior. We can imagine other circumstances where, through no fault of our own, telling the truth hurts us: for example, when we are surrounded by liars or grudge holders whom we know will use our truthful intentions against us. So, there is a position somewhat less extreme than Kant but still sufficiently hard-line that Harris gestures at but does not flesh-out well.

It may be that his position cannot be fleshed-out because the subject matter is too complex. Many topics in moral philosophy attract perennial controversy and debate. But then his goal to get people to stop lying is unmet because no one can heed his commendations to the letter.

One conceivable way out of this conundrum is to add to his definition of lying. Along with ‘misleading intentions’ and ‘betraying honest expectations,’ we could add ‘depending on the severity of the consequences.’ On this updated definition, if the consequences of lying are small, or if they help to avert nastier consequences, we may be permitted to lie. 

Unfortunately, this addition brings us back to square one: we aren’t fortune tellers. We cannot predict the consequences of our lies. Furthermore, telling the truth can also lead to unwanted consequences. But few in their right mind would blame the truth teller for telling the truth just because it led to unforeseen consequences. These mean that considering consequences, while part of the picture, complicate rather than clarify.

Another issue arises from our cognitive abilities. We may be convinced by Harris’ arguments, but that doesn’t mean that we can follow through on his advice. Study after study in cognitive psychology show that we are not the paragons of rationality we think we are. Part of the reason is that our evolutionary heritage has endowed us with cognitive systems that prioritize our survival over a dispassionate commitment to the truths of reality.

Cognitive researchers divide our thinking processes into two broad categories, system one and system two. System one denotes our fast, intuitive, and automatic thinking processes. System two denotes our slow, deliberative, and controlled thinking processes.

To illustrate their operations, system one engages when we hear an unexpected sound in the bushes near us. Our minds immediately default to the most risk averse assumption: that there is something in the bush that threatens our life. Our bodies go into fight-or-flight mode and adrenaline is secreted into our bloodstream. All of this is done automatically to facilitate our need to fight, escape, and survive (sometimes all three): 

System one helps us make quick decisions when quick decision-making offers us a distinct survival advantage.

System two engages when we are thinking of a problem rationally. We reason slowly, look carefully for flaws, and work through problems systematically. We do this when we check our thinking processes for cognitive biases and logical fallacies. 

Compared with system one, system two has only very recently conferred a significant advantage to human life. For most of our history before the invention of agriculture, the industrial revolution, and the population explosion that resulted from them, system one helped us survive better as species in small hunter-gatherer groups than system two.

Therefore, even though slow, deliberate, and controlled reasoning helps us in many domains today, we tend to default back to system one whenever we experience anything imminently threatening.

Because of that, it is likely that some of our lies are committed automatically under system one: when we feel threatened, we default to lying as a defense mechanism. If this is true, then, barring blanket behavioral therapy, it is hard to see how Harris’ injunctions feasibly map onto the realities of human cognition where some forms of deception may be indelibly seared into our cognitive architecture and therefore ineradicable. 

Finally, there is the problem of self-deception. To maintain a positive self-concept against the reality of our inconsistent beliefs and hypocrisies, we sometimes deceive ourselves. This complicates Harris’ criterion of truthful intentions for honesty: We may have convinced ourselves that we have truthful intentions when a part of us knows that we actually don’t. For an example of a masterclass in self-deception, ideological extremists abuse or exaggerate tautologies like their eternal victimhood to license their lies and simultaneously soothe their conscience. 

The above two issues, self-deception and system one thinking, are problematic for Harris’ argument because they suggest that some lies cannot be eradicated. We could, of course, pay close attention and strive to debug ourselves from our cognitive and psychological maladaptations, relative to the modern world. However, this process will likely take us only so far. Coming to terms candidly with the fullness of our own inconsistent beliefs, especially concerning our truthful intentions, is not a welcome or pleasant experience. Many of us will be regularly transformed by it. But some of us will sink deeper into self-deception. 

The post has taken a negative turn. But I do not wish my genuine concerns to detract from the merits of Harris’ argument and conviction. Going back to the less controversial aspects of his treatise, I agree that misleading those who expect honest communication for personal gain should be eradicated as far as possible from our speech. By doing so, we may motivate others to share our company on the journey toward the mutual trust and affection that the authenticity of honesty brings. I am inspired by his idealism even if I think that it’s hopelessly unrealistic when applied without nuance.

Though Harris’ treatise poses more questions than it answers, I am grateful to have read it and been motivated to change because of it. If you decide to give it a read, I hope it inspires you too.