Liar in the Sense That

¶ … liar in the sense that I purposely invented false stories or lied to people to trick them into giving me things, but I defined truth in a very narrow and literal sense. For example, if my parents asked me a question and I knew the answer might get me in trouble, I would say something in response that was entirely truthful but that I knew would communicate something false.

I believed that as long as I did not actually say something untruthful I could not be accused of "lying." So, if I went to a party someplace that I was not allowed to go to without permission and my parents asked me if I was at the party downtown on Friday where all those kids from my school got arrested, I would say something along the lines of "I don't even hang out with those guys…I went to Mark's house on Friday" and then I would walk out of the room as though I was angry at being asked the question.

The fact of the matter is that I was at that party on Friday and I did not want my parents to know that. Because I had been taught that it is wrong to lie, I thought that as long as what I said was truthful, I was not actually lying.

In the situation with the downtown party, it is true that I did not hang out with the particular kids who got arrested and that I was not friends with them at all; in fact, I was happy they got in trouble. So, the statement "I don't even hang out with those guys" was entirely truthful. The statement that I went to Mark's house on Friday was also true, because I walked to Mark's house and then Mark and I drove downtown in his car.

For a long time, I used to answer questions like that anytime that I knew the real answer to the question would cause me problems, especially with my parents. I eventually came to the realization that this kind of response is as much of a lie as a literal lie. Critique While Nietzsche (on Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873) would disagree, I came to the realization that a person who misleads others by the careful choice of words is as immoral as an outright liar.

Nietzsche (1873) argued that truth and falsity were not actually states of reality in nature but only exist as a function of the interpretation that human beings assign to them in communication and that for animals without human intellectual communication, there is no such thing as truth. For that reason, Nietzsche questioned whether it is appropriate to give people moral credit for telling the truth and to consider them immoral for lying.

In some respects, I do agree with Nietzsche, but not in any that would justify the way I used to use language to lie. Specifically, I do believe that it is immoral to lie in most situations and that people who lie easily and often are unlikely to be moral in their lives in general.

That is because, in principle, the purpose of lying is, in one way or another, to trick other people into doing things they would not do if they knew the truth and all of us would be annoyed if we found out that we were on the receiving side of lies. I realized during the 2012 presidential election how immoral lying is, even the passive lying of the type that I used to do,.