Is Lying Always Wrong? Business Ethics and Dishonesty

Introduction: The Ethics of Lying

While the concept of lying appears simple at first, upon consideration one can imagine any number of situations in which lying would not appear to always be wrong, thus creating something of a quandary for anyone attempting to argue in favor of ethical and honest behavior — especially in the corporate world. The problem investigated in this essay is whether lying is always wrong, and what the implications of that answer might be. To address this problem, this paper examines certain relevant, well-known instances of lying in which an argument can be made for either side, such as the padding of résumés with misleading or false information, and James Frey's repackaging of a novel into an ostensible memoir.

James Frey and the Memoir Fraud

James Frey wrote a book based roughly on his own experiences but embellished to the point that when he first shopped it around to publishers, he marketed it as a piece of fiction. It was soundly rejected, so he tried again with the same book — this time telling publishers it was a memoir. It was picked up by Random House, and Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces, became "a best-seller when Oprah Winfrey endorsed the book as one of her Oprah's Book Club selections," to the point that "there were 1.77 million copies sold in 2005, a figure that made Frey's book the number-one seller of the year" (Jennings, 2009, p. 69). Following its publication and success, the website The Smoking Gun investigated the claims made in the book and found that many of its crucial elements were either fabricated wholesale or embellished beyond recognition, leading to a public uproar that resulted in an angry Oprah chastising Frey on television and a $2.35 million settlement for those who felt they had been duped.

While at first glance the case of James Frey may appear to be a kind of ethical gray area — because the line between memoir and fiction can be murky — the fact is that Frey committed an outright act of dishonesty. He knew his book would not get picked up if sold as fiction (a fact not mentioned in the Jennings case study). It is not as if Frey always intended the story to be taken as a dramatized memoir; rather, he understood from the beginning that it was far more fiction than reality. That fiction only became a lie once he began telling other people it was true, so the case of James Frey actually provides a fairly clear-cut argument in favor of honesty, given the brutal public reaction once his lies became clear. Of course, this argument only goes so far: like any sufficiently famous person in America, the fallout from this scandal did not preclude Frey from receiving more writing contracts, the $2.35 million settlement was likely less than he earned from book sales in the first place, and A Million Little Pieces remains a best-seller.

Short-Term Gains and Long-Term Consequences

Frey's case offers lessons on short-term versus long-term perspectives in decision-making, because his dishonesty was eventually uncovered precisely due to his success. In the short term, the decision to market his novel as a memoir was likely made to make money and succeed at selling a book, with little thought given to how that claim might hold up later. Having already been rejected once, Frey was probably not imagining he would become so successful so rapidly. His case reveals the central difficulty that arises with lying: the longer a lie persists, the more detailed and robust its maintenance must become. While it is not impossible to sustain a lie over the long term (as will be seen shortly), it requires far more skill and cunning than concocting a story about overcoming alcoholism and crack cocaine addiction through sheer willpower. Frey's dishonesty relied not only on no one bothering to check any of his claims, but also on Random House forgetting that it had previously rejected the same story when it was labeled fiction.

Conclusion: Is Lying Always Wrong?

To see why this is the case, imagine a soldier who lies about his age in order to fight for the military, and try to imagine the same people who cried foul over Ms. Green and Ms. Jones's dishonesty reacting the same way to that soldier. (This is not to suggest that volunteering to perform state-sanctioned violence is unambiguously in the service of the greater public good, but rather that the rules for determining what constitutes a "wrong" versus a "right" deployment of dishonesty are generally arbitrary and culturally informed.) One must therefore conclude from the comparison among Ms. Green, Ms. Jones, and Mr. Frey that lying is not always wrong, but must instead be analyzed in terms of the motivation behind the lie as well as its actual effects. In the context of business and commerce, extra attention must also be paid to the legal limits of dishonesty, because while a particular lie might not be wrong in the sense that it is ultimately helpful to others, it may nonetheless be illegal. Any conception of dishonesty as always and eternally wrong ultimately falls apart, because it must be grounded in some set of universally applied moral standards that bear little relationship to the actual functioning of human society.

References

Jennings, M. (2009). Business ethics: Case studies and selected readings (6th ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.