Yes, according to Sam Harris in his latest book. Clancy Martin isn’t so sure:
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). But Harris oversimplifies both the act and the morality of lying. Merely sorting out what should count as a lie is notoriously difficult. 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 than you find in Harris’s all-or-nothing approach.
More on that “nuance”:
[A]s evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has argued, deceit is fundamental to animal communication, “and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced.” In order to communicate, we 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 an interview just after the book was released, Harris had this to say about “white lies” – such as when you respond to the dreaded question, “Do I look fat in this dress?”:
[M]any people view that question as really not a question. What is really being asked is, “Tell me that you love me” or “Tell me that you think I’m beautiful.” If you believe you’re actually in that situation where there’s a subtext that you’re supposed to respond to, well, it’s not a lie to do that.
But in many situations there is a question being asked here, and information is useful. It could be that one dress looks much better than the other. What is more flattering to her? It could be that your wife wants to lose weight. You want her to lose weight. You think she would be happier if she lost weight. There’s a conversation about weight that, if you’re always eliding this inconvenient fact, no one is ever forced to realize that both of you are noticing something that actually can be changed.
Harris’ fundamentalist opposition to lying also sparked one of our most popular reader threads last year, “Always Tell Kids The Truth?“
The Dish 