11:47am May 8, 2014

It is sometimes okay to lie.

youneedacat:

It is okay to lie to someone who clearly wants information about you that you’re not willing to give, or who will use that information in a negative or even abusive way. If you can’t simply say “I won’t tell you”, there is nothing wrong at all with coming up with some lie and leaving it at that.

It’s also ok to *plan* to lie so that you won’t be compliance-triggered or language-triggered into telling the truth.

Yes.

Another situation where it’s okay to lie, is situations where it’s important to get something for someone, but the actual rules for getting that thing are impossible, so you can lie in order to jump through those hoops to get what the person needs. (Whether that person is you or someone else.)

Many of these situations crop up when dealing with poverty, starvation, disability, and the like. My take on it is that if my lie results in getting someone food who would not otherwise have food, I will lie all it takes. Most people I’ve known who’ve known genuine hunger feel the exact same way. Especially when dealing with an inhuman system stacked against poor people on purpose. I just can’t see how lying is worse than someone starving or something.

And there are less extreme situations where lying is also okay for similar reasons.

Lying in itself can be good or bad, it just depends how and when and why you do it.

(And this is one of many reasons that I get nervous around segments of the autistic community where “lying is the worst thing you can possibly do and autistic people never do it” is a social norm. I lie. I have lied. I will lie again. I regret some of my lies. I do not regret others. This does not make me evil incarnate, nor does it make me non autistic. I’m not a very good liar and I don’t like lying, but I’ll do it if I have to.)

Notes: