Now, before people think I'm getting riled up about next to nothing, let me just say that Honesty is by far the most important quality to me, so bear with me here
. Some people are obsessed by Justice, some by Purity, some by Courage, for me, it's all about the Truth.
For example, the saying "What you don't know can't hurt you" enrages me, it seems so wrong, and on so many level, that I can't believe people would actually go by that. In the same way, I HATE the "kind lies", when someone lies about, or hide a fact that directly concerns me, because they supposedly "didn't want to hurt me".
I much prefer to face an ugly truth than to live in a pretty illusion, even if only for the fact that, once the illusion is dispelled, you're gonna fall from very, very high, and it'll hurt more than having known the truth in the first place.
Now, I recently bumped into some Kant philosophy which I had long forgotten.. it was the part about the "Universal imperatives" (for those unfamiliar, these are the rules without any "if", that everyone should abide to, always), and I nodded in agreement upon seeing a "Do not lie" in the examples of Universal Imperatives.
The next part, however, made me wonder.
It was about the "exceptions", when breaking a promise, or an Universal Imperative, is the morale thing to do, if doing so avoids a greater bad aspect..
"Well, DUH" are you all thinking. Of course, in some crazy weird scenario, like, if by lying to some criminals I'd then save the lifes of innocent, if course I would lie... but the example given was more subtle than that, and that's what bothered me. (And no, it wasn't the dilemna about a poor guy stealing medication to save a life, either
)
It went like this:
"Your mother is dying. She has a terminal illness, and has only a week or two left. During one of your last visit, she asks you how is your little family doing, how is it with the wife, and the kids, etc. She always has seen you as a model family, and took great pride in her son's accomplishment of forming such a nice family. Now the truth is, you and your wife are thinking about divorce. Do you tell her, or lie and pretend everything is well?"
Now in this case, telling the truth accomplishes nothing, except maybe standing up to your values in any situations, and causes unnecessary pain.
So yeah, I tend to agree that, in this case, lying would probably be the right thing to do.
The problem is, what prevents this to apply in less extreme situations as well? Where is the limit where it becomes unacceptable? Is it only the possibility that the truth might be found eventually that makes "kind lies" bad? Does an hypotethical "kind lie" which has 0% chance of ever being disproved become good, and morale?
Sorry for the rambling and the incoherency, I had little time to write this and had to get it off my chest, I suppose