That truthfulness is central to morality no one disputes. The disagreement comes in the contrast between truthfulness as a quality of one=s life and truth as a function of statements considered without context. A truthful person may deceive; in fact, on occasions should deceive. On the other hand, a truthful person finds lying abhorrent. Everyone has occasions when they believe it is good and proper to deceive. Each of us, however, believes that we sometimes have a right not to be deceived by others.

Two principles underlie all morality: l) No society can allow indiscriminate killing 2) No society can allow indiscriminate deceptive statements. No individual case is solved by these two principles. The term Aindiscriminate@ indicates the unavoidable task of figuring out what is allowable and what is not. The line that governs killing has moved over time. Killing human beings is now allowed in only a few circumstances. Capital punishment and abortion are cases that are near the line. Killing some animals is now forbidden or at least morally frowned upon; killing other animals is still accepted.

In ordinary exchanges of conversation we deceive out of politeness and from concern for the feelings of others. We do not always say how we feel when someone says Ahow are you?@ We also do not convey to someone that we think they look terrible. We exaggerate the good in formulas that have been crafted over generations to lessen pain in difficult situations. The physician who says to a patient AYou have a grave illness and you have to work with me on what can be done,@ may not be telling the whole truth, but it is likely to help the patient.

Many exchanges in life involve deception. That is not a problem provided both parties know that deception is part of the game, is sometimes the main point of the game. A poker player who does not know that deception is part of poker should not be playing. Anyone in a contract negotiation should be aware that Athis is my final offer@ has to be understood within a context. The same is true in buying a house. There is an accepted ritual, in which speech is used to conceal one=s final position. Each culture varies on what kinds of deals come under this rubric of negotiating and bluffing. In the middle east, almost everything might be bought this way. I wouldn=t try it, however, at Macy=s or Macdonald=s.

I have said that all lies are wrong. But doesn=t everyone tell Alittle white lies?@ Not if one gives an appropriate meaning to lying. A lie has three conditions: 1) it is a statement 2) it is contrary to what the person making the statement believes to be true 3) it is made to someone who has some right to know the truth. Very often people assume only the first two conditions. But the biggest discriminating of conditions concerns who has a right to know. If someone has no right to know (for example, a telemarketer at dinner time), I have no duty to speak the truth.

A parent usually has a right to the truth from his or her child, as does a judge in court from a witness. But even in these cases there are exceptions. There are private areas in every person=s life where no outsider has a right to go uninvited. The law recognizes this principle in the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination (a right not observed in our peculiar grand jury system).

There are times when one cannot or should not tell the truth, as every military leader knows. The guide for U.S. soldiers in Bosnia says AThere is nothing wrong with saying >I don=t know= or >I can=t tell you=. However, never lie to a reporter.@

For politicians, lawyers, physicians, agents and many others the distinction between telling lies and the deceiving can become blurred. An occasional failure at discriminatiing between lies and acceptable deception is understandable. Over time a person develops a pattern of truth telling and becomes known as trustworthy or not. If we know that someone is trustworthy, we give them the benefit of the doubt on occasions where they may seem to lie. In contrast, to call a person a Aliar@ (not merely someone who has told a lie) is one of the worst things that can be said of that person=s character and ethics. Until recently, at least, liar came right after murderer and rapist in personal insult. The British House of Commons forbids any member calling another a liar (Winston Churchill once accused someone of Aterminological inexactitude@).

When Joe Klein was revealed to be the anonymous author of Primary Colors, after repeatedly denying it to other reporters, the press went into a paroxysm of professing that Apoliticians are supposed to lie, but not reporters.@ The reaction was amusing since polls indicate that the public finds politicians and reporters about equal in trustworthiness. The assumption is that both do try to tell the truth but sometimes fail to do so. The public is not cynical in this assumption; on the contrary, they hate being lied to but they understand when someone who is generally trustworthy sometimes fails at the truth. People who carry the heavy burden of power and responsibility have a greater risk of deceiving themselves and misleading others in a way that crosses the line of acceptability. On the other hand, if your work is mainly one of making moral pronouncements from the comfort of the American Enterprise Institute (or a university), it looks easy to deal in truth and avoid lies.

Religious traditions are quite remarkably unified in their attitude to truthfulness: 1) it is supremely important 2) there are lots of occasions when untruthful statements are allowable and even good. Speech serves many purposes besides statements of fact, something obvious to a religious person but not to the modern rationalist. An example in the Talmud involves the question Awhat does one say when dancing before the bride?@ The school of Shammai answers Aone describes the bride as she really looks.@ The school of Hillel answers Aone says the bride is beautiful and graceful.@ Shammai: AEven if she is lame or blind, or has a beard?@ Hillel: ASay the bride is beautiful and graceful.@

A similar attitude is found in Buddhism where the precept of right speech is the second most important path of the eightfold path. AFor it is said that a person who has no shame at intentional lying is capable of any evil action.@ At the same time, Buddhism considers language a pedagogical tool. To help a person, one is allowed to use speech in the way a father might try to coax small children from a house that has caught fire.

Roman Catholicism, like Talmudic Judaism, is famous for its legal distinctions concerning the use of speech and other human faculties. Jesuit moralists took the lead in working out rules of speech to the extent that Ajesuitical@ for some people means two-faced and untrustworthy. But like Buddhism and Judaism, Roman Catholicism highly values trustworthy speech while at the same time recognizing the many purposes of speech and the many occasions when the community is not served by @unvarnished facts.@

The United States of America emerged from one peculiar religious group whose motto was Athe art of plain speaking.@ Cotton Mather described his father, Increase=s preaching as : AHe put aside every art in order to convey the truth.@ That one might convey a deeper truth in artful ways is not well accepted in the United States. The United States was founded in the late eighteenth century when a loss of certainty created an unprecedented zeal for truthfulness. That is why perjury was written into the law as such a serious crime. When there is a lack of trust we are especially demanding that the other person=s words be unambiguous, but any statement from an untrustworthy persons will not be unambiguous enough.