On lying, part 11

This is the body of an email I wrote to Marie some four years ago. Recently I ran across a note to myself to post it here. The note doesn't say whether I wanted to expand on it, and I no longer recall what I was thinking at the time. So let me just present it as-is. Some of this may cover familiar ground, but some of it may be new.

The context is that I had been discussing aspects of my (past) relationship with D, and Marie had fixated on my remarks that D was a remarkably gifted liar when she needed to be. This led her to make some assumptions (based on the only other gifted liars she had ever known in her life) which I was at some pains to dispel. Anyway, my discussion went something like this. 

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As for my descriptions of D generally, please bear in mind that they are all oversimplifications. Any real person is necessarily more complex than the best description. And there are a lot of ways that she resembled Wife. (Also a lot in which she differed hugely.) For the moment, just as a placeholder, let me say that the resemblance I had in mind in my poem was connected to her inability to hear me during certain kinds of conversations. For my part I had not learned to speak very clearly yet, and this needs a lot more paragraphs before it will be anywhere near the truth. But maybe it can stand for now until we can come back to it.

On the subject of lying, I want to say several things. And even all these will probably oversimplify, but maybe they can point in the direction of a better understanding.

On the one hand, I am well aware that lies corrode the soul. I spent many hours, over the years, trying to make Wife see that. And I think “Women and Honor” is brilliant and deep. If I spend very little time right now on these topics — on Rich and Aristotle and the virtue-side of the question — it’s not because I am unaware of them, nor because I disagree with them, nor yet because I think they are unimportant. It is more that I think I can take them for granted when I talk to you, so I don’t need to reiterate them. In a sense I assume them as prerequisites for any further discussion. You don’t spend a lot of time on algebra when studying calculus, but without algebra you are lost; and I would not trust my further thoughts with anybody that I did not first trust to get this part.

That having been said, ... well, let me tell you a story.

Back in 2009, things were getting pretty bad between me and Wife. I didn’t move out for another four years, but I made the decision that things were unsalvageable. Wife, for her part, seemed to get ever more erratic and desperate. And one weekend, when we drove down to visit my parents, she packed her handgun into her travel bag. She had bought it back when I was spending the weeks working in [a town far away] and she was afraid to be alone in the apartment. Since then she would go target shooting once every 5-10 years, but otherwise never used it. 

God only knows why she brought it along on this trip. When I asked her later, she couldn’t tell me. So I concluded, rightly or wrongly, that her behavior had become sufficiently unpredictable that it was no longer safe to trust her with lethal force. I stole the handgun from her and hid it. Of course she knew who had taken it, and I never denied that part. And when she first asked where it was, I said I wouldn’t tell her. But Wife can be remarkably persistent; so after the umpteenth time she demanded to know its location, I gave her answers designed to get her to stop asking but also to prevent her from ever really finding the weapon. 

Does that make me a liar? I suppose it does. It also makes me alive. True, if you look at the story statistically the odds are probably against her ever actually killing me. But I don’t feel too bad about helping the statistics along. When the stakes are life and death, it’s nice to avoid needless risks. 

Was I a convincing liar? I had to be convincing, so I was. To this day she has never found the handgun. Could I be convincing again some time in the future if the stakes were lower? I don’t know. I hope never to have to put it to the test. 

Did my convincing-ness come from 10,000 hours of practice? No. Absolutely not.

Anyway, the fact remains that after all my speeches to Wife about how lying corrodes the soul, I lied to her to prevent her putting her hands on a lethal weapon to which she had — still has — valid legal title. And even though I totally believe everything I say above about the virtue of telling the truth — in other words, this has nothing to do with simple hypocrisy — I would do it again if I had to, if I thought that it would avert the murder of myself or someone I love. 

Therefore perhaps what we need is a new theory, a wider theory — one that does not contradict the virtue-talk I reference above, but which extends it somehow. Perhaps it includes the former theory as a special or limiting case, or something like that.

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There is an easy way to evade the issue, but it’s one I reject. The easy answer says, “When you misled Wife about her gun, that wasn’t a lie so much as an exception. Consider even something like homicide. If a mugger threatens to kill you and you kill him first in provable self-defense, no court in the country will convict you. So this was self-defense and that makes it OK.”

Except it’s not. Yes, under certain circumstances you can do things that are normally forbidden and get away with them. But that’s just because we as a society have made certain conventional agreements about what behavior we will prosecute. It says nothing about the reality of the act itself. If lying corrodes the soul, then it corrodes the soul even if you have an excuse. Using the example of homicide that the objector in the previous paragraph bounced through so chirpily, killing another human being takes a toll on one. Even if you kill a mugger in self-defense — hell, even if you save the lives of a dozen innocents by taking out the villain who was holding them hostage — you will carry the burden of that death for the rest of your days. It may have been the best thing you could do under the bad circumstances, but that doesn’t make it free or easy. Or if you hate your enemies, the hatred will poison you just as surely, whether your enemies are immigrants or Klansmen, the Amish or the Gestapo. Each of these things — the lie, the killing, the hatred — costs. Each of them takes something from you. The fact that other people will congratulate you this time while blaming you that time is entirely irrelevant.

Where does that leave me, then? It’s a little late for me to aspire to a life of perfect sinlessness — that cherry has already been popped. And I’m not sure that it’s actually the best choice: what if you are confronted with one of the awful dilemmas we were just talking about that look like extenuations? But let me go back to this idea of cost. It’s always a bad idea to incur costs heedlessly, of any kind. And as the soul is more valuable than the wallet, it’s prudent to be even more cautious of costs to the soul than of costs to the wallet. But it costs something to buy groceries, yet we do it. It costs something to go to work every day, yet we do it. Is this cost really that different? Or is it, too, something we can choose to pay under certain circumstances, when it is worth it — doing wrong while knowing we are doing wrong and choosing it anyway for reasons we think sufficient?

“We think sufficient.” There is an unavoidable element of subjective judgement here. We might be wrong. So it behooves us not to be flippant about it. But this subjective element also makes it harder to judge someone else. If I look at D, say, it costs me nothing to congratulate myself that I would never lie about this or that. But how can I really see the pressures on her without standing in her shoes? Since I can never stand in her shoes, is it not maybe the kinder path to back off?

This does not mean ignoring things that truly affect you. One reason I can admire D’s technical skill is that I arranged my involvement with her in such a way that it didn’t matter whether the things she said were true or not. Under different terms of engagement it would have mattered more and I would have cared more. But in her case I could afford not to care.

And this is why I think it is important to know someone’s story. It’s not my job to score anyone on a moral checklist. But if I am going to interact with someone I want to know what I can expect. So rather than know X is Good and Y is Bad, I’d like to know that X is reliable with money but don’t offer a drink to Y. If I can choose the Wrong sometimes, when all the options are bad ones, so can the other fellow. But in that case it is most valuable to know how he evaluates bad situations, not merely that he might do Wrong on occasion.