At my preparatory school I acquired the art of lying without serious compunction when in awkward situations. Hitherto I had been rigidly truthful, having been brought up to regard a lie with a kind of superstitious horror. ("Remember, God sees you!") This is not the place to enlarge on the ethics of truth-telling. I now think that lying is an expedient which is permissible and even commendable on occasions, but that those occasions are rarer than one likes to believe, and that it should be used as a sensible man would use a valuable but seductive and habit-forming drug.
(C. D. Broad, "Autobiography," in The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 10 [New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959], 1-68, at 35-6 [italics in original] [essay written in 1954])
Note from KBJ: Only an absolutist believes that lying, as such, is wrong, whatever the consequences. Remember the cries of "Bush lied!"? Seldom do you hear it said that his lie (assuming for the sake of argument that he lied) is unjustified. This implies that the critic is an absolutist about lying. Why does it imply this? Because, if the critic were not an absolutist, he or she would realize that it's not enough to show that Bush lied; he or she must show that it's one of the lies that is unjustified. I find it deliciously ironic that absolutism is now the special province of progressives. Torture, they say, is absolutely wrong. Lying is absolutely wrong. What's next? Will they say that killing the innocent (including fetuses) is absolutely wrong? Don't hold your breath. Progressives are absolutists only about things that President Bush did or authorized.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 