Morality,Ethics and God part-1

I have been planning to write this piece for a long time now but it needed some thought and I haven’t had either time or conducive company in the whole summer break and merely no time in the month of August. Both seem to be in ample supply now and so, here goes.

This concerns that famous question- ‘Is there a god’. This also concerns the nature of our moral precepts and our own attitude towards morality in general. And if you are still reading on then I will assume that you have time and patience enough and will allow me to build my case. All arguments are, of course, welcome in the comments section of the blog.

Sometime ago I was reading ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder. The book gives a basic introduction to all the famous and some not so famous schools of philosophy. I, being an almost complete Objectivist, was trying to measure how each of these schools matched against my beliefs. It was then that I got this idea of conducting a survey. So I shot off messages to a lot of my friends, asking a rather simple question-‘Why is it bad to lie?’. The responses were, to say the least, interesting.

First I had to assure each of them that I had not gone crazy and seriously wanted an answer. All the answers I received can be grouped into 3 broad groups:-
1. We must not lie to our friends, it doesn’t matter what we say to strangers.
2. Any lie is permissible, as long as the aims are ‘selfless’.
3. One lie causes us to lie more and more to cover it up. So we shouldn’t lie.

These answers are all very curious because none of them recognizes truthfulness, honesty etc. as a moral absolute, an end in themselves. They all imply that we must not lie because people can find out, and leave enough loopholes to wriggle around the guilt of lying easily enough. I want to examine all these answers individually.

To all those who gave the first answer, I asked- why? Most replied- “Because your friend might be hurt if he/she found out”. Again I asked- “What if it could somehow be ensured that he would never find out”. Most amusingly none answered this query. Note that the answer is not an answer. It never answers why lying is bad. It merely tries to divide the world into two groups of people- those you can lie to and those you can’t. How this division comes about is not explained. If you had a fight with one of your current friends, then it would magically become okay to lie to him/her.

It sounds like some weird kind of loyalty but it isn’t. It’s a façade built to convince yourself that you are a moral person while you are not. It is this answer which is coming back to us whenever a shopkeeper lies to us and cheats us, whenever an acquaintance doesn’t keep a promise (he thinks you are not ‘friend enough’ and who are you to argue with that). This ‘Moral Nepotism’ will be defended by its proponents as pragmatic behavior (“I am no saint-everyone does it! Why take a burden of guilt for people you do not even know?”), but I beg to differ.

The second reply is the vilest contortion of morality garbed as a moral statement. Why should the aims be selfless? Who decides this selflessness? It allows us to lie and then to hide it behind some or the other veneer of selflessness. I could go on and on but I will stop because just thinking about this makes me want to throw up, and then slap the person who gave this answer. Unfortunately, the person is one of my closest and oldest friends.

The third POV, which I call ‘Lazy Morality’ can be held to be the closest to my own beliefs. Whenever we lie, we are deviating from fact, from reality and the more we lie the further we must lie to cover the previous lies. Thus we deviate further and further from reality. But here we come up against a blank wall. Further from reality…so what? Why is deviation from reality bad? And that, of course, is the original question. So we don’t really have an answer. But in my opinion, we are tantalizingly close, whether or not my friends who gave this answer realized it.

Which brings me, at last, to my own opinion on this subject. Why should we not lie? It certainly is expedient, and in our daily lives, often necessary.

In my opinion, honesty is an Objective requirement of human survival. In as much as man is a social being, and must live in a society in order to survive in the kind of living conditions that we are living in today. This kind of life would not be possible if every man was a free operator and functioned according to his whim or fancy.

Lying is bad because our every action aimed at survival in today’s society is depended on an unspoken understanding that certain other individuals will do certain other tasks and deliver on certain promises. Job agreements, business contracts etc. are all forms of these promises. Were lying as acceptable as honesty, then it would be quite acceptable to not pay an employee after a month of work, to renege on a deadline for a projects, an infinite such instances where either a man’s word or his signature on a piece of paper count for millions of rupees or years of trust. If all this were acceptable then the only way to survive would be to do everything by your own hands and all semblance of society would vanish like a fart in the wind.

Now I hope the patient reader can see why the third answer was so close to my reasons for honesty. The further from reality, the further from survival, and if that is not reason enough to stop lying, nothing is.