I totally agree lying is something that has to be done depending on the situation.

Everyone lies or
has lied. So what is the big deal about lying? I don't understand how people can say "Lying is never
the right thing," because everyone lies ! I lie, you lie and all people lie! A lie is a false
statement to a person or group made by another person or group who knows it is not the whole
truth, intentionally. [1] Lies can be told for various reasons and with various amounts of success.
It is a good idea to be honest all the time, but there are times in which you cannot tell the truth.
Simply because it hurts others. In my experience, telling truth all the time could only exist in our
dreams. In reality, lies could not be avoided. There are many factors involve in this issue.

1. In an emergency
Any time lying prevents harm. If (in the unlikely event) that a terrorist asks me if I'm
American, I'm gonna start blabbering in Spanish and dig out my Argentinian passport. For
example, in a war, people are forced to lie in front of their enemies in order to save their
companions' lives. In such situations, telling the truth would have meant the end of a
person's life and nothing is more important than life, so lying is absolutely acceptable as it is
done for good.

In addition, lying can also be acceptable in medical situations in order to encourage a patient
and make him fight for his life. If a patient that is ready to be operated asks his doctor if he
would be okay, although the chances of survival may be little, it would be acceptable for the
doctor to lie and say that everything would be alright as it will encourage the patient to keep
fighting for his life. Instead, if the doctor had told him the truth, the patient would have
been discouraged and wouldn't be willing to fight for his life anymore, which could have had
fatal results. I think one should lie if he or others are undeservingly in danger or emergency
and a lie would save them.
So why might healthcare professionals want to lie 'for the good of patients', and what are
the arguments against this sort of lying?

Lying may be good therapy: the doctor may believe that the patient should only be given
information that will help their treatment
Lying deprives the patient of the chance to decide whether they want the treatment - highly
intrusive treatment near the end of life may prolong life, but at greatly reduced quality, and
the patient, if properly informed, might decline such treatment
The truth may harm the patient: a patient may, for example, give up hope, go into a decline
or suffer a heart attack if given a depressing diagnosis and prognosis - they may even choose
to kill themselves
Such information should be given in a way that minimizes harm -- the patient should be
appropriately prepared to receive the information and given proper support after being
given bad news
Surveys suggest that patients don't in general go into a severe decline or choose to kill
themselves
Respect for autonomy requires the patient to be given the chance to consider all legal
courses of action, no matter how undesirable other people may think they are
Lying deprives the patient of the opportunity to take meaningful decisions about their life,
based on accurate medical information
The patient may realise that the symptoms they experience and the way their disease
progresses don't fit what they have been told. They then experience all the bad
consequences of being lied to

Another example comes from the movie The Great Raid. In this movie Connie Nielsen plays
Margaret Utinsky, an American nurse working in the Philippines during WWII. There is an
underground operation headquartered somewhere in the camp. One day, Japanese soldiers
raid the camp where she works, looking for spies. They bring her in for questioning. Fearing
that her comrades and friends would be killed, she lies about what she knows. Emergency
lies are much more common during a war or large scale catastrophe.

Since such lies are often told in emergencies, another justification is that the person telling
the lie often has not time to think of any alternative course of action.

Examples include lying to protect a murderer's intended victim and lying to save oneself
from death or serious injury. These lies are thought less bad than other lies because they
prevent a greater harm occurring; they are basically like other actions of justified self-
defence or defence of an innocent victim. The good consequences of the lie are much
greater than the bad consequences. Since such lies are often told in emergencies, another
justification is that the person telling the lie often has not time to think of any alternative
course of action. There are two main moral arguments for lying to enemies:

Enemies do not deserve the same treatment as friends or neutrals, because enemies intend
to do us harm and can't grumble if we harm them in return by lying to them
Lying to enemies will prevent harm to many people, so the good consequences outweigh the
bad ones.

2. to protect young children
Most parents lie to their children, at various times and for various reasons. Because young children
cannot understands complex situations.
For instance, telling a child that their drawing is nice or that their story is clever, or telling new
parents that their baby is the cutest ever are both examples of this. The young brain has yet to
develop the ability to digest horrors that in some cases, it's just better to gloss things over. You can
tell the kid later, when he/she grows up.
In all likelihood, lying to children evolved as a pastime for parents, just to see what kind of stuff they
could get the little chuckleheads to swallow, and then afterward they'd get together with other
parents and laugh about what suckers they'd spawned while eating their lunch snacks. The Tooth
Fairy, the Easter Bunny, their potential to succeed ... we just cloak children in lies and see how long it
takes them to figure it out. to protect innocent people or their family member and when they
want to give a people a chance to mend their ways. The ones that serve to protect children from
information that would hurt them; the ones that help foster imagination and belief in an age-
appropriate way,
"A parent's job is to protect children and nurture their development," says Dr Robin Altman, a child
psychiatrist and medical director of the Children's Home of Reading, in Reading, New York. "At
times, that means telling a small lie or holding back some of the truth when they don't have
the capacity to deal with all the facts yet."
Whatever the situation and justification, lying among parents is, it seems, the norm. A new study
published in the International Journal of Psychology says 84 percent of parents lie to kids to get
them to behave better. The most common: "If you don't come with me now, I will leave you here by
yourself," followed by false promises for a toy or other reward in exchange for compliance.

In more subtle ways, it's just so much easier to lie to kids under the guise of protecting them, which
is often a way of saying that it makes you uncomfortable to tell the truth. If little Billy walks in on
Mommy getting railed by Daddy and Daddy's friend Julio, then asks what's going on, odds are no one
is going to explain a Chinese finger trap to Billy. They'll just say he's sleepwalking, or Mommy's losing
a really weird game of Risk. Sex, death, and any mildly complex math is much easier to explain to a
child with a lie than with the truth, and it's so commonplace that some people would argue that the
weird people are the ones who would tell kids the truth rather than shield them from life's myriad
horrors and perversions.

If you really want your mind blown on this particular subject and the potential moral quandary
represented by telling a child that no, the clown is not going to do anything bad to us, we're just in
his basement waiting for a surprise party, you could look into something called Wittgenstein's
ladder, which is basically a method of taking really hard-to-understand concepts and information
and presenting them in a happy, easily digestible manner until such time as you understand them --
then you can ignore the bullshit part. It's lying to someone with the intention that they're going to
recognize the lie eventually and learn something in the process, so it's actually beneficial to be
deceptive. So feel free to tell your kids it's cool to taste the cat's bum, because they will eventually
learn that the true lesson is that it's mostly never OK to taste the cat's bum.
you tell a lie to a child, but the lying changes the situation and taught the child that you are smart
parent



Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-situations-when-youre-totally-supposed-to-
lie_p2/#ixzz3250qP3Td

3. to save someones feelings from being hurt
A lie of omission can be appropriate if protects someone from hurtful circumstances that cannot be
changed. For example, it might be appropriate for someone who has had an affair to keep that
information to him/herself if telling would only hurt the partner.
Sometimes such information is only shared to relieve the teller, rather than to benefit the hearer.
Sometimes it is kinder to keep things to oneself. for example, giving a positive opinion that does not
truly reflect your feelings to save someone's feelings from being hurt.
A lie can be acceptable if it is said to avoid hurting someone's feeling. For instance, if a girl asks her
friend weather or not she looks good in her new dress, her friend would be justified to lie and say
that she does, even though she doesn't, as she would be lying to avoid hurting her friend's feelings.
Telling a white lie is always acceptable if it is to prevent an unreasonable fight between two friends
and avoid hurting someone's feelings.
First, some lie could help to develop the relationship with each other. For example, your dear wife
just bought a new dress, and she asked for your opinion about if the dress was smart and trendy, or
if it was suitable for her. Then what comments would you cast based on the fact that your true idea
was that you don't like the dress? You choose to tell the truth, and say"Oh darling, it is ugly, old
fashioned." or "Why you waste your money on that." Yes, when you say this, you are a honest man,
but have you ever considered your wife's feeling? She must be very upset due to your honest
behavior.

It might seem so in the abstract. But we live in the real world. We might value honesty and want to
be honest, but we sometimes value other qualities at the same time, such as compassion or loyalty.
Sometimes, two noble goals come into conflict. If you tell the truth, you will be unkind, and if you
say something kind, it will be a lie. Sometimes when people lie to the ones they love, it is because
they are valuing something else more than honesty. Maybe they are trying to be loyal, or to avoid
hurting the other person's feelings. Maybe they think that the other person isn't in a good enough
place, emotionally, to hear a painful truth.
Sometimes people tell what I call "kind-hearted lies." Those are the lies told to spare someone else's
feelings or make them look better to others or feel better. Examples include: "I know just how you
feel;" "you did the right thing;" "you look great." If you care about someone, you are more likely to
tell them those kinds of lies.

Many of the other little lies of everyday life are told to make the liars look better or feel better or get
what they want. Those are the self-serving lies. They can be told because the liars really are acting in
a self-centered way, but there's another reason, too. Sometimes liars claim to be smarter or kinder
or more accomplished than they really are because they are trying to impress the other person. So,
they puff up their own image because they care so much about what the other person thinks of
them. They want to create a good impression, but they are not sure whether their true self will be
good enough. So they lie. Probably more of this kind of lying goes on when potential partners are
first getting to know each other. protects your relation from misunderstandings

Serious lies are a whole other matter. When we asked people about the most serious lie they ever
told to anyone, and the most serious lie anyone ever told to them, they described lies about many
different things. But the most common were lies about affairs.

Liars sometimes claim to tell lies so as to spare the other person from pain. Sometimes they really
mean it. But they can also be using that as an excuse to give themselves an out.


Telling your mother that her meatloaf is delicious when you really hate the meatloaf.
Telling your friend that she doesn't look fat in her dress when she asks because you don't want to
tell her that she's gained a lot of weight and looks heavy.
Telling your husband that his new haircut looks really good because you don't want to hurt his
feelings by telling him that you hate the haircut.
Telling your friend that you really like her new house when you actually think it is very small and
cramped because you don't want to dampen her excitement.
Telling your boss that you are happy to work over the weekend when you are really feeling very
resentful because you don't want to upset the boss.
Telling your sister that her new baby is really cute when the baby actually isn't very cute at all.
Telling your brother that you love the gift that he got you for Christmas because you know that he
put a lot of thought into picking it out for you, even though you actually really hate the gift.
These lies are all pretty harmless and they are told in order to spare the feelings of someone that
you care about. While there are some people who argue that you should never lie under any
circumstances, the world would not necessarily be a very nice or very happy place if people told the
truth all the time.
Telling the truth is hard, especially when you know that someone you love could be emotionally hurt
by it. It makes you a stronger person if you are capable of telling the truth, and it helps you think
about consequences before you do something. You are less likely to do something behind
someones back if you automatically think about what their reaction will be when they find out, not
if they find out.



Conclusion
As a conclusion, I would say that the truth is a good thing, but sometimes it's not the best one. Being
honest is not always the right decision to make, because a lie, even a white lie, can sometimes bring
better results than the truth would, and in such situations lying would absolutely be acceptable.
The Dutch philosopher and lawyer Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) taught that a lie is not really wrong if
the person being lied to has no right to the truth.

The Truth About Lying: How to Spot a Lie and Protect Yourself from Deception Paperback
by Stan Walters (Author)
How to Spot Lies Like the FBI: Protect your money, heart, and sanity using proven tips. Paperback
by Mark Bouton (Author), Ms. Patsie Sweeden (Photographer)