Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1999
Abstract
Popular and professional moralists have a tendency to over-condemn lying. This Article is a critique of that tendency and the more general outlook it exemplifies, which I call Quasi-Categorical Moralism. I begin with an illustration from my own experience of morally appropriate lying that is condemned by the legal profession's ethics norms. I proceed to a critical examination of the arguments against lying in what is perhaps the best known contemporary work on professional ethics – Sissela Bok's Lying. I then explore the more sympathetic treatment of lying in a broad range of literary and philosophical works typically ignored among popular, professional, and even philosophical moralists.
Although this not an Article primarily about any aspect of the Starr-Clinton scandal, it briefly considers the lying charges in the spectacular recent outburst of Quasi-Categorical Moralism directed at President Clinton. I conclude by suggesting that, at least in the context of the legal profession, the impulse to moral self-restraint that animates Quasi-Categorical Moralism is a more dangerous force than the impulse to moral self-assertion that it deprecates.
Disciplines
Law | Law and Philosophy | Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Recommended Citation
William H. Simon,
Virtuous Lying: A Critique of Quasi-Categorical Moralism,
12
Geo. J. Legal Ethics
433
(1999).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/876