IS IT OK TO LIE TO GET WHAT YOU WANT, as long as in doing so no one is harmed and someone benefits? This seems to be the standard of popular morality. For example, if I wanted you to cheer up and be hopeful, I might tell you "everything's going to turn out alright", when disaster is looming. If a child asks you what happens to our bodies after we die, it's probably not a good idea to truthfully describe this process. When your wife asks you if she looks fat in her new jeans, etc., etc. The rule seems to be: "tell the truth unless it could hurt someone, then it's OK, even mandatory, to lie".
What is a lie? It is to say or to write that B is, when A is. It is the opposite of truth, a defiance of reality designed to obtain a value for the liar. For example, I am 12 years old and I don't feel like going to school this morning, so I lie and tell my mom I've got a stomach ache. I want to be elected President, so I tell people I'll give them free stuff if they vote for me. Notice that a lie mostly involves two or more people (although many of us lie to ourselves), and that what's involved here is the liar's attempt to alter the perception of reality by another, in order to achieve a value, a desired end. A value obtained in this matter is a value obtained by fraud. A criminal act.
But, how can a value obtained by fraud be a value to anyone at all? Because people who lie do not care about the means to acquire a value, they only care about the end-having the value unearned. "You've got to crush a few eggs to make an omelet", they say, ignoring that human beings aren't eggs. It's the classical "the means justifies the ends" argument, used to justify lying to someone to get a value. In the case of the Nazis during WW2, this bromide was used so that the concentration camp guards wouldn't go insane. Want a perfect, homogenous society? Crack a few eggs (actually, about 5 million people were killed), and there you go. It's what we must do to achieve a Utopian Fatherland! Here's the thing, the insight we can thank Solzhenitsyn for: authoritarian hell begins with one or two lies that no one dares to challenge. All of the hell on this Earth was created by the acceptance of a lie in one form or another. We defy and reject reality at our own peril.
SO NO, it is never OK (right) to lie for any reason, except when to do so would clearly save someone's life or prevent grievous harm, in specific situations ("no, Herr Nazi, Anne Franke's not hiding in my basement"). Some of you are thinking, what if I could save a thousand people by telling one lie? Or, if you lie to the bank, you'll get that loan. When you realize that the terror, mayhem and brutal bloodshed of Soviet Russia could've been stopped if just one man had the courage to say "no" to the Big Lie, you see how important it is to tell the truth, or at least, never lie.
