One weekend a month a few of my friends and I get together to have what we call "Girls Night Out". The evening usually consist of dinner, cocktails, manicures, pedicures and a movie. This month we elected to rent a movie as opposed to going to the movies. And the movie that we rented was Liar Liar starring Jim Carey. The movie was produced in 1997 and it's about a lawyer who no matter what he does cannot tell the truth. He constantly breaks promises to his only son which hurts the son greatly. On the sons birthday he father had promised that he would come to his party and he did not show. The son made a birthday wish that his father could not lie for 24 hours and the wish came true.
It's a really cute and comical movie. But somehow that cute and seemingly harmless movie transformed our girls night out into a debate of why people lie - more specifically why do men lie? My friend (we'll call her Jane) has been married to her husband for quite a while now and he has been unfaithful to her the entire time that they have been married. She's a gorgeous woman, intelligent, successful in her career and a great mother and wife. She was extremely heartbroken after she found out that her husband had fathered a child with this other woman shortly after she had given birth. Devastation does not begin to describe what she was feeling and has been feeling since that day that she found out. So Jane posed the following questions "When is a lie a lie"? Is it a lie when a person tells it even though the other party does not know that they are being told a lie? Or, is it only a lie if the person telling it gets caught in the lie? Or how about is it a lie if you don't lie but you just choose to not disclose something? And me being the curious person that I am I decided to start exploring these questions.
So I typed the question into my internet browser "when is a lie a lie"? And this is what the computer populated for me. "We all know when we tell somebody something that is not true it is considered a lie" (Tarnovsky). So having felt validated in that conquest I decided to attempt to find an answer for her next question "Is it a lie when a person tells it even though the other party does not know what they are being told a lie"? Once again I typed this question into the internet and here is the answer that I received: "Lying is giving some information while believing it to be untrue, intending to deceive by doing so" the article also went on to say the following about lying "a lie does not have to give false information and it does not have to be told with malicious intention" (BBC). Interesting, and I have to admit at this point my curiosity had been peeked.
So I looked at her next question "is it only a lie if the person telling it gets caught in the lie"? So I went back to the same article that I was just looking at and this is what I found: "the definition says that what make a lie a lie is that the liar intends to deceive (or mislead) the person that they are lying to" (BBC). Well, I don't know about you but by know I am learning quite a bit about liars and what makes them tick. Until now I had really not stopped to analyze what's a lie, when is it a lie or even to try to define lying. This is some pretty interesting stuff. So I decided to try to find my friend an answer to her final question "Is it a lie if you don't lie but you choose to not disclose something"? Answer: "A lie of omission is an intentional failure to tell the truth in a situation requiring disclosure" (USLEGAL).
So after all of this I can only say "WOW"! I must give my friend accolades. I can only imagine what she has been dealing with. I have watched her go through depression, mood swings and points in which she truly hated her husband and I never grasped why she felt this way. But after listening to her speak this weekend and seeing the pain that she has endured and researching these questions for her I thing that I truly have a better understanding of her. I would not want to walk in her shoes for anything but I admire her because she did not let any of this change the person that she is.
REFERENCES:
Liar Liar, Paul Guay Stephen Mazur, Writer, Tom Shadyac, Director, Brian Grazur, Producer,
Tarnovsky, J., VT When is a lie a lie, 2010
BBC Ethics Guide, 2011
USLegal.com, 2011
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