I once read the following bit of advice to parents of autistic children: don’t tell your child to always be honest, because they will take you seriously.

This neatly expresses a central feature of human society: dishonesty is omnipresent,* is unavoidable for those who don’t want to be seriously disadvantaged in social interactions, and yet many people talk as if they believe it is (almost) always wrong. Having suggested this, I immediately need to provide two caveats:

(1) The problem may be a broader problem, that most rules for social behavior have lots of unstated exceptions. When parents tell their children to always be honest, they are counting on their children to learn exceptions as they go, and it isn’t indicative of a literal belief on the parent’s part.
(2) It may be that many people draw a sharp moral line between lying and other failures of honesty–omissions, equivocations, misleading but not false statements, and so on. While lying is almost always condemned, perhaps people think these other things are okay most of the time.

I’m not sure what to make of (2), but suggestion (1) is called into question by two things: first, sometimes people go out of their way to make clear they are being literal in endorsing a no-lying rule. This post by Alexander Pruss is a good example. Another example comes from Bill O’Reily, who once expressed moral indignation at a survey finding that the vast majority of high school students say they lie–not lie about anything specific or of great importance, just that they lie sometimes.

Worse, perhaps, is that when counter-examples are given to the no-lying rule, they are often of a very restricted type. Consider Enigman’s reply to Pruss, which considers only two examples: the Nazi asking if you are hiding Jews in your house, and a doctor who hopes to save his patients’ life by placebo effect. This suggests that in ordinary cases where we are often dishonest, those that don’t involve matters of life or death, lying is prohibited. With most counter-examples being of this type, is seems this is the position most people consciously take on lying. But are there illustrations out there that suggest something different?

*Examples could be multiplied endlessly, but here are some tidy ones from Robin Hanson.