The Kindest Lies

WHEN presented with a page of scribbles, eagerly held up by a proud child, most reasonable adults would instinctively search for words of praise. While white lies are sometimes told and can be understood or excused, this does not mean they are morally right when alternative courses of action remain available.

For the purposes of this discussion, a lie is defined as an intentional act of deception: deliberately delivering information one understands to be false. This must be distinguished from other forms of response that may also evade a harsh truth, such as tactful honesty or silence. Some argue that feelings should be “the only thing at stake”; yet the impacts of deception are rarely confined to immediate emotions. They affect future trust and autonomy – a person’s capacity to govern their own choices – both of which form part of our emotional wellbeing.

Whether lying in this context is morally right ultimately depends on which account of morality is best accepted: a devotion to truth, an effort to maximise wellbeing, or an emphasis on care and attentiveness.

The Duty to Tell the Truth

The strongest objection to compassionate lying by principle is deontology – the view that morality is a matter of duties we owe one another, not of the good our actions happen to produce. Deontologists argue that morality is grounded in duty and obligation rather than consequences, and that actions such as lying are intrinsically wrong regardless of what beneficial outcomes may follow.

Immanuel Kant famously proposed the categorical imperative, which requires that moral principles be universalisable – that they could be followed by everyone at once without collapsing – and that persons be treated as ends in themselves rather than merely as means. Under these standards, deception becomes morally impermissible: it cannot function as a universal rule, since it manipulates the conditions for forming rational judgement and infringes on autonomy.

A deontologist may also recognise duties of respect, however, requiring that truth be communicated in a manner consistent with the listener’s circumstances. Honesty, then, need not amount to blunt cruelty. Rather than telling a child that her drawing is nothing but scribbles, a deontologist can choose tactful honesty or silence.

Deontology has its limits, though. Its most significant weakness is that it offers limited guidance on which duty ought to take precedence when duties conflict. In the case of the child’s drawing, honesty might pull against duties of encouragement, protection, and guidance, leaving it unclear how a balance can be found. It is also difficult to deny that foreseeable emotional harm, even when it stems from adherence to duty, carries moral significance. A framework grounded in rules may struggle to account for the emotional consequences of our actions, leaving relationships built on trust and dependence vulnerable to harm.

Weighing the Consequences

If foreseeable consequences carry genuine moral weight, then morality cannot be judged by principle alone. Utilitarianism holds that the morally superior course of action is the one that brings about the greatest overall wellbeing.

In responding to the child’s drawing, a utilitarian would weigh not only pure honesty and deception, but also tactful honesty, silence, and redirection, selecting whichever course best promotes emotional wellbeing while minimising distress. Jeremy Bentham’s hedonic calculus – a method for scoring an action by how much pleasure or pain it produces, and how intensely, how certainly and how lastingly – attempts to make this systematic, weighing actions according to the various ways they may produce pleasure or pain and allowing the moral agent to account fully for context.

Crucially, utilitarian reasoning demands consideration of all available options rather than restricting the decision to two extremes, allowing choices to reflect the complexities of lived realities rather than a predetermined course.

The difficulty, however, is that emotional consequences are highly subjective and difficult to predict, making utilitarian reasoning unreliable in precisely the situations where feelings are all that is at stake. One agent might judge that silence is least offensive; another might conclude that the child would be happier facing the truth than being ignored. One might argue that praise maximises immediate happiness; another might argue that honest feedback builds long-term resilience.

Under utilitarianism, almost any course of action can be defended. Making the right decision demands more than principles or calculations: it requires attentiveness to relationships and a genuine understanding of the needs of others.

The Ethics of Care

Care ethics holds that morality is rooted in compassion and the capacity to respond attentively to human vulnerabilities and relationships, an approach most associated with the philosophers Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings. Rather than applying abstract rules or calculating aggregate wellbeing, a care ethicist asks what response best sustains the relationship between the adult and the child, attending to her particular needs, her stage of development and what she is capable of understanding.

This does not mean the child should never hear a difficult truth. It means the manner, timing and warmth of the response matter as much as its content, and that a response chosen purely to avoid discomfort, whether by lying or by a cold and blunt honesty, fails the relationship either way.

This is where the argument lands. Compassionate lies are sometimes excusable. They are rarely, if ever, the right choice when truthful and caring alternatives remain: tactful honesty, delivered with attention to the relationship and the child’s own capacities, protects both her feelings and her ability to trust what the adults around her tell her.

A single kind lie may cost little. A pattern of them costs a child the one thing she most needs from the adults around her: the ability to believe them.