Musings with Montaigne: On Liars
Why even white lies lead to places you don't want to go...
In this essay, Montaigne reflects on lying and liars using a number of lenses and prompts. Lying, for Montaigne, is a serious concern, believing something to the effect of man is his word. Children need to be severely disciplined out of lying. He also distinguishes between a lie and lying, viewing the former as an unfortunate and perhaps uncharacteristic mistake and the latter, using the gerund sense of the word, being a deliberate activity. Unusually, this essay contains few examples and much more exposition, indicating that Montaigne perhaps had both stronger and clearer personal feelings about the matter.
If you haven’t read it, I greatly enjoyed Sam Harris’s book Lying, which explores these topics in a comprehensive and detailed manner that I think the topic deserves:
A few years ago, we were reading a novel in one of my classes that had themes of lying, and I remember watching this TED-Ed video that provoked great discussion: