Rejecting a Culture of Lies, by Randall Smith

It was a very revealing moment.  I was driving with a friend through a major university campus.  He was working in an office responsible for managing the resources of the university. And I happened to say, “You know, I’ve been wondering. I know there are complex moral questions like what to do if there are five guys in a lifeboat but only room for four, but I’ve started to suspect that most of our moral issues from day to day are fairly straightforward applications of the Ten Commandments that only seem complicated because we convince ourselves that in this instance it would be better to steal or lie or whatever.”

“Lying,” my friend exploded. “If we could only get people to stop lying. In my office, we can’t even figure out what we have because everyone is always lying, so we can’t make any reliable judgments about what we need.” …