On my adoption papers for my son I wasn’t completely honest.
I said I had no history of mental illness.
I didn’t want people to discriminate against my unborn child.
When I did disclose my schizophrenia,
His parents admitted that seeing that kind of history of MI would have scared them.
We were all grateful things worked out the way they did,
But it was all because of my lying in the beginning.
Is that okay?
When is it okay to lie?
Other examples?
Sometimes you have to lie for your advantage and its ok. I am not good at lying and always too honest. My cousin bought a 250$ screen replacement for his laptop and he broke it while installing it. He told the place he bought it from that it came in the mail already broken and they sent him a new one free of charge. I could never do that.
It’s okay to lie when you are trying not to hurt someone else’s feelings I feel. Little white lies as they call them. I must say that I sometimes cringe even when telling a white lie though.
I would say that lie doesn’t matter because because most adoptable kids end up with gaps in their medical history anyways, and a good percentage of them end up with some kind of mental health struggle. To the point that, in preadoptive classes, they teach us specifically how to handle the most common types of mental illness found in adopted kids.
In my ethics class, the professor made a strong distinction between falsehoods and lies. Basically, if the person doesn’t deserve an honest answer, or you suspected would use that honesty to cause harm, you can give false answers and not feel guilty about lying. Sort of like the difference between killing in self defense and murder.
I don’t think I would call that OK, but I completely understand why you did it and might have done the same myself if I was in your situation.
small lies are ok sometimes
but big lies are not ok and it will cause big trouble
This is a really good question. I lie, I do it all the time. Things such as someone’s food tasted great when I really thought it was awful to haircuts looking bad but saying they look nice. I lie about how I am doing so as not to worry other people. I lie about whether or not I have cash on me so I don’t have to lend out money sometimes. I lie about peoples performance to build their self esteem like my sister with her terrible driving. When people ask me what I’m thinking, I lie. It’s private, but I don’t want to say that and get them curious. I always sort of thought of myself as an honest person until now, but I just realized I’m not. I’m living a lie. Whenever I have been honest and forthright I liked how liberating it was.
Everyone lies in some way or other. It’s only wrong when it does damage to someone else.
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