Truth be Told

By Mukul Sharma

Located outside the gate of an old folks home in Düsseldorf is a bus stop where no buses stop even though everything about it is completely authentic. It’s been set up solely as a lure for residents with dementia who might wander out of the facility trying to go home.

So, instead of them venturing blindly downtown and triggering a police search, it’s so much better to have them wait at the bus stop for a bus that will never come till an attendant can bring them gently inside again.

Technically speaking, the whole thing could be called a lie, but because it helps some people to avoid coming to harm, and is therefore ultimately beneficial, its intent may be admired rather than condemned. Eytan Adar, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, calls such a lie a ‘benevolent deception’ in a paper he presented recently at a conference.

It’s also a bit like what some doctors do when they have to break a particularly dire piece of diagnosis to their patients. Realising that sometimes being too bluntly honest can, in fact, be counterproductive, they disclose it more kindly by omitting a few details and parrying direct questions.

People actually admire this deceptive trait and say that the doctor has very good bedside manners. It’s not even considered a sin of omission. But the truth too can sometimes be viewed askew.

In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Camus writes about his protagonist Meursault as a kind of person who is incapable or unwilling to lie. So much so that at his murder trial, the prosecutor describes his brutally honest demeanour to be that of “a monster, a man without morals”.