Recently I was presented with a moral issue that made me reflect on what the truth actually is. I consider myself to be a very honest person; in fact, I hate lying and people that lie. Lying never ever benefits you in the long term. Sure, you can spin a web of lies in the short term to your benefit, but to maintain your web you will need to continuously spin more strands to patch holes that develop over time. Eventually, your web of lies will become so complex that you or someone else will trip over a strand and fall, taking out the entire web and making you look extremely bad. From then on, people will be unable to trust what you tell them thereby devaluing anything you have to say. I find it far better policy to just tell the truth up front, regardless of the immediate cost, because if you lie you will eventually be caught out and the cost will be far worse than the cost of telling the truth up front.

The moral issue I encountered was over half-truths, or "spinning". Spinning is where you "present the facts" in a light that makes them look better than they are. You probably do this by colouring your language to bias it one way or another, or by omitting certain truths and only leaving the truths that make you, or whatever it is you are arguing for, sound good. To me, this is lying. Why? Well, let's define what a lie is.

The dictionary says a lie is "a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; something intended or serving to convey a false impression". Spinning and half-truths fall squarely in the latter definition's bucket. By omitting certain facts, you are deliberately "serving to convey a false impression". I would call half-truths "lying by omission".

Let me present an example. Say you see an ad for a hypothetical new cream that removes wrinkles from your aging face. However, the makers of the cream know that if you use the cream for over two weeks you begin to develop rashes on your face. If they deliberately don't tell you this in the ad, one could say they are not lying, since they have not said any untruths. I deny this assertion. By deliberately omitting the truth that the cream causes rashes, they are lying to the consumer about how good the product is so as to get people to buy it. If the ad said, "miraculous cream that removes wrinkles, but gives rashes", would you buy it? I think not.

The specific issue I have encountered is to do with a software solution that a team that I am working on is delivering to our client in the next few weeks. Unfortunately, even though we've worked as hard as we could have, we haven't been able meet all the requirements that we promised the client due to simply running out of time. We've been told that when we present the product to the client, we shouldn't tell them about the requirements that we have not met, and instead tell them about the ones we have met. We'll then tell them about the missed requirements in our documentation and in later presentations to them (presentations where I gather the bigwigs will not be there). Apparently, because we are telling them about the unmet requirements later on, that makes not telling them about them now okay.

You might think that not telling them up front about not meeting some of the requirements might be okay if the requirements that were not met were trivial. After all, why let some small stuff overshadow the larger achievements of the project? However, in our case, it is not trivial requirements that we are missing; we are not fully meeting critical main requirements. I argued that if we're not meeting these requirements fully, when we present the product to them, we should be truthful and say "we've managed to meet part of the critical requirement, but there's a major part that, due to time constraints, we weren't able to cover". However, we were told that, no, we shouldn't tell them about it at this presentation because it would tarnish the project.

To me, this is just a case of lying by omission. We are literally "conveying a false impression", which is the definition of lying. The client will think "great, they've met our requirements and we've got a working product". However, when they actually go to use it, or read the documentation, or listen to our later presentations, they will see and be told that, in fact, we are not meeting their requirements, and they are getting an incomplete product. Then we'll look like liars.

We're obviously being told to do this to make us look good, but would it really be that bad if we manned up and just told them the truth? I'm sure they'd appreciate our honesty, and since we honestly did do our utmost to try and meet the requirements, we really can't be faulted for anything other than perhaps promising more than we could deliver in the time allocated. And since this is a university project for an external client and they're not paying for it, I can't really see them getting too angry over it and suing us or something.

If we don't tell them about it in that product presentation, I can imagine that when we come to the later presentation and go "oh, it performs your needed functionality, except in these rather common cases where it just won't work", they're going to frown at us and go "but you said before that it did all that". And that'd be where we go, "yeah...", and look like fools. I think that getting their expectations pumped up and then smashing them will leave a worse taste in their mouths than actually telling them about it up front.

In conclusion, I believe that you can either speak the truth, or you can lie. There is no middle ground, no half-truths. Deliberately biasing the "truth" to control another person's perception is nothing more than creating falsehood. Why else does one try to make decisions off of objective, unbiased facts? Subjective, biased "truths" are not the truth and therefore cannot be used to make firm decisions off of. Lying can never benefit you because eventually you will be caught out and forced to admit your untruths, and then people will never be able to trust you again. Telling anything other than the truth, regardless of whether it makes you look bad, is nothing other than lying. If you've screwed up, or something unexpected went wrong, man up and admit it.