Lying and Time: Moving beyond the Moral Question of Lying

Abstract

Lying is typically considered as a morally salient phenomenon in existing research. In this article we seek to expand the understanding of lying and deception as socially situated phenomena. We draw on qualitative interview data from a larger project on everyday experiences of living with dementia and examine how carers of people living with dementia describe, explain and justify care practices that involve the use of untruth in some way. We find that carers frequently refer to a problem with their temporal landscapes. Weaving this into moral accounts of lying, we argue for recognising the importance of our orientation in time (to the past, the present and the future) for how lying and deception are made sense of in everyday life.