The fundamental problem is that most people view "lying" as a simple concept when it's anything but.

There's a great book about childhood development called Brain Rules for Baby. In it, the author explains that a "lie" to a small child is any outcome that does not meet predictions, not just a willful deception. If you tell your daughter that you'll take her to the park but then it rains or the car breaks down, you "lied." You told her something and it turned out to be untrue. The extenuating circumstances that lead to disappointment, rather than betrayal, develop with time.

However, the ability to lie is inherent in people. Children lie regularly and without motive. There is something in our psychology that gets us to practice lying early and often. More than that, the better a liar you are the more likely you are to succeed in the future- those who can lie generally have a great deal of empathy, and empathy is even more positively correlated with success than intelligence.

In this instance, a "lie" is a deliberate mistruth. The distinction is important because a "deliberate mistruth" is very different from a "malicious deception." Intent matters in any interpersonal interaction, and a "lie" is more than a mistranscribed fact, a lie is a deliberate choice to cloak the truth. Behind that deliberation is any number of motivations, some pure, some impure.

And that's why these conversations ultimately lead nowhere - it isn't the act of lying that people get upset about, it's the motivation behind the lie that fucks people up. Besides mine, there are five responses (and a joke). Each one of them is a debate about motivation. The "lie" itself is fundamentally irrelevant to the discussion - nobody likes to wrap their head around it, but there it is. The brighter your kid is, the more your kid lies. The better your kid relates to other kids, the better your kid lies. Success in society is directly, positively correlated with your ability to lie. If you wish to consider "lying" to be relevant then you are forced to acknowledge that every leading light in our society is morally aberrant, and statistically that doesn't work, therefore the people telling the truth are the deviant weirdos.

So forget about the lying. Don't get hung up on it. Focus on the intent. People lie. They lie all the time, and they lie for a gajillion reasons, most of them harmless, some of them altruistic, a modicum of them sinister. There has been a continuous line of human civilization for twelve thousand years now, which is a pretty convincing argument that our better natures win out most of the time… which in turn makes the argument that most people are basically good.

And if most people are basically good and if all people lie, "lying" cannot be that bad. A crude syllogism, but a compelling one.