The Virtue of Lying

I have been re-reading Professor Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. I just finished that part of her chapter on the virtue of honesty which explains why honesty is not morally required when one is threatened by Nazis, or by a mugger, or while enduring analogous emergent circumstances. She concludes this section by writing:

The thing to appreciate about Rand's position is that it is entirely of a piece with her broader explanation of the propriety of honesty. She condones particular lies not as an ad hoc concession to the vague cliche that every rule was meant to be broken or by claiming that some exceptions are "just obvious." Rather, the rationale for the permissibility of certain lies is a logical extension of the rationale behind honesty itself. Honesty is not intrinsically virtuous or a categorical imperative, to be blindly obeyed regardless of circumstances. Honesty is a practical means of furthering a person's objective values and thus his life. Virtue cannot be properly demanded when it would work against that end, however. Indeed, truth-telling would not be virtue, in the cases in question.

I find this paragraph very helpful, but perhaps not making the point as starkly or clearly as Smith might. I think the basic precept to remember in this case is that at all times, morality requires self-defense, and self-defense requires that one meet the initiation of force with force. To lie to someone in order to gain a value is fraud, and to lie to someone to preserve the value which is your life, while it is not at all fraud, nevertheless is similarly the attempt to get someone to act on that which is not true. In each case, you're using force, albeit indirectly.

I have not yet reached that section of her book, but I would not be surprised if Smith makes the point in this way when she further elaborates on such situations in her chapter on the virtue of justice.