For many, honesty is a key tenant of friendship. We trust our friends to ‘give it to us straight’, to ‘keep it real’. We often like to believe that we can be our truest selves around our friends. But how reasonable is it to expect total candor from our friends? Might it sometimes be more acceptable to lie to preserve our friends’ feelings or interests? Are lies told to our friends, in a way, worse than lies told to non-friends? I explore various categories of lies - lies by omission, lies by commission, and lies by misrepresentation. I present two categories of potential justification for lying to a friend - internalist justification, reasons motivated by the friend’s interest, and externalist justification, reasons extraneous to the friend’s interest. Ultimately, I argue that all lies, regardless of content or justification, should be broadly considered unacceptable, but that our decisions about whether to lie to a friend or, alternately, our response to being lied to by a friend can and should be motivated by the features of the lie.
