Lying for a righteous cause works best when the lie includes a planned exit. Nellie Bly lied her way into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in 1887. Then she exposed both the asylum and her own deception in print (Source: Gutenberg).

Elizabeth Holmes kept the Theranos story running for years. A federal judge sentenced her to 135 months on November 18, 2022. She and Ramesh Balwani owe more than $452 million in restitution (Source: History).

As of October 2026, Holmes remains in a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Her transfer to a halfway house should come in August 2027 (Source: History.com, same page). Immanuel Kant rejected every lie in his 1797 reply to Benjamin Constant (Source: Wikipedia).

The working test demands two answers before anyone lies. It names the date the truth comes out and the person who hears it.

Before Nellie Bly faked her way into an asylum, she asked her editor one practical question. How would he get her out?

“I do not know,” John Cockerill told her. “Only get in.”

So she got in. In 1887, Elizabeth Cochran, a 23-year-old reporter writing as Nellie Bly, stayed up all night practicing a wide-eyed stare. She rented a room at a boardinghouse called the Temporary Home for Females and acted strange in front of the other boarders. The doctors who examined her bought it. Soon a ferry carried her to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

Inside, she dropped the act and talked like herself. It didn’t help. “The more sanely I talked and acted,” she wrote later, “the crazier I was thought to be.”

After ten days, a lawyer from the New York World arranged her release. Her reporting ran in the paper, then as a book, and a grand jury went to look at the island for itself.

I’d call that lie justified. I’d guess you would too, and fast. That speed deserves a second look.

Why “Is Lying Ever Justified?” Asks The Wrong Question

Quick Summary: The question freezes two moving processes into nouns. A told falsehood demands daily upkeep from whoever started it. Goals drift between year one and year five, and deceptions drift along with them. Weighing “a lie” against “a goal” ignores that both keep changing.

The question sounds simple. Can you lie to reach a righteous goal?

Look at the grammar, though. “A lie” sits in that sentence as a single object, one act you commit and finish. “A righteous goal” sits there too, fixed and shining at the end of the road. Put both nouns on a scale, see which one weighs more, and you’re done.

Neither holds still like that. A lie keeps running after you tell it, because somebody now believes something false, and you either keep that belief alive or let it die. The goal drifts too. What you wanted in year one tends to shift by year five, and the lie you told for the first goal quietly starts serving the second.

So I’d ask a different question. How long does the lie have to keep running, and what do you have to keep doing while it runs?

Kant’s Murderer At The Door, Minus The Door

Quick Summary: Benjamin Constant limited the duty of honesty to listeners with a right to the truth. Kant answered that every falsehood wears down trust in contracts and promises. Jens Timmermann notes that neither text mentions a door (Source: https://cambridgeblog.org/2025/02/bidding-farewell-to-kants-murderer-at-the-door).

Philosophers have fought over this since at least 1797. That year, the Swiss writer Benjamin Constant took a shot at Immanuel Kant. If you can never lie, Constant argued, you’d have to tell a murderer where your friend went to hide.

Constant’s fix limited the duty. You owe the truth only to people with a right to it, and nobody has a right to a truth that harms others.

Kant answered in a short essay, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” and dug in. A lie, he argued, harms more than the person who hears it. It wears down the trust that lets contracts and promises work. Then he made a sharper, stranger point. Tell the truth, and whatever the murderer does next belongs to the murderer. Tell a lie, and you own what follows, even when it goes wrong in a way you never pictured.

Interpreters still call that answer grotesque. After World War II, critics swapped the murderer for a Nazi officer searching homes for hidden Jews, and Kant’s position started to look monstrous.

One detail tends to get lost. Kant scholar Jens Timmermann points out that neither Constant nor Kant mentions a door. Generations of readers added it. The scene came secondhand, too. Timmermann traces it back to Augustine, then to the Hebrew Bible.

Augustine drew the line even harder. In De mendacio, written around 395, he sorted lies into eight kinds, ranked from worst to least bad. The least bad harmed no one and protected someone. He still rejected those, including a lie told to save an innocent life, allowed that such a lie could earn a pardon, and never called it right.

Shiphrah And Puah: A Righteous Lie In Exodus

Quick Summary: Exodus 1 records Shiphrah and Puah defying a royal order to kill newborn Hebrew boys. They answered the king with a single false explanation. The biblical text rewards them and never scolds. Their deception ended within one conversation and needed no ongoing maintenance.

One of those older versions runs about a paragraph long.

In Exodus, the king of Egypt orders two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill the boys born to Hebrew women. They let the boys live. When the king calls them in to explain, they lie. Hebrew women give birth so fast, they tell him, that the babies arrive before the midwives do.

The text doesn’t scold them. It says God dealt well with the midwives.

Look at the size of that lie. One sentence, to one man, to stop one order. Nobody had to remember it next quarter. It ended almost as fast as it started.

Theranos And The Lie That Needed A Payroll

Quick Summary: The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2015 that Theranos ran only a handful of tests on its own machine. Whistleblower Tyler Shultz alleged the company discarded inconvenient results. Sustained deception required demos, board endorsements, lab staff and lawyers.

Now take a lie that never ended.

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and cited her own fear of needles as the spark. The pitch sounded righteous to plenty of smart people. A small device would run a wide range of blood tests from a finger prick, so patients could skip the needle and the vial.

The device didn’t do that. In October 2015, John Carreyrou reported in The Wall Street Journal that Theranos ran only a handful of tests on its own machine. Employees had worried about accuracy. A whistleblower, Tyler Shultz, alleged that the company tossed out inconvenient results.

Think about what the lie needed by then. Investor demos. A board that kept vouching. Lab staff running tests on conventional machines while the story said otherwise. Lawyers. A lie like that needs a payroll.

In January 2022, a jury convicted Holmes on four counts tied to defrauding investors and acquitted her on the counts tied to patients. On November 18, 2022, a federal judge sentenced her to 135 months, a little over 11 years.

I can’t tell you the day Holmes stopped working on blood tests and started working on the story about blood tests. I doubt anyone can. But somewhere in those years, I think the goal and the lie traded places. The needle-free future turned into the excuse for the story, and the story took up her days. The jury didn’t rule on that part. I’m reading it in.

Do The Ends Justify The Means? Plato’s Noble Lie

Quick Summary: Plato’s Republic proposes a “noble lie” told to an entire city, including the rulers (Source: Wikipedia). The myth of the metals gives every citizen a gold, silver, bronze, or iron soul. Sissela Bok’s 1978 publicity test requires a justified lie to survive public defense before reasonable people (Source: Michigan Law Review).

The most famous righteous lie in Western philosophy was aimed at grandchildren.

In Book III of the Republic, Socrates proposes a founding story for his ideal city. He says every citizen grew up inside the earth, and the god mixed metals into each soul. Gold went into the rulers. Silver went into the soldiers. Bronze and iron went into the farmers and craftsmen. If the story sticks, everyone stays in their place.

Socrates calls it a noble lie. He also doubts anyone will buy it. Glaucon agrees that this generation won’t. Their sons might, though, and the generations after them.

Read that as a business plan. The lie has no exit. It actually works better the longer it runs, because the people who remember it as a story eventually die off.

That turns “do the ends justify the means?” into a timing question. Plato’s ends sit generations away. The means run every day in between.

The philosopher Sissela Bok offered a check in her 1978 book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. Her principle of publicity says a justified lie has to hold up when you defend it in front of reasonable people. Plato’s lie fails that check by design. Explain it to the citizens, and the myth stops working.

Where Kant Still Has A Point

Quick Summary: Short deceptions still bet on futures nobody can see. Bly entered Blackwell’s Island with no guaranteed way out. Kant assigns the liar responsibility for every outcome that follows, planned or unplanned. Some truths, like a family’s hiding place handed to soldiers, still cost more.

It would feel tidy to stop here, with good short lies on one side and bad long ones on the other. Kant won’t let me.

Even the short lie carries his warning. Bly fooled the doctors whose signatures sent her to the island. She also had no promise she’d get out, and Cockerill told her so. Every liar bets on a future they can’t see. The midwives bet the king would believe them. Bly bet the World would come back for her. Kant’s point lands right on that bet. Once you lie, you own the outcome, including the parts you didn’t plan.

Still, some truths cost more than any lie I can imagine. I wouldn’t hand a family’s hiding place to a soldier, and I don’t trust anyone who says they would. So I won’t pretend the answer comes out “never.”

The Exit Test For Lying For A Good Cause

Quick Summary: Bly’s undercover reporting ended in her own published confession. The midwives’ falsehood ended once Pharaoh stopped asking. Holmes’s story needed every new funding round to stretch it longer. Each month without disclosure made telling the truth more expensive.

I keep coming back to one test. Does the lie have an exit, and do you know where it sits before you start?

Bly built hers in. She lied to get inside, then told the whole city what she’d done, in print, under her byline. The lie existed to end in a confession. The midwives’ lie ended once the king stopped asking.

Holmes’s lie had no exit. Each new funding round needed the story to hold a little longer. Every month it held made the truth more expensive to tell.

A goal doesn’t stay righteous on its own. You keep it righteous, or you don’t, through what you do each day. A lie with no exit slowly takes over those days.

White Lies Vs. Noble Lies

Quick Summary: Bella DePaulo’s 1996 diary studies found college students telling about two lies a day and community members about one (Source: MIT). Participants rarely planned these lies or worried about getting caught. Sissela Bok traced how white-lie beginnings grow into larger patterns of deception (Source: Kirkus Reviews).

Noble lies get the philosophy seminars. White lies get the dinner parties.

In 1996, the psychologist Bella DePaulo and her colleagues asked two groups to keep a diary of every lie they told for a week. The 77 college students averaged about two lies a day. The 70 people from the surrounding community averaged about one. Most participants didn’t plan their lies much, didn’t consider them serious, and didn’t worry about getting caught.

On paper, that makes the white lie the opposite of Theranos. Nobody needs a payroll to say the muffins came out great. The lie ends when the plate goes back to the kitchen.

Bok saw a catch. In Lying, she followed how white lies tend to lead into bigger, habitual patterns. A white lie passes the two-line test easily, once. Trouble starts when the same lie comes back every week with a new date.

The Smaller Lies We Tell

Quick Summary: Workplace reassurances like “we’re on track” arrive with good reasons attached. The person speaking has to keep believing in their own honesty, with one temporary exception. Over weeks, that exception settles in, and self-deception can outlast the original deception.

Most of us won’t fake insanity or raise $700 million. Our lies come smaller. “I’m on board with the reorg,” I said to keep a team calm. “We’re on track,” I told a client so they don’t panic before I fix it. Each one arrives with a good reason attached.

Then watch who has to keep believing it. You do.

To keep telling a client you’re on track, you have to keep seeing yourself as someone who tells clients the truth, with one temporary exception. Weeks pass. The exception stays. The person you deceive longest can end up sharing your name.

How To Run The Exit Test Before You Lie

Quick Summary: Readers apply the test with two written lines. The first line holds the planned falsehood. The second holds a disclosure date and a named listener. A blank second line signals a maintenance commitment, not a contained deception.

Before you tell the next righteous lie, try this. Write the lie on one line. On the line under it, write the date you’ll tell the truth and the name of the person who’ll hear it.

Bly could have filled in both lines before she boarded the ferry. “Only get in” covered the way in. She supplied the way out herself.

If you can only fill in the first line, hold off. You haven’t planned a lie. You’ve signed up for a second job.

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