In a thread on the other board about my agnostic/rebellious teenage cousin and her asshole fundamentalist parents, at least one person opined that she should flat-out lie to them about rejecting of their faith until she turns 18 and can move out. While I am not going to advise her to do so, that's mostly because I feel that, for me, that would be an unethical insertion of myself into their parenting authority. In fact I think that lying about her faith (or lack thereof) is the best option for her, given the circumstances in which she lives. I do not believe that truthfulness is an absolute virtue, because I don't believe in absolute virtues. I'm a contextual ethicist, by which I mean that you can only judge the rightness or wrongness of an action in terms of the environment in which it occurs.* I don't think telling the truth is the moral choice in every circumstance. In many circumstances, a person has a moral obligation to do so; in some, a person has an obligation to lie; and in still others, lying is neither good nor bad.
That brings me to the stop if this thread--which, by the way, is NOT my young cousin's situation. Rather, I would like to discuss under what circumstances you guys feel lying to be morally or ethically justified, and how how you make that decision.
*I say "contextual" rather than "situational" because I'm not comfortable with the connotations of the phrase "situational ethics." But that's another thread.