I think every person needs to develop their own code of ethics, so what's ethical for someone else may not be ethical for you.

Is lying unethical? I think we can all think of good examples of (little) white lies. (Open any ethical dilemmas textbook.) In this case, a little massaging of the truth to avoid getting punished for what is, after all, a stupid law, doesn't seem at all unethical to me. It's not a white lie (it's only serving the liar), but it's not a black lie either: it's not hurting anyone.

That's the thing about lying. Weirdly, it goes from being ethical to unethical if you get caught at it. Nobody is ever hurt by a lie, until they find out it's a lie.

I lie a lot, at least by implication, when I'm infiltrating and I bump into employees or security. Usually my default lie is, "Just looking for the bathroom," or "I'm lost, and trying to find my way back out onto the street, can you please help me?" I don't feel too bad about these, because generally they are undisprovable, and nobody's going to be hurt or insulted by discovering I've just lied to their face.

So I try to draw the line at disprovable lies, like, "Yes, I do work here."

This is both self-serving and considerate, I think. I probably hate getting caught in a lie as much or more as others hate being lied to.

But the other day I got carried away. I'm always spinning plausible stories that I can tell people if I'm challenged, and finally one came spilling out by accident. I was opening doors on a fairly busy conference level of a hotel, and found myself in a service corridor where three employees were arranging things on trays on carts. I blurted, "Oh, I'm looking for the stairs." (My inner story at this time, which I was trying to project through body language, was that I was a guest who didn't like elevators and wanted to climb up to his room.) The nearest employee said, "Oh, are you trying to get upstairs or back down to the lobby?" Here is where I should have come clean, but I said automatically, "Upstairs. I don't know if it's possible, maybe I need to just take the elevator ..." Pleasantly she led me to a nearby stairwell, asking on the way what floor I was going to. As I was fully committed now, I said at random, "Seven." "Wow, you're going to climb all the way to the seventh floor!?" I laughed and said, "Yeah, and if I feel good, I might just keep going!" --That was true.

I felt bad afterwards, not so much for lying, but for having drifted into a situation where I could have easily been caught in a lie.