Thank you, Lewis Cornelius, for a great question!
In response to your question (and it’s key to remember that philosophy often offers responses and not answers), I thought we could break it down a bit and see what it is we’re really looking for. This is certainly a question of ethics and morality, yet I think most helpful would be a discussion about what the terms ‘truth’ and ‘good’ really mean – I’m exchanging your phrase ‘okay’ for ‘good’ here – and how they relate to each other in your question.
Let’s start with ‘good’. Our dear friend Aristotle would say that something is truly ‘good’ only if it is desirable in itself. Money, for example, is not truly ‘good’ because we do not want money just to have money; we want it because of what we can do with it. So, when we consider your question in this context, it becomes a question about the functionality of ‘truth’. Is ‘truth’ something that we desire for its own sake, or is ‘truth’ a tool we can use to ‘be good’?
Defining ‘truth’ is a huge undertaking, something a Facebook post is not going to be able to accomplish. What we can say is that most of us view ‘truth’ as objective fact about the world and reality. This description of ‘truth’ leaves us with little room to do any stretching, because once we’ve distorted it, well, it’s no longer the truth. So, essentially, to ‘stretch the truth’ is to report something that is not the truth, that is, to tell a lie. With this in mind, we can see using the phrase ‘stretching the truth’ as a way to soften the blow of the term ‘lying’.
So, if ‘truth’ is something that we desire in itself, that is, Aristotle’s ‘good’, then ‘stretching the truth’ is not ‘okay’, because it is not honouring the truth, but rather telling lies. But, if ‘truth’ is a tool we use to achieve an end, then morality rests not in the act of ‘stretching the truth’, but in the goal we have in mind when we do the stretching.
What do you think? Is it okay to stretch the truth? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: The Truth, by Shivani Goel (credit)
I received a BA in philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2008. After that, I spent roughly a decade traveling Europe and North America as a touring musician. Now I am working on a master’s in philosophy and philology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden with the goal of teaching at the university level. Some specific areas of interest include medieval grammar and free will. Michel Foucault’s approach to the history of philosophy has been a huge influence on me, and his work on notions of the self and power structures bring history to the present.