"A liar is someone who denies the truth to someone who has a right to it."

Creative, you have to admit…and sneaky. Professor Maguire rejects the straightforward definition of a lie as "a deliberately untrue statement or a statement made with the intent to deceive" in order to concoct a value-laden definition with a big loophole. Liars of the world, rejoice! Your deception isn't a lie unless the person you deceive has a right to the truth you're hiding.

So when a nice stranger in a bar asks you what you do for a living, spin him a yarn! After all, he doesn't have a right to know your business. Those of us who still accept the old-fashioned concept that lies are inherently wrong but that certain lies can be justified never considered the possibility that intentionally misinforming someone isn't a lie at all. Unfortunately, Professor Maguire doesn't tell us what such an intentionally untrue statement is called, so keep your eye out for his next letter.

It seems that the professor's idea is to narrow the definition of liar (which used to be "one who tells lies"…what fun is that?) to one who tells bad lies. Unnecessary or gratuitous lies like the one in the bar apparently don't count as bad lies, but this is Professor Maguire's definition. If you ask him what his sign is, be on the alert: he can tell you he's a Capricorn when he's really a Taurus, and still not be lying under his new formula.

But a captured American soldier who is being interrogated by the enemy regarding the identity of U.S. bombing targets and refuses to reveal them would be a bad liar under Professor Maguire's definition, because any nation has a "moral right" to know if its going to be attacked. Similarly, the eleven year old Ohio boy who recently saved his mother's life by telling her falsely that the family cat was safe, dissuading her from running into their burning home seconds before it collapsed, would be a bad liar according to Maguire. The mother certainly had a right to know what had become of her cat (The cat survived, by the way.), and yet her son deceived her. Bad boy! Don't lie to your mother, even if it gets her fricasseed!

Yet Maguire's "right" exception would have let Bill Clinton off the hook. He wouldn't have had to wait until this month to reapply for the Arkansas law license he had taken from him for lying under oath in a court proceeding. President Clinton's defense always was that attorneys had no right to ask him about Monica, that it was a perjury trap and an invasion of his private life. And indeed, by Professor Maguire's definition, he wasn't lying at all!

There is that problem of what rights we're talking about and who gets to define them: legal rights, moral rights, human rights, privacy rights…a lot of loopholes in there for the duplicitous and evasive…not that they would be liars any more…to exploit. Professor Maguire makes it clear the kind of liar his definition would expose: people like new Supreme Court Justice Alito, who, Maguire writes, denied the "truth about his intentions on issues where citizens have a moral right to be informed." This too is odd, because no judge has the "right" to decide how he or she will decide a case before hearing all the arguments and knowing the facts, to say nothing of having an actual case to consider. And nobody, not even Senator Shumer, has the "right" to make a judge do that. Yet Maguire regards Alito as a liar.

Clearly, his definition needs work. Or maybe not: after all, the old definition is clear: a lie is a lie. Professor Maguire's intent, it seems, is to make liars out of those with whom he disagrees, at the cost of allowing true liars to escape detection. With all his emphasis on rights, he forgets the simplest. A person has a right not to be lied to, unless the truth will cause more harm than the lie.

Thanks to the efforts of politicians, journalists, and, of course, James Frey, much of the public is confused enough about what constitutes lies and liars. It certainly doesn't need an ethicist with an agenda peddling a flawed and useless definition that can only make things worse.