Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

Honesty is often treated as a private virtue, something between you and your conscience. But a community depends on it the way a building depends on its foundations. Contracts, courts, friendships and news all assume that most people are telling the truth most of the time, and each lie slightly weakens the ground everyone else is standing on.

Think of the small untruths told for convenience: the excuse for lateness, the pretended agreement, the inflated report. None of them feels like a public matter. Try going a week without the convenient ones and notice how much of social life you had quietly been bending.