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i'm considering the idea that it's okay for a human individual to lie under duress or who is personally involved with someone under duress (unless you have a specific duty to answer truthfully), or when you have been asked a question that you shouldn't have been asked. This would provide a way where someone harboring a Jewish person from the Nazis could be allowed to lie if asked straight up if they were hiding a Jewish person. It also allows you to lie to a mugger who insists that you promise to do something on pain of immediate death.
The idea of duress may be very broad; for example, if your employer asks you if X, where X is something such as hiding a Jewish person that is good, or at least neutral, but must remain secret, and you feel that you will get in trouble with your employer if you answer truthfully and that your employer should not have the right to ask that question, then this would be considered 'under duress'.
In general, one might find 'duress' to occur whenever telling the truth may cause an entity significantly more powerful than you to do significant harm to you. This is super broad, and gives pause to the idea that lying under duress should be permitted (although i currently can't think of a better idea). The best i can think of is to say that a finding of any sort of 'duress' should not always give license to lie, but rather should be attenuated by circumstance. For example, there is always a tiny chance that any sort of thing you say might unintentionally cause offense to your employer and get you in trouble -- but this tiny chance does not give license to lie all the time.
Note also the conjunctive condition "unless you have a specific duty to answer truthfully". For example, if your employer asks you if you have made any major mistake that will cost them a lot of money, you are not entitled to lie merely because you may be fired -- in this case, you have a duty to tell your employer how your actions affect the business. This "specific duty" thing is also way too ill-defined and gives pause to the idea of using this rule.
The "when you have been asked a question that you shouldn't have been asked" means that if a stranger in a bar (even one who poses you no harm) asks "are you X?" where X is an ethically permitted but unpopular thing to be, you don't have to say, "i can neither confirm nor deny that statement" -- because of course most people would answer "no", so your supposedly neutral answer actually identifies you as very probably X. Of course many people are sufficiently smooth that they would usually be able to direct the conversation away without ever precisely answering the question, but a system of ethics has to work universally without a requirement that one be smooth or intelligent.
Note that determining which questions 'shouldn't have been asked' is itself a tricky ethical question almost as complex as determining whether it is ok to lie, so this may seem like a cop-out to some. However, this rule is still different from (a) the simple rule to never lie, no matter what, (b) the rule to lie whenever you think it will increase utility.
The "who is personally involved with someone under duress" is also tricky. Personal involvement seems like a condition that shouldn't enter into a system of ethics. However, if not, won't people always be finding some way that by lying, they can help the economy or increase justice in society etc, and therefore often lying to protect other distant people? And if personal involvement is not a criterion, then a mugger can say "Promise X or i will kill your family member who is standing next to you". And is it enough? What if the mugger says "..or i will kill this other person who happens to be standing right here'? Should their sudden involvement in your life be enough to consider you to be 'personally involved', or is that criterion itself flawed?
It also may be important that these outs should only be made available to individuals acting in their individual capacity, not to institutions or people speaking on behalf of institutions. Institutions can too often be said to be acting 'under duress' as they are always in some way threatened by markets or governments or larger institutions. For example, a bank might like to claim 'i am allowed to cook my books because if others know how bad my balance sheet looks, i will lose more business, causing a positive feedback loop ending with my death. I am under duress.'. This reasoning may be valid, but nevertheless ethics are in service of conscious entities, not institutions, and it may serve humanity better if institutions are never permitted to lie in these cases; therefore one might conclude that these loopholes must not be made available to institutions. However, this conclusion is questionable because in a situation in which the legal authorities are unethical, it seems to effectively prevent institutions from participating in fighting against the unethical system.
An interesting area of further investigation is whether this sort of loophole could be generalized to other ethical imperatives; e.g. stealing food when one or one's family is starving; killing in self-defense. It seems that perhaps it could, and the same conditions (e.g. not having a rebel army that steals at will because ostensibly they are helping the poor; not having an army that fights a war on a distant continent becaus ostensibly this helps to defend the homeland) could be useful. But, if people can only defend other people with whom they are personally involved, how would Hitler have been defeated?
In summary, this sort of rule looks like an improvement on both 'don't ever lie' and 'lie whenever doing so increases societal utility', but it seems like further thought is needed.
Note that the above criterion authorizes lying even to third parties who haven't done anything wrong (collateral damage). For example, let's imagine each landlord is required by their insurance agency to monitor how many people are staying in each apartment, including guests, on a weekly basis. The landlords thereby ask each person once a week if they have any houseguests, and if so, how many. The landlords and insurance companies haven't done anything wrong (let's assume), and have every right to an honest answer. But now, let's say that the Nazis take over and require each landlord and each insurance company to send them notifications whenever the amount of people in any apartment changes. Now if you hide a Jewish person and give an honest answer to your landlord, the Nazis will come.
