You’ve entirely missed my point. She wasn’t lying, as we know, but the point is that, in the remote possibility that she was, the harm done to society was nil. In life lying is only rarely okay (e.g. to preserve someone’s feelings), but that’s not the point. The point here is that there was a clear upside to showing some compassion and the downside on the off chance that she had lied about going to the hospital was virtually nothing. In even a cold-blooded calculation of one vs. the other, I would hope that compassion would win out. Guess I’m wrong.