Lie (Autonomy vs Authenticity)

In the recent Supreme Court ruling on US v Xavier Alvarez  Judge Kozinski discusses the reasons for lying and makes some interesting claims relating lying to society and its freedoms:

An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal and when to deceive.

Political and self expression lie at the very heart of the First Amendment. If the First Amendment is to mean anything at all, it must mean that people are free to speak about themselves and their country as they see fit without the heavy hand of government to keep them on the straight and narrow.

The courts promotion of personal freedom and restriction of government interference is certainly to be applauded, but the ruling does raise questions regarding ethics and identity.  Moral thought throughout history would probably have disagreed with the court.  Kant would have upheld that lying was wrong even when it was for a social good or for an avoidance of evil.  In the twentieth-century, the Existentialists were concerned about lying as the basis of bad faith.  Authenticity in life was a moral requirement.  But now, through the periods of late modernism/post-modernism, personal autonomy has been elevated to a chief moral concern.  I wonder if the pantheon of Existentialists would revise there positions now, as personal autonomy was a prime concern of theirs and we now live in a world that they helped create.  It would seem that the evolution of moral thought might now regard personal autonomy as inextricably linked to authenticity.  If we must make ourselves, then an element of that creation is determining how that existence is viewed and regarded (many of the courts examples can be reduced down to an avoidance of judgement).  But, "Hell is other people" as Sartre claimed.  Perhaps he would now say that the self-created individual must be judged on a fundamental basis of who they are, not how they can be perceived.  The highest level of autonomy, he might claim, comes from the individual one becomes in its undistorted reality, not the one that is carefully advertised to affect a pre-determined response.  In the post-modern world customization and personalization have become elevated because of their availability, everything from a personal music playlist to extensive body modification.  It is also the world of the spectacle where everything resides on the surface and is therefore subjected to spin.  The court-affirmed position of deception as a valid method of self-creation becomes a another tool in self-creation.