Lying is ALWAYS a Sin: Resurrection Thread

[Marc_Anthony]

No, what I said is that lying isn’t always wrong. It is sometimes the right thing to do.

I know you said that. But that isn’t true. If you’re lying, you’re using bad ends to achieve good means.

Or, think for a moment. I can argue that mass murder isn’t always bad. Not that the ends justify the means, mind you, but that sometimes it is the right thing to do.

1. Mass murder is a miss killing of a large group of people. This is wrong.
2. But if I kill 100 people, I will save five thousand.
3. This is obviously the better result. Therefore mass murder is sometimes not wrong.

This is really the ends justify the means, and that’s really what you’re trying to say.

 

[jimmy]

This is an argument from emotion, and it means nothing. What you’re saying is, "I don’t like the conclusion, so I don’t agree. There really isn’t an “argument”. Lying is saying something you know to be false with the intention of making somebody else believe it is true. The natural end of speech is communication. Lying is a disruption of that end. Therefore, lying is wrong. You can’t make exceptions just because the conclusion is uncomfortable, but honestly that seems to be everybody’s argument.

Look, nobody’s view here is heretical, and frankly this is a very small issue so I won’t condemn anybody here for having a different view. But I’m just stating the valid conclusions from the premises.

When you say that lying is always a sin you are saying that it is heretical to believe it is acceptable to lie in certain situations.

My whole point in lying is disruption and to communicate something false. It is still communication. You haven’t shown that telling a lie violates natural law. The purpose of speech is communication, whether what I am communicating is true or false. A false statement is still communication.

If you are trying to equate communication with communion and love, then I would agree in cases where you love the other person and your intent is to bring communion. But in the example of the Jew that is not the case. My whole intent is to create a rupture between the nazi and the truth. I don’t want communion with him. I don’t commune with evil. I have chosen the side of the Jew, and I will be faithful to my decision. Similarly, if I were a soldier, I would lie to the enemy in order to protect my own country and the soldiers of my country. The enemy troops have no right to the truth, and I will lie specifically to give them a false conclusion. My allegiance is to my own people and my own country. They are the ones I am friendly toward and love.

This brings up a question though. Is communication the only end of speech? I think the only way you can say that it is, is if you say that it is always evil to go to war or to kill or to rupture friendly ties. If communication is always about love and communion, and communication is the only end of speech then it is always wrong to break communion. It is always wrong to break a friendship. It is always wrong to declare war, because there is absolutely no intent of communion in these situations.

You can avoid what I said if you want, but I didn’t say I don’t like the conclusion so I don’t agree. What I said is that your hierarchy of values is screwed up. Facts mean more than life. Nietzsche’s morality is more just. The only way that telling the truth can always be good is if there is never any war or disruption between people. It only works in an ideal world.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

When you say that lying is always a sin you are saying that it is heretical to believe it is acceptable to lie in certain situations.

That is totally untrue. There is a difference between sin and heresy, I suggest you research it. Now I’m annoyed, because you’re trying to make it out like I’m calling you a heretic. The Church allows for debate on whether or not lying is a sin.

Okay, you know want to know why natural law says that lying is always wrong? Look it up. It’s all over the internet. It’s not hard to find.

 

[jimmy]

I know you said that. But that isn’t true. If you’re lying, you’re using bad ends to achieve good means.

Or, think for a moment. I can argue that mass murder isn’t always bad. Not that the ends justify the means, mind you, but that sometimes it is the right thing to do.

1. Mass murder is a miss killing of a large group of people. This is wrong.
2. But if I kill 100 people, I will save five thousand.
3. This is obviously the better result. Therefore mass murder is sometimes not wrong.

This is really the ends justify the means, and that’s really what you’re trying to say.

That isn’t really what I am saying. There are some things that are unjustifiable. Idolatry is unjustifiable. I would also say it is unjustifiable to deny your faith in God. It is unjustifiable to kill an innocent person. I would agree that the ends don’t justify the means. But the question is whether the means are always evil in the first place. In the case of lying I don’t think that is the case. Just like there is a distinction in killing out of self defense and murder, I would say there is a distinction between lying to a friend and lying to an enemy. In the case of a friend, speech is about communion, but in the case of an enemy it is about disruption. I am not friends with the man who is trying to kill me so I have no desire or intent to communicate the truth to him.

In regard to your example: you have limited it by using the word murder. But if it was just mass killing it could be justifiable. If it was the killing of 100 suicide bombers to save 10000 civilians then it is justifiable.

This has gotten more interesting for me in the last couple posts. It has allowed me to think through and modify how I understand and explain it.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

You can avoid what I said if you want, but I didn’t say I don’t like the conclusion so I don’t agree. What I said is that your hierarchy of values is screwed up. Facts mean more than life. Nietzsche’s morality is more just. The only way that telling the truth can always be good is if there is never any war or disruption between people. It only works in an ideal world.

The only way that not mass murdering people can be always good is if there’s never war. It only works in an ideal world.

On why lying is against natural law, from the Summa Theologica:

Now a lie is evil in respect of its genus, since it is an action bearing on undue matter. For as words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 7) that “lying is in itself evil and to be shunned, while truthfulness is good and worthy of praise.” Therefore every lie is a sin, as also Augustine declares (Contra Mend. i).

Read this section from the Summa on lying:

newadvent.org/summa/3110.htm

 

[jimmy]

That is totally untrue. There is a difference between sin and heresy, I suggest you research it. Now I’m annoyed, because you’re trying to make it out like I’m calling you a heretic. The Church allows for debate on whether or not lying is a sin.

Okay, you know want to know why natural law says that lying is always wrong? Look it up. It’s all over the internet. It’s not hard to find.

I was under the impression that you thought I was contradicting church teaching.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

Just like there is a distinction in killing out of self defense and murder, I would say there is a distinction between lying to a friend and lying to an enemy.

The parallel between self-defense is murder is not the parallel between lying to a friend and an enemy. When lying to a friend vs. an enemy you’re still lying, which is wrong. But when murdering you’re doing something different than defending yourself. The real parallel is between lying and deceiving.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

I was under the impression that you thought I was contradicting church teaching.

You were mistaken. In certain cases what is defined as a sin is up for debate. This is one of those cases. You’ll notice that the Catechism is deliberately unclear on the matter.

EDIT: This is why the debate is really little more than an intellectual excercise, because even if I’m right the practical effects of it in real life are virtually nil, because even if you DID lie in such situations (and I make no bones about it, I would) the lie would be so minor that it’s not even worth your attention, really.

 

[jimmy]

The parallel between self-defense is murder is not the parallel between lying to a friend and an enemy. When lying to a friend vs. an enemy you’re still lying, which is wrong. But when murdering you’re doing something different than defending yourself. The real parallel is between lying and deceiving.

That is just semantics though. Whether you are killing in self defends or committing murder, the act is still the same. Either way you are killing another man. Murder just modifies killing to limit it to particular situations. Similarly I have limited lying by speaking of it in relation to friends and enemies.

Yes, deception is the goal with my enemy. I can do that by either telling part of the truth, or by telling an outright lie. Sometimes an outright lie may be necessary to make the deception work.

 

[jimmy]

You were mistaken. In certain cases what is defined as a sin is up for debate. This is one of those cases. You’ll notice that the Catechism is deliberately unclear on the matter.

EDIT: This is why the debate is really little more than an intellectual excercise, because even if I’m right the practical effects of it in real life are virtually nil, because even if you DID lie in such situations (and I make no bones about it, I would) the lie would be so minor that it’s not even worth your attention, really.

I am glad for the intellectual exercise. My earlier posts weren’t as clearly thought out as my last few have been. They were just responses based on what I thought was wrong and a stataement of position. The last couple posts I have been able to make a few distinctions in the way I understand and explain it.

Sorry about any grammatical and spelling errors. I am doing this on a kindle and it keeps correcting what I write.

 

[Iron_Donkey]

In the natural law, lying is undoubtedly saying something you know is totally false to somebody in the effort to convince them that what you’re saying is true, because the point of speech is communication, and you are frustrating that end. Self-defense is a different issue. Why? Great question, actually. This is because we’re making the wrong comparison. Murder and killing is a distinction. When we kill somebody in self-defense, we’re not murdering them.

The same distinction is made between lying and deception. You can deceive somebody, just like you can kill somebody. But you cannot lie to somebody, just like you cannot murder somebody.

So it seems like your saying it’s much more analogous to artificial birth control vs NFP. Deception is “open to truth,” as it were.

I’ll have to think about this. The shape of the objection that is taking place in my mind is that the ordinary purpose of speech is to communicate truth, but that when you are unreasonably forced into speech against your will (and body language and silence in the face of questions etc do fall broadly under the term “speech”), you may not be required to personally make sure the purpose of speech is being followed, and the guilt for any violations falls on the aggressive party.

Of course, this could be problematic, because this sort of reasoning seems equivalent to saying that it would be ok for a victim to use contraception (when abortion is ruled out) in the case of rape which, to be frank, I have never even considered until now. It seems like such might be acceptable from reading this article, and more directly this other article (which includes the line “In accordance with Catholic moral teaching, these hospitals provide emergency contraception after appropriate testing.”), but I freely admit that I am not familiar with this issue, and that this objection is in the early stages and may fall apart. But it wouldn’t be the internet if people only gave arguments that definitely made sense, so here it is anyway.

I also have a slight objection that it is not clear to me that this puts enough restrictions on when deception is allowed (it seems like it may potentially say that deception is always or almost always ok), but I may get over that, as people tend not to have problems saying that NFP must be justified.

I’m still not ready to give up on the murder vs killing analogy completely - I suspect that the difference between the two may be able to be couched in terms similar to the above - but I’m willing to set it aside for the moment.

They would be wrong. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the government using taxes for good causes. It is not against natural law. It doesn’t matter what they think.

Yes of course. No disagreement whatsoever. But they are wrong because they misunderstand the purpose of (or at least allowable purposes of) taxation, not necessarily because they are misapplying morality to their idea of the purpose of taxation. Which is more or less one of the possible ways to disagree with your position (though I am not yet certain whether or not I disagree in this way).

 

[Kay_Cee]

Has anybody read Peter Kreeft’s new book Summa Philosophica? He has an entire section devoted to the very problem of this thread (see pp. 181-182).

According to Kreeft, “No universal natural law obligation can conflit with another.” He gives examples, such as the taking of a madman’s weapon not being theft, and self-defense not being murder. He claims that deliberately deceiving those who do not have the right to know is not lying. He goes on to state that nobody has a universal right to know the truth about everything.

It seems to me that, just as a madman forfeits the right to his property when he is going to use it to harm another, the Nazis forfeited their right to the truth when they intended to use that truth in the employment of evil.

 

[Iron_Donkey]

Has anybody read Peter Kreeft’s new book Summa Philosophica? He has an entire section devoted to the very problem of this thread (see pp. 181-182).

According to Kreeft, “No universal natural law obligation can conflit with another.” He gives examples, such as the taking of a madman’s weapon not being theft, and self-defense not being murder. He claims that deliberately deceiving those who do not have the right to know is not lying. He goes on to state that nobody has a universal right to know the truth about everything.

It seems to me that, just as a madman forfeits the right to his property when he is going to use it to harm another, the Nazis forfeited their right to the truth when they intended to use that truth in the employment of evil.

Yeah, I think we all agree that if someone doesn’t have a right to the truth then you don’t have to give it to him. The question appears to be whether or not speaking something that is false is a permissible way of not giving that person the truth - or to put it another way, I know I don’t have to speak the whole truth to this person, but does what I speak have to be true?

I tend to think saying something which is false is acceptable in such extreme cases as Nazis, and I tend to think Dr. Kreeft says the same thing, but I think to be precise enough it may be necessary to distinguish between a “right to be told the truth” (as in, the right to have the information that you seek) verses a “right to have what you are told be true.”

I would argue that the first can vanish pretty easily even for questions about stupid things like what you plan on doing for lunch, but the second requires that the truth will be somehow misused, and that it is when the second vanishes that it is permissible to lie (and I don’t think social untruths, things of the type that are said to dodge questions that all people understand are said to dodge questions, count as lies in either case).

 

[HelenRose]

I never belong in “logical” conversations like this and I generally stay away from them. But once in a while I have to stand up and say. “God is not stupid and He certainly is not a logic machine.” Sure lying is a sin, but really now, doesn’t common sense have some say in this convoluted debate.

If a nazi was standing at my door, I hope I would have the courage to say “We are not hiding anyone.”

If is logic you are looking for, go to Star Trek’s Spock.

If is common sense you are looking for, turn to the mercy of God.

I doubt if “social lies” are necessary and are basically cop outs. I don’t engage in them, not because I am particularly virtuous but truthful tact is far simplier than weaving in a stupid lie.

 

[Iron_Donkey]

I never belong in “logical” conversations like this and I generally stay away from them. But once in a while I have to stand up and say. “God is not stupid and He certainly is not a logic machine.” Sure lying is a sin, but really now, doesn’t common sense have some say in this convoluted debate.

If a nazi was standing at my door, I hope I would have the courage to say “We are not hiding anyone.”

If is logic you are looking for, go to Star Trek’s Spock.

If is common sense you are looking for, turn to the mercy of God.

I doubt if “social lies” are necessary and are basically cop outs. I don’t engage in them, not because I am particularly virtuous but truthful tact is far simplier than weaving in a stupid lie.

Hey, we’ve got to occupy our minds somehow. If I didn’t spend time thinking about this, I’d have to study for my stupid qualifying exams, and frankly any excuse to avoid abstract algebra is a good one.

Seriously though, if what we believe to be logical and what common sense suggest are in conflict, it is important to try to resolve the conflict. Test everything and hold fast to what is good, sort of thing.

And while God is certainly not a logic machine, He is logical. Christ is the Logos, after all.

(And yeah, “social lies” or mistruths or whatever are probably avoidable, and in some cases may be a cop out and uncessary - I didn’t mean to imply that they were always or often good, I just don’t believe that they are sinful.)

 

[someperson555]

+JMJ+

I decided to resurrect the topic of an older thread (in which I have participated before) because I apparently have found at the very least a partial answer to this moral conundrum that initially shook my faith a couple of years ago.

To recap, there are two scenarios that are being considered here. One is the scene in which a person who is running from those trying to murder him/her hides in your house, then the aforementioned potential murderers knock on your door and ask if the person they were looking for is in your house. To protect the person you have hiding, you would have to lie to the people who were pursuing him/her. But isn’t it a sin to lie?

The second scenario is that of the work of a spy or undercover cop, in which lies and subterfuge are the norm. But since lying is a sin, it would be immoral for a Catholic to be one. This, to remind others, is different from the question of being a soldier, since the main purpose of a soldier is to protect the state, and killing is the last option, while a spy or undercover cop has to maintain and even propagate lies to do his/her work.

The answer for the first scenario came from Dr. Peter Kreeft’s excellent lecture entitled “Seeking and Responding to Truth”, which can be found in Youtube. In summary, to tell the truth to those potential murderers is to commit a lie. You promised, verbally or not, to protect the person that hid in your house; therefore, to rat him/her out is to lie against that promise.

The second scenario, however, I still don’t have a definite answer to. Yes, for a spy or undercover cop to refuse to lie is actually lying to his/her superiors to whom he/she made a vow to do his/her job, but does it not make a vow morally unbinding if the vow makes one do something against his/her conscience or morality?

Thoughts?

lying isnt always a sin. even if you would have not promised a person you would protect him, its still morally permissible to lie to protect him from injustice. if you had a neigbor you never really talk to, but one day an axe murderer showed up at your door and asked you if your neighbor lives in the apartment adjacent to yours, ofcourse you should lie and tell him no. i think people are making this question more complicated than it really is.
bottom line, when it is to defend someone against injustice its morally permissible to lie.
lying is only a sin if you lie for selfish reasons.

 

[Iron_Donkey]

lying isnt always a sin. even if you would have not promised a person you would protect him, its still morally permissible to lie to protect him from injustice. if you had a neigbor you never really talk to, but one day an axe murderer showed up at your door and asked you if your neighbor lives in the apartment adjacent to yours, ofcourse you should lie and tell him no. i think people are making this question more complicated than it really is.
bottom line, when it is to defend someone against injustice its morally permissible to lie.
lying is only a sin if you lie for selfish reasons.

I agree that this probably will hold for lying, however, the problem is that this sounds an awful lot like the ends justify the means. Which is not always true.

For instance, torturing information out of terrorists is terrible, despite the fact that the desire to gain such information and to use it to protect people is good.

Now obviously, saying “no one’s here” does not compare to torture in gravity, but the question is whether it’s one of those things that are permissible in grave circumstances or not. Several of us appear to think that the answer is that it obviously is, but several of us don’t as well and so we’ve been trying to chase down exactly why it is or isn’t.