by Charles Kluepfel
12/13/. But What About Morality?
Is religion a way to get people to act morally, the way Santa makes children behave?
IIs 30 too old to be a virgin?
... 40?
Is it right to lie to a Nazi?
Summary
- While holding possible doubts about the literal truth of Christianity parents might think that religion is somehow good for their children, making them behave in much the same manner as a threat that Santa won't bring presents to bad little boys and girls. But is ethics such a hard thing to inculcate in a secular manner? Can't we all just get along, without recourse to divine retribution? I think we can. We can combine empathy for our fellow humans with, sometimes, the retribution of the state's police power, to ensure that we live in a socially livable world.
- Religious moralities have a resemblance to humanistic "don't hurt your neighbor, and let's all just get along" moralities that would be uncanny were the former to be arbitrary rules from God. It is apparent that the true basis for morality is to make life the best for all of us here on earth, by preventing people from hurting one another and in fact, inspiring us to help one another. It would make sense for us rationally to see what actions can increase total human well-being. If that differs from conventional morality, then it should take precedence over what was in fact just an approximation, and an ancient one at that, to this true human-valued ethics.
- Particulars: is lying ever right? Is stealing ever right? Any given action might at some time be the right thing to do, if it alleviates human pain, or contributes to human good. But self-deception can never be of true value, if one always sees the value in life, and in carrying on despite its disappointments.
Many Americans, perhaps even most, have a repressed skepticism about religion. While professing to be Catholic, say, and attending church every Sunday, they will nevertheless be unable to intellectually defend such doctrines as the Virgin Birth, and may have behavior patterns at odds with the Church's teaching, such as using birth control. Andrew Greeley reports on pages 31 and 32 of his The Catholic Myth that 98% of American and British Catholics and 94% of American and British Protestants believe in God, leaving 2% and 6%, respectively, who call themselves Catholics or Protestants, but don't even believe in God.
One thing that such Americans find of value is social connection. But another value, one that is appealed to intellectually, is the claim that religion "is good for the children" in that it fosters morality. Demographic studies show upsurges in religious behavior among couples starting a family. What of the argument that religion is good for morality?
To put the matter explicitly, the argument goes that even if the Church's doctrines are not historically true, the practical benefit is to foster moral behavior. But if one finds value in such "good" behavior despite one's underlying lack of committed belief in the religion that fosters it, then you really value that morality for other than religious reasons. Why not try to "sell" that behavior based on the real reason that one finds it of value, rather than the purported religious one? On the other hand, if the goodness of the behavior depends solely on the religious orientation that the parent would otherwise find unappealing, then maybe it's time to rethink the value of such morality.
When it is said that churchgoing is harmless and inspires morality, there is a conflict. Is the church leading or following? If leading, it will bash gays and cling to other "ideals" of the past. If following, based on reason and compassion, what purpose does it serve? We can know this morality by ourselves.
The Code of Hammurabi, going back to the 18th century BCE, propounded rules of law designed "to do away with wicked and perverse men, so that the strong might not oppress the weak," and were displayed in the temple of Marduk. Even then they felt the need to put the laws under the aegis of a deity, though one the Christians today would cringe at worshipping. Obviously it was people who recognized the need for law, not Marduk. We all realize that there would be chaos if law did not exist: without policemen, we would all have to be policemen. All recognize the benefits of law.
Typically, however, the type of morality that parents are more interested in fostering are the kinds not covered under criminal law: specifically, sexual morality. In fact, there is a degree of hypocrisy in this. Parents wish their children to follow a morality that they did not follow in youth, and would not follow if given their youth to live over again. It's a hypocrisy in which an unmarried male who is 40 years old and has kept the morality-decreed virginity is looked upon as strange.
There are obvious reasons that sex is of concern to parents. Just as even National Rifle Association supporters would be leery of putting guns in the hands of all 14-year-olds, parents fear the powerful emotional and physiological powers with which all teenagers become equipped. While the state can forbid the sale of liquor and cigarettes to minors, and have a minimum age for the license required to drive a car, and even forbid adults from having sex with minors, it can't prevent access of teenagers to each other. And, unfortunately, another minor can be more irresponsible with your minor than an adult could be.
But is reliance on mythology a sound method of protecting your children? Can you not expect your offspring to be able to detect any misgivings you have about your "beliefs"? What if they are skeptical in spite of your professed beliefs? We successfully warn our children of the dangers of playing with matches, but expect as they grow into their teens that they may learn safely to use the stove and even tend the fireplace.
We provide drug education programs to warn children of the dangers of drug use. We provide driver education so that we may entrust thousands of pounds of deadly steel to our offspring's care. Can we not provide realistic sex education programs stressing the need for responsibility in relationships? ... stressing that some such responsibilities may be beyond the reach of many or most youths? ... warning of the dangers of disease and pregnancy? ... showing the consequences of unintended pregnancy? After all, if religious motivation to avoid sex fails, the youth is not going to think that a condom will prevent going to hell and so will not use one, if going to hell is presented as being the punishment. However, he or she can be taught that correct use of a condom can prevent the actual true unwanted effects of sex, and hopefully will use one in the statistically inevitable cases where prevention of sex fails. Besides, to the Catholic, the religious guilt of disobeying abstinence rules can be seen as erasable by confession. The physical consequences of failing to use protection can be shown to be not so curable. The importance of responsibility is that much greater.
The viewing by fundamentalists of the AIDS epidemic as God's punishment for homosexuality is as ludicrous as saying that the multitude of people killed in Lisbon, Portugal, by an earthquake collapsing the cathedral ceiling on them (commented upon by Voltaire) is an example of God's punishing the very act of worshipping God.
How Good Is Religion at Fostering Morality?
You may recall the case of Susan Smith, who sent her two kids in a car into a lake to drown. Her stepfather, Beverly Russell, "a prominent leader of the South Carolina Republican Party and the local Christian Coalition," reported in the October/November 1995 The National Times, had begun sexual advances on this step-daughter when she was 15. "At 17, Smith attempted suicide again. Russell claims that he held off until Smith was married before escalating this sick sexual liaison" to the point of having an adulterous affair with his step-daughter, which continued "right up to a few months before the boys were drowned."
Catholic Guilt
The Catholic Church has always told its faithful that confessing one's sins and receiving communion are ways of strengthening one's resolve, and avoiding further sin. Yet it also says that we all are sinners, and all continue to sin. This sounds like a direct contradiction. If Catholics have all that anti-sin fortitude put into them by the sacraments, they should be cleared of sin in a few years at most. But then the confessors would be out of a job. As in all bureaucracies, no one wants to do his job so well that he is out of it next year.
A Curious Morality
The Catholic Church in particular has been known for its fostering of feelings of guilt, but other denominations also have this effect. I recall one person who was a member of a Protestant denomination that forbade kneeling in church. During her teen years, a church group she belonged to visited an elderly congregation of a different denomination, as part of its charitable work. They took part in a worship service, in which they had to kneel in order to participate properly. This they did, but afterward prayed as a group for forgiveness for having knelt. They felt they had done the right thing, but needed forgiveness anyway, as if the action had been the wrong thing. This seems to me antithetical to what morality or ethics means. If one does the proper thing, there should be no need for forgiveness. If one anticipates the need for forgiveness, one shouldn't do the action to begin with. After all, this is not a case where the body is leading the soul astray, with terrible cravings that make even the strong succumb — this is a case of a rationally decided upon course of action being the appropriate thing to do. Very strange.
Situation Ethics
Christian morality traditionally decries the use of "situation ethics," in which that which is right is determined by the situation that one finds oneself in. It would certainly find, that in order to make the ladies at the other church feel more comfortable, the group was entirely justified in kneeling, entailing no need for forgiveness.
Situation ethics certainly does not mean "if it feels good, do it," nor that the end justifies the means, but it does imply weighing all the consequences (the purposes, or ends, as well as the side effects) of our actions to determine if the actions are the ethically best that one could do. They are "humanist" in the sense of seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people, a phraseology that also has been called utilitarianism. I recall from my college days, a Contemporary Civilization professor's criticism of utilitarianism's seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. He asked how we can know the extent of a good. If I had had the experience then that I have now, I would reply that lack of ability to completely define every situation does not mean that we should not try as well as we can. Clearly it is better to spend a few dollars on health care than to let many people die. Surely it is better that fewer people die. As the old joke goes, it is certainly better to be rich and healthy than to be poor and sick. The difficulties in implementing the ideals in less clear-cut cases in no way detract from the value of those ideals.
If I were test piloting a new airplane, and it was definitely going to crash, and if I did nothing it would crash into a crowded apartment building, but I could divert it, and the only place to divert it to were a playground with three kids playing in it, I see no moral choice but to divert it. Three lives would be lost but many more would be saved. This is not a case of not being able to determine which is the greater good.
Is There No Fixed Morality?
Only in the sense that no particular action can be considered good or bad without considering the consequences at that time of that action would this statement be true. But in the larger sense, of course there is a fixed morality, or better, a fixed ethic, and it was stated above: seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Without this (or some other) basic moral imperative, there would be no way of deciding each individual situation on its own merits. In my opinion, the way it is phrased here makes the most sense from the point of view of human happiness, and seems to be the asymptote which the evolution of other moral systems seeks to approach.
If everyone agreed on situation ethics being the moral norm, rather than fixed rules of behavior, then one thing that would have to go by the boards would be the sense of righteous indignation that some moralistic types feel at seeing someone do wrong (being immoral). In situation ethics, there often can be considerations in deciding upon a course of action that are not apparent to the bystander, who thereby has no right to butt in.
One example of how Situation Ethics would, however, be dangerous in a Christian setting (and only because of the artificial construction of the Christian setting), is that a good Christian who desired to make the greatest number of people happy would find out where as many baptisms as possible were taking place, and then proceed to kill all the babies right after baptism, assuring them of eternal bliss. He could take comfort in that the loss of his own eternal soul was more than compensated for in the salvation of many. In fact, if he repents, he need not lose his own. It's a good thing Christians don't believe in situation ethics. Those who use it must be careful to be more rational than are the Christians. In fact it is sometimes necessary that the courts intervene to protect the children of Christian Scientists who feel that it is better to pray for a child with appendicitis than to seek medical treatment, the intervention being an application of situation ethics to choose between conflicting moral systems.
For a real-life example of the distorted morality that would kill an infant to save him, click here. A writer posted this, dealing with his narrow escape from a "compassionate" killing by his mother, on the recovering catholic subscription list. (To subscribe, send a message to Majordomo@world.std.com saying subscribe recovering-catholic.)
Lest one think that Christian Scientists in particular, or Christians in general, should be singled out for their fixed, and not altogether thought-out, morality, let's notice the situation in Japan, as noted in an article in the New York Times for October 15, 1995:
One measure of the scope of faith here is that when Kazuko Okuyama's two young children grew irritable and kept waking at night in terrible crying fits, Mrs. Okuyama went not to a doctor but to a kind of exorcist. He made a dye of cedar pitch and tobacco and painted Chinese characters on the children's hands so the colic would leave the body from the fingers.
"This didn't seem to work so well, so he painted characters on my older daughter's stomach as well," recalled Mrs. Okuyama, ... "That seemed to cure them."
Certainly a lucky outcome in this case; others are not so lucky. As a curious sidelight, this article notes that faiths do not seem mutually exclusive in this town in Japan:
The Okyuama family, for example, keeps a Buddhist altar in the living room and makes daily offerings, but in the next room is a Shinto altar to other gods.
Like most women in Omiya, Mrs. Okuyama wore a supposedly divine sash from the fourth month of her pregnancy. Typically, the gynecologist writes a few lucky words on the sash, and helps pick an auspicious "day of the dog" on the traditional calendar to begin to wear it. The sash has pictures of dogs on it, and the idea is that it will allow the woman to give birth as easily as dogs do [unlike the western notion that women should give birth in pain, as punishment for Eve's sin.].
Mrs. Okuyama is eclectic enough in her theology to have attended a Roman Catholic church and taken Communion [this was known as desecration of the host when I was a Catholic: giving the Eucharist to a heathen!] as a bit of extra insurance. She even keeps a crucifix. "I got the crucifix for decoration," explained Mrs. Okuyama, ... "But if it works, that would be great."
That last sentence has all the fervor of belief inherent in Pascal's wager. It might be wrong, but what if it's right? ... then I'm set. "Hey, you never know!" (For non-New Yorkers: that's the slogan of the New York State lottery advertising campaigns, another tragic offering of hope to the poor and downtrodden.)
In Defense of Utilitarianism
The recent 50th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought up some thoughts in this regard concerning whether, net, lives were saved as a result of the bombing. Jim Holt's "Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic" on the Saturday, August 5, Op-Ed page of the New York Times attempted to refute utilitarianism, saying that even if lives were saved overall, the direct killing of people with an atomic bomb was wrong, equating utilitarianism with a philosophy in which "if somehow you can save 10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead and boil that baby." Holt rather approves of "an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes quite a different view. The gist of it is expressed by St. Paul's condemnation of those who say, 'Let us do evil, that good may come.' Some actions, this tradition holds, can never be justified by their consequences; they are absolutely forbidden. It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby." That prompts me to write up the following thoughts:
Even from the very title, "Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic," the refutation starts with the false assumption that the notion of greater or lesser total good or evil reduces morality (or, it is to be hoped ethics, which is more important), to arithmetic. This is no more true than that the extensive use of mathematics in physics reduces the latter to the former, or the extensive use of sums and differences in accounting reduces contract law to arithmetic.
It states that "it is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby." Anyone of course has the right to make any assertion he wishes about morality, and in the described instance it is difficult to imagine a situation in which boiling a baby will save 10 lives. If, however, for the sake of argument, such a situation were to occur, those 10 people would surely have the right to feel set upon if adherence to "an older ethical tradition" were to prevent them from being saved, that is, if such opposition to utilitarianism were, in effect, to kill them. In discussing the use of people as means to an end, here are 10 such people whose lives are considered subject to sacrifice to the end of preserving "an older ethical tradition." These people are being used as a means toward an end—an end which is the defense of an abstraction, more than the defense of that one baby. A further tragedy of this is that those 10 people whose lives are snuffed out by Judeo-Christian theology may likely agree, due to long years of indoctrination, that the older ethic is correct, and not even consider themselves discriminated against, even though they have every right to life; they may think so even if they themselves are not Jewish or Christian, but merely grew up in such an atmosphere. However, the length of time or the force with which a doctrine is practiced or promulgated does not make it right.
An episode of M*A*S*H comes to mind, in which a crying baby threatens to give away the location of a group of civilian and military personnel, who stand to be wiped out thereby. The baby's mother wrings its neck. The incident is in a flashback in which, presumably for psychological mitigation, it is initially misremembered as the wringing of a chicken's neck. In this incident, though, the baby would have been wiped out anyway as part of the larger group, so it is not an exact parallel, but it does exhibit the utilitarian need to overcome a similar psychological compunction—besides illustrating that war is hell to begin with.
In fact, Judeo-Christian philosophy is notable for its close approximation to utilitarian theory, made even more so by the "principle of double effect," which Holt mentions, as saying, for example, that "although it is always wrong to kill innocents deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some noncombatants will die as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is lying ill." In this way, Judeo-Christianity, to quote Psalm 19:7, makes wise the simple. Utilitarianism foregoes the simplicity, in order the better to approximate the ultimate goal of human well-being.
Getting back to the specifics of the ending of World War II, where a statement is quoted that "there are no civilians in Japan," one could also turn this around the other way: There are few warmongers in the trenches. A soldier was a civilian who had been drafted. Distinctions between civilians and soldiers date back to medieval times when there were soldier classes, going on crusades and otherwise pillaging. I can't imagine anyone drafted into the trenches thinking that war is a wonderful thing, thereby making himself deserving of death. Anyone who would not have been a draft-dodger if called, possibly in the future, after reaching draft age, is morally no less culpable than the actual soldier in the field, though not given the chance to show that "culpability," if that is what one wishes to call it.
As it is granted that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the first instances of mass destruction in the war, I will grant that the precedents set by the holocausts in Dresden and Tokyo of course do not justify mass destructions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They make the decisions psychologically easier to make in the destructive direction, but by utilitarian standards (on the anti-bombing side now) do not justify the killing. Precedent does not make right, whether that precedent be Judeo-Christian morality or previous experiences in the war. The saving of lives and overall suffering is what makes right, and when one does so, one is not doing evil, and therefore one is not saying, as alleged by St. Paul, "Let us do evil, that good may come." If good comes, the doing is not evil; that is the point.
While this may offend Holt's "deep-seated intuitions about the sanctity of life," and even the majority's intuitions, it certainly does not constitute treating a person as a means rather than an end, as majority opinion does not define truth. Each individual life saved constitutes just as much a valuable end, with family and friends waiting at home, and many productive years of life ahead, as each life lost in the bombing. While this indeed opens the way for bad-faith estimates of numbers, thereby making ethical evaluations more difficult, that cannot take away from its true valuation of every human life as a goal worth saving. The Christian tradition also dictates that one is not to judge others anyway, so why should an ethical system that makes it a harder task to judge be looked down upon for the reason that it makes it difficult to judge 50 years later whether people did the right thing?
Also getting back to the particulars of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I note that most calculations weigh the lives lost in these two cities only against the American lives to be lost in a continuation of the war. While "American lives" make for good post-war rhetoric in defense of U.S. actions, additional Japanese lives would also have been lost, possibly many civilians, deemed more valuable, defending the homeland.
It is easy to lose sight of the fact that mathematics is just shorthand and logic. In the instance under discussion, 100,000 is shorthand for
Bill Smith
Greg Kulmatiski
Jefferson Jones
Tony Adoni
Frank LeJoe
Jane Franciosa
...
Greg Kulmatiski
Jefferson Jones
Tony Adoni
Frank LeJoe
Jane Franciosa
...
And don't let the ellipsis ("...") fool you; the overwhelming majority of the list consists of people just as warm and loving and loved as the people behind the six chosen names; the logic involved is not a "cold" logic. And don't forget that with the "winners" of the successful extended campaign losing, for sake of argument, 100,000, how much more would the official losers lose? The extended list would have over 200,000 names (I'll let you spell that out into names to which you can imagine flesh and blood holders). Life is too short to require decision makers to wax poetic to convince people that what they are doing is right. No wonder that the exhortation not to judge found its way into Christianity. But let us also realize that when we make decisions, we should keep in mind the full effects on all people who will be affected by those decisions; let us not limit ourselves to the wisdom that is available to the simple, but try to incorporate as best we can all the complexities of the consequences of our actions.
Life and Death
A baby is born with no cerebral cortex—just a brain stem. The body will live for a few days or weeks. Should it be kept alive until the life processes inevitably fail, and its organs become useless as transplants to let conscious youngsters live? Are patients whose higher brain functions, that distinguish humans from other animals, have ceased, more entitled to the maintenance of life than, say, perfectly healthy baboons, who have been killed to provide organs for transplant to humans?
These are points raised by Peter Singer, in his recent book, Rethinking Life and Death. They are key points in contemporary life, where the old stand-by morality is no longer firm, and we are in the process of making our ethics more rational. The focus is on what makes a human life special in its right to continue.
The first area of life to feel the "rethinking" was abortion, in the 1960's. Various cultures in history have defined the moment a human comes into existence, with a right to continued life, as variously "quickening," the movement of the fetus in the womb; or viability, the ability of the fetus/child to survive on its own outside the mother; or conception. None of these focus on the consciousness and self-awareness that give humans their status of having rights. Singer rightly points out that "human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons. Hence their lives would seem to be no more worthy of protection than the life of a fetus."
Usually other factors give the newborn value, such as the love that the parents feel, particularly the mother, who has just given birth. Even lacking this, there are many persons who would wish to adopt the newborn. But there are problems even here. There are infants who, for whatever reason, are not considered adoptable. There is also the circumstance of a mother who is not in the loop of the mainstream culture, who is afraid, and does not have the means to raise the child. We sometimes hear, in the news, of mothers who abandon or kill their newborns. Surely our compassion for the mother can extend to the point of not considering her guilty of the crime of murder, which applies to someone who kills a being who has plans, who knows and wants life, who already has loved ones who will be devastated by the loss of the deceased.
Parents are the caretakers for infants, and the parents of a baby born with no higher brain function, or of a child whose consciousness has been irretrievably lost, have the right to donate the child's organs in the hope of saving many more lives. Likewise, at the other end of life, those whose lives have become burdensome, with no chance that life will improve, have custody of their own lives. While Dr. Kevorkian may overdo some of the necessary theatrics that gain attention to the need for a "right to die," it is indeed a necessary attention. Who is better than the person himself or herself to decide if continued life is worthwhile? Barring psychiatric problems, a patient, informed with all the pertinent indications of the future course of a medical condition, must be in control of his or her own treatment.
The only caveat we must assuredly take is that the sociology of the situation does not allow a "right to die" to become a "duty to die" to spare the family any expenses associated with life support. Singer dismisses such worries based upon the current situation in the Netherlands, and upon a comparison to the withholding of treatment, that is, we allow withholding treatment in extreme cases but not suicide, when in fact, morally, the two are equivalent. However, this is no reason to relax vigilance on this topic. Social obligations develop over a longer period of time than the Dutch experience has been around, and the withholding of treatment from those who want the treatment should indeed be subject to the same scrutiny as positive actions that cause death, based on the moral equivalence of the two.
Likewise, our compassion for the mother who kills the newborn should in no way deter us from trying to improve social and economic conditions so that these situations will not arise.
Our consideration of anencephalic babies in contrast to baboons also brings up the subject of non-human animal rights. The making of consciousness and self-awareness the criteria for a right to life rules out all plants as having rights, as well as bacteria, protozoans, on up to some level of encephalization. As with all gray areas, we are left at the point of having to draw an arbitrary line, much as an arbitrary line has to be drawn in the human life span somewhere between conception and legal majority at age 21 (drinking age is about the only thing left that is this high). As a result, we see why traditional morality has such a popularity in that it gives us such quick answers. Singer points out that we, as members of the species Homo sapiens, are the chimpanzee's nearest living relatives (and thus the genus Homo and the genus Pan, to which the chimpanzee belongs, are really one). Animals outside our species, though, are not known to accord other species any rights, or members of their own species for that matter, other than what comes up in self interest, as other sociologists have labeled as strategy of "tit-for-tat," or as Singer calls it "the rule of reciprocity," as well as obligations to our kin and "constraints on our sexual behaviour" (though I have heard that chimps are very promiscuous).
It is presumably the right thing to do to defend a fellow human who is being attacked by a lion, even to the point of killing the lion. Is it also right to likewise protect a defenseless zebra we see in such trouble? Similarly, if "animal rights" activists say it is wrong to eat meat, must we not also say it is wrong for us who have a sense of morality to allow the eating of meat by those (such as lions) who lack the necessary intellectual abstraction capability to see the wrong of what they are doing?
Singer points out the debt that is owed to Eastern philosophy in pointing out the oneness of life, and the lack of sharp boundaries to what we consider to be different areas of life. In fact, various Eastern philosophies question the existence of an "I," or as the Freudians would put it, an ego—that the sense that we have of being individuals is an illusion. If we go far enough in this direction, might we not also question whether or not our idea that there are such things as "right" and "wrong" is also an illusion? One might question whether our thought processes have led us too far. But then again, maybe not.
Faith in Truth
John 8:32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
This familiar quotation is taken out of context, as it often is (see the section "What About the Bible" in my chapter "What Am I"), but in its out-of-context form it is indeed something that I believe, and yet may in some instances be perceived as being difficult to reconcile with a belief also in utilitarianism and situation ethics.
Situation Ethics As Practiced by Nuns in The Sound of Music
In the movie The Sound of Music some nuns do "sinful" things by the lights of fixed morality. When the Nazis are chasing the von Trapp family, some of the nuns steal the distributor from the Nazis' chase car, an example of situation ethics' allowing stealing. The nun's confession that she had sinned is seen to be disingenuous, much like the "sin" of a believer in non-kneeling kneeling to comfort the visited elderly of another faith. The nuns also say to the Nazis that the Trapp family went one way, when in fact they went another, an example of lying. Now, the ten commandments do not forbid lying, but rather bearing false witness against one's neighbor. However, Jesus said (in an admonition against the need for swearing to the truth) that one should always be truthful:
Mat 5:37 Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one.
or
Say, 'Yes' when you mean 'Yes' and 'No' when you mean 'No.' Anything beyond that is from the evil one.
as given in the New American Bible translation, more familiar to my ears that have heard it so many times over the years in the Catholic mass.
Regardless of the Bible's rather meager admonition against lying, most religionists would usually say that lying is wrong except under the extenuating circumstances such as found in the scene from The Sound of Music. However, some who hold to situation ethics may be tempted to have a lesser faith in truth than I do.
To me, the example given of the need to mislead Nazis searching for fugitives depends on the need to counter a greater falsehood, in fact all the combined falsehoods of Nazism. It certainly does not involve a need to mislead one's self away from the truth. If one knows correctly that, say, the Trapp family deserves to escape, and one knows correctly that the Nazis are in fact wrong, then the temporary expedient of telling a lie is justified. But note that when one is doing this, one is in fact passing an ethical judgement on the person being misled, and of course, one keeps in one's own mind the true destination of the von Trapps — one does not ethically keep one's self in the dark, for some time in the future this information may be necessary to us and to help them in the future.
How does this relate to a lesser faith in truth on the part of some of today's moralists who invoke a situation ethics to devalue the rightness of seeking truth? Certain authors claim that science should not investigate genetic engineering, saying that too much power from such knowledge would corrupt, echoing the religious leaders' claim that this would be playing God. Other authors decry studies of intelligence being related to genetic heritage as being flawed racist, while not themselves supporting non-flawed, non-racist research in this area, on the a priori claim that such studies can lead to no good.
Some claim that even discovering how to tell who is more or less likely to develop, say, cancer, is wrong, as it will allow health insurers to discriminate against those found most susceptible.
I believe that these ideas are wrong. The same value that I hold for the truth that says that people can be moral without religion, and that we should investigate the claims of the Bible, letting the chips fall where they may, and not be afraid to point out its errors and inconsistencies, makes me say that whatever truths are found can be dealt with in the most appropriate way. If it is felt that no one should be denied health insurance, then some way can be found of covering everyone, without allowing those who are found not to have a predisposition to cancer to escape covering those who do. And if there is a gene that lessens synaptic efficiency that has a distribution comparable to, but not necessarily the same as, say, sickle-cell gene, then it would be all the best to find it, or even show that it doesn't exist, rather than to refuse to do "racist" studies on the ground that such a gene couldn't possibly exist, or to say that it would be wrong to point it out even if it did exist. It is wrong to say that to do the investigation is inherently immoral. This is not a case where we are trying to mislead those racist Nazis — it is a claim that we should hide our own heads in the sand for fear of what's outside.
The Truth Shall Make You Free
Truth is what enables us to find out what is best — true sensory impressions are intrinsically better than illusions. Truth seeking is always good; the exception, above, to the need for truth telling depended on not being able to convince Nazis on the spot that they should not do what they intended. All things considered, it would be best that the Nazis be made to see the light, so that knowledge of the true whereabouts of anyone is no threat. Also in the case of the misguided Christian killing babies just after their baptisms, intimated above, upon the Christian's discovering the truth of situation ethics, it is necessary to convince him first of the truth about the inefficacy of Baptism.
This also points out the danger of relying on falsehoods or "covering up" to counter other falsehoods. It is sometimes said that people can receive psychological benefit from belief, even in an objectively false myth. I have pointed out that people can be perfectly happy atheists (such as Isaac Asimov). People who need psychological help should get therapy, and adjust to the realities of life. The old adage goes: Oh what a terrible web we weave when first we practice to deceive. If the person being so deceived finds out the truth on his or her own, without discovering the falsity of the other belief that the deception was designed to counter, humanity will then suffer the consequences. To paraphrase the old adage: two falsehoods don't make a truth.
Is Stealing Ever Right — Revisited
The Bible says Thou shalt not steal, but what does this mean? What is stealing? The nuns' stealing the distributor from the Nazi chase car clearly is an example of an extraordinary case where all would consider stealing to be good. Are there more ordinary examples?
If stealing is the wrongful taking of property from someone else, then it is tautologically wrong, as it wouldn't be called stealing unless it were wrong. We would then go on in circles trying to determine whether an individual act of taking someone's property were wrong, that is stealing.
If, however, we define the act of stealing as the taking of someone's property without that person's permission, then we see that society in the present day does indeed condone stealing all the time. Taxation takes from a person, under threat of force, if necessary, some of his or her property. To say that it is right, and therefore not stealing, is to ignore the fact that the same activity (taking someone's property against his or her will) is seen in some circumstances to be right, and in other circumstances to be wrong.
What Does This Prove?
I'm sure the above demonstrates that ethical decisions are difficult to make. The help that is proffered by a book which purports to "give wisdom to the simple" can be tempting indeed. But even Judeo-Christianity admits we should be strong in our resolve to resist temptation. The term Deus ex Machina has been applied to fiction written by writers who resolve a situation by pulling a pre-built solution out of thin air. The analogy is enough to show that religious ethics are a form of Deus ex Machina, pulling a pre-built morality out of the Bible or other religious tome, and forcing it to fit any given situation.
