'I Cannot Tell a Lie': Thomas Aquinas on the Moral Permissibility of Lying – Prof. Christopher Tomaszewski

[music] Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at TumisticInstitute.org. So we're going to talk tonight about the intrinsic evil of lying. This tends to get people pretty excited, and we'll talk about some of the fun cases toward the end of what I have to say here. But yeah, like I'll just open up by saying I'm going to defend like a really hard line extremist, tumist position on this, right? Like you should never lie. You should lie to your wife about how she looks in that dress. You shouldn't lie to your children about Santa Claus. You shouldn't lie to the Nazi at the door. Yeah, I'm going to defend all of that, both in general and in particular. And obviously, hopefully we'll have some fun in the Q&A about the hard cases. Because I think there are obviously hard cases, including some cases that I think don't get very much attention, but are actually what I consider to be the hardest cases. I don't think the Santa Claus or Nazi cases are the hardest cases. I think something else is potentially the hardest case. Okay, so we're doing philosophy. Whenever we're doing philosophy, first thing we definitely want to always make sure we're doing is have a careful definition of what we're talking about because people do differ about the definition of lying. Even scholars who work on the morality of lying, of whom there aren't a great many, will differ about what exactly the definition is. So it is really important to make sure that we're talking about the same thing. Obviously, if I say that something's intrinsically evil and you deny that, but we don't have the same definition, we're not really disagreeing. We're just talking past each other. Okay, so my definition is that a lie is an assertion contrary to belief. And I think that's an adequate, contemporary articulation of what St. Thomas thinks a lie is as well. He doesn't really use the word assertion or the latin equivalent too often in this kind of way. It's actually helpful to put it this way because it's helpful to identify lying as a species of assertion. And this is where we can get into a little bit of philosophy of language. Philosophy of language becomes important here because an assertion is what philosophers of language call a speech act. Now there's all kinds of speech acts, praising someone can be a speech act, blaming someone can be a speech act, naming a new ship can be a kind of speech act. I, Chris indeed, Elizabeth or whatever, we're naming the ship. A certain demand is a kind of speech act, I can demand something of you using words. All kinds of interesting things we do with words. You know, we're talking about the morality of lying tonight, but one kind of area of ethics that gets radically underdeveloped in general is the morality of what we do with words, right? We just don't pay enough attention to the morality of what we do with words. Anyway, so an assertion is a certain kind of speech act, right? And thereby what makes this speech act distinctive is that we invite our audience, our interlocutor to believe what one says as a fact, as a representation of how the world really is. And I'll just include here, right? It's important to understand that the interlocutor in person is a, the interlocutor in question is a person. Right? So I don't, I just think it's impossible, right? To lie to my dog, to lie to chat GBT or anything like that. Or in fact, for that matter, I think it's impossible to lie to the computer that's asking me whether I've actually read all the terms and conditions. When I make, when I, when I check the box that says I did, even though I didn't, this is fine because I, you can't assert to computers and you can't assert animals and so forth, it has to be to a person. Whether they're obviously that's a human or divine person. All right, so right, it's important to note here lots of speech acts are not assertions. Right? So lots of saying things that are literally false won't count as lies because they're not assertions. So, for example, a question is not an assertion. It's a different kind of speech act. Actors lines during a play is not a speech act. Sorry, it's not a, sorry, it is a speech act. It's not a, it's not an assertion, however. And then, well, I guess we're in Canada, so maybe I don't know if this is true up here. At least in the United States, when you're charged with a crime and you plead not guilty, this is not an assertion. Right? Everybody in a court of law understands that when you plead not guilty to a criminal charge in the United, again, at least in the United States is how it works. You're not literally asserting that you're not guilty of the crime, which you're instead doing is just demanding that the government produce to prove. Right? You're saying, I demand, I'm going to put the government through its paces. They have to prove that I did it beyond a reasonable doubt. Okay, so, and this is, this is where we could have some interesting play in the joints between what counts as a lie and what doesn't, because you might ask, well, how do I go about determining exactly when somebody's making an assertion and when they're not? And that's a pretty interesting and deep question in the philosophy of language. And it's going to be context specific, right? It's going to depend on the social context, which is, and social context are obviously very complicated, very difficult to determine what kind of social context you might be in. When you attend a play, for example, nobody comes out beforehand and says, we are not asserting, or we will say false things. We want you to understand that we do not thereby assert those false things. Right, you just understand that you bought a ticket to a play and that the social context in which you find yourself, therefore, is one in which people are going to say things that they're not asserting. Right? And so you could come up with other interesting examples of this. Perhaps maybe you might think, maybe I'm playing poker with some friends, and I might think, you know, it's okay to bluff in this context. Without thereby be making myself guilty of lying because everybody understands that when you're playing poker, it's not an assaturic context. People are going to bluff and that's part of the game. Right, it's just part of the game. And of course, very importantly, also, many false assertions, even things that are assertions, and our false are not lies. Right? Because it has to be an assertion contrary to belief. We, I don't know if this, again, is prevalent in Canada. I have every reason to think it is. But certainly in the United States and in many other English-speaking countries, we've gotten into the very bad habit of saying people have lied when they've merely said that they're not going to be in a lie. They've merely stated something false. Right? They could be mistaken. There could be just some kind of confusion, misunderstanding about what is being, what is actually being asserted. And of course, whenever we're doing moral philosophy, we should always be hesitant to chalk up to malice what can be explained by ignorance. Right? Usually when people say false things, it's because they're ignorant, not because they are lying. All right, good. I'm a philosopher, not a theologian, but it is worth just pointing out from the outset that scripture is pretty uniformly negative on lying. All right, so just a selection here from the testimony of scripture. Exodus 2016, the decalogue, that's not bear false witness against thy neighbor, which obviously like many of the precepts of the decalogue, we now take to read in an expansive way to condemn all lying, not just lying in court against your neighbor. Psalms 5.7, thou God hadest all the workers of aniquity that will destroy all whose that speak a lie. Proverbs 16 and 17, six things there are, which the Lord hadeth, and the seventh is sold to testeth, one of which is a lying tongue. Christ himself in John 844 calls Satan a liar and the father thereof of lies. Saint Paul in Colossians 39 commands the Colossians not to lie to one another. And finally, in Revelation 21, 8, all liars, they have their portion in the pool burning with fire and brunestone, which is the second death. Now I should qualify, I should hasten the qualify here, of course. You want to be like really careful how you read these things and I'm not the person to ask about the proper interpretation of all these passages, because I am not a theologian. But one important thing to say is generally, right, like to mystic manualists from the early 20th century. and she agreed that like, lying without some kind of special aggravating factor is a venusin, not a mortal sin. And so when we're talking about liars going to hell, we're not talking about your one of the male white liars. We're talking about people who are guilty of some kind of serious injustice presumably. All right, and now, okay, it gets even more interesting because this has not just been controversial among scholars, it's been controversial in the church herself, she revised what she meant by lying in the cataclysm. So the 1992 version of the cataclysm defines lying, well, says of lying, that it is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie as the speaker act against the truth in order to lead into error, someone who has the right to know the truth and then a couple of two paragraphs down says that by its very nature lying is to be condemned. Joseph Ratzinger at the time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger later became Pope Benedict, was unsatisfied with this. He thought it was wrong, right? He's just like, that's not the right definition. It's a definition that has a venerable intellectual history, arguably goes back to St. Augustine, but he just thinks that this is wrong. And so when the 1997 edithiotipica of the cataclysm comes out, they just pull that clause out. They just pull it out. Right? So, you know, that's penalty. Not the first time we've changed the cataclysm. We changed it all the way back in 1997 about lying. So here, right, you just see, to lie as the speaker act against the truth in order to lead someone into error, no clause there about someone who has the right to know the truth. We'll talk more about that later on and why I think, why I at least think Benedict was right to insist on this revision. Okay. Great. Okay. So, if we're going to understand St. Thomas' argument against lying, we need some background about the natural law approach that he takes to most moral questions. Right? And importantly, St. Thomas was not a contiend antologist and he wasn't a consequentialist of any stripe. A million or otherwise. And so, right, this could be like, obviously, an immediate point of departure for some of you, like if you're broader normative ethical sympathies lie with deontology or with consequentialism, then the primary argument I'm about to offer, you know, you're going to get off the boat pretty early on that. And so, but of course, interestingly, right, although Kant disagreed at a really fundamental level with St. Thomas about why lying was wrong, he was every bit as insistent that it is categorically wrong, he had obviously slightly different reasons. And if consequentialism is always going to permit at least some lying, but the problem with consequentialism is it's always going to permit some of every act type that you can think of and that's one of the reasons, you know, not to be a consequentialist. But as we could talk more about that later on if you guys are interested. Okay, so what is the natural law? St. Thomas defines it as a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature. But what's important for our purposes right now is natural law is an approach to ethics where we are thinking about our ethical obligations in terms of pursuit of our ends, right? At least one reason I like natural law is someone who doesn't really do ethics as you heard from my introduction, I'm more of a metaphysician than an ethicist, but one thing I really like about natural law as an ethical system is that it gives the same answer to what makes somebody a good human being as it gives to the general question of what makes an acts a good acts. And if you're asking, you know, what makes a fork a good fork, what makes a car a good car, what makes a dog a good dog, and what makes a human being a good human being, you get a nice uniform answer from natural law theorists about this, right? And so in terms of fulfilling one's ends, fulfilling one's purposes, one's tealoy if we're using the technical Greek term, all right? Right, and again, let's know carefully on this, right, that what natural law view of ethics obliges us to is to pursue and to not frustrate the ends of human nature, right? The ends of human nature. I'm bound by my nature, not by nature, large or something like that, right? And this is why, for example, traditionally, at least, there is no natural law objection to using and killing animals or anything like that because the goal with natural law is not to promote the ends of nature writ large, capital N nature, or something like that, it's to promote my ends, right? So natural law, you know, on natural law, the theft is wrong primarily in the first instance because it harms me, right? Yes, yes, we talk about it being an act of injustice in terms of I'm taking what belongs to somebody else, but that, the fundamental reason that's wrong on natural laws because I'm in community with the people that I'm stealing from. And so I'm frustrating my own ends, undermining my own purposes in harming people that I'm in community with, okay? All right, so how does this tie in with lying, right? So given this natural law background, we say, right, it's always going to be wrong to pervert our natural faculties, right? Pervert here is a technical term, right? The English history of the word pervert has had an unfortunate narrowing. But we're using it here, right, just in its original Latin intention of to divert from its end, right? To pervert, faculty is to use the faculty in a manner contrary to that end. So for example, acts of gluttony, right? In a certain sense, involve using my faculty for ingesting and digesting nutrients, but in a way that's contrary to the end of that, or to use a more extreme, but more obvious example, you know, if I were to eat rat poison, right? This is obviously going to involve using my nutritive faculty in a way that is completely at odds with in contradiction to lots of different ways you could put this, right? The purpose of that faculty, right? And in a way, I'm using the faculty to undermine itself, right? This is what's at the root of this idea of perversion. Obviously the classical, domestic and natural law argument against contraception is in terms of the perversion of a faculty, in this case of the sexual faculty. Some of the arguments, at least against torture, speak of the perversion of the rational faculty in the victim of the torture, right? Where you're kind of trying to hijack somebody's minds, basically, right? And so on. All right. And here again, it's important clarification. When we're talking about perverting a faculty, we really need to understand it as using the faculty in a manner contrary to it, and not merely beside it. Otherwise, we get what are ultimately, I think, a lot of silly objections to natural law accounts, whereby, you know, it's like, well, is does that mean it's a sin that you gum? Because, you know, I'm not actually getting any nourishment. So I guess it's not actually true. You're getting sugar from the gum. But, you know, I'm not actually getting any nourishment from it, or it's a sin to walk on my hands. After all, my hands aren't made for walking on. And, you know, no, we're not going to worry about any of that stuff, because although those constitute uses of a faculty that are beside the end of the faculty, they're not contrary to it. So, for example, if I were to be walking on my hands in a manner that permanently configured my hands, then yeah, okay, yeah. Now, we have some kind of perverted faculty argument against doing that kind of a thing, because now you're actually destroying the faculty, right? But, just walking on my hands, as long as that's consistent with all the other things I want to be able to do with my hands, no problem, right? Chewing gum, as long as that's consistent with otherwise having a good diet, no problem, and so on. All right, so here's the argument, right? With that build up, you get a very straightforward, easy argument, right? All lies are perverted acts. Okay, now, here we should, well, let me get the argument out, and then I can be more precise about what I'm saying in the premises and defend them. All perverted acts are immoral. Therefore, all lies are immoral, or we could state that in a slightly different way, and just say say that lying the speed. The dishes of act is intrinsically evil. St. Thomas kind of summarizes this in one sentence in his article on the Morality of Lying and the Secundiscundate Parties. For his words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural, right? So obviously they're the invocation of natural law. And undo for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind. And of course, he's not using the word assertion there, right? But I think this is kind of implicit in the way that he's thinking about what he means by signify here, okay? All right, so obviously, well, yeah, I mean, very important, I am a logician. And obviously, valid categorical syllogism, right? No questions about the validity of this. So what about the premises, right? We can obviously question the premises. One, all lies are perverted acts. Okay, so here we wanna just be more precise what exactly is the faculty that is being perverted. I think the faculty, I think sometimes Thomas are a little bit sloppy about this and say something like, well, the faculty that's being perverted is the faculty for speech or the faculty for communication. And I think that's not wrong, per se, but in precise, because as I said, lots of false speech is not lying. And lots of false communication is not necessarily lying. I think instead we should just say that the faculty being perverted is our faculty for assertion, right? A assertion is one of the paradigmatic kinds of communication were routinely engaged in as human beings. It's highly important to the way that we relate to each other, right, I mean, just imagine what a language, what being a language using creature like ourselves would be like if assertion wasn't one of the things that we did with language, right? You could do all kinds of other things, right? You'd ask as many questions as you want, make as many demands as you want, but you can't assert, right? It would be like a fundamentally broken language. So I think there's a good reason to just say we have, we have multiple linguistic faculties and one of them is the faculty for the speech act of assertion, right? And of course we said by definition that lying is assertions, lies our assertions contrary to belief. But of course the end of our faculty for assertion is to report beliefs as an invitation for one's interlocutor to believe likewise, right? So to assert contrary to one's belief is to act contrary to the end of assertion, right? And here I think it's helpful to just see it in parallel with a really easy, straightforward example like the rat poison example, right? What makes, on natural law, what makes ingesting rat poison wrong? Well, I'm using this nutritive faculty and while at the same time undermining its very purpose, right? And I'll say more about in my defense of the next premise about what is fundamentally immoral about doing that. But there's something similar here going on with lying, right? I'm using this faculty for assertion. Its purpose is to invite my interlocutor to believe like I believe. And of course as I'm using it, I'm at this very same time undermining that purpose in such a way that my interlocutor if the assertion is successful, comes to believe if I'm a good liar. Comes to believe not like wise. Comes to believe otherwise than I believe, right? All right, so that's what I have to say in defense of premise one. What about premise two? I mean, right, and of course if you're not already friendly to something like natural law, premise two might just be where you wanna get off the boat as far as where this argument is going. All right, to deliberately frustrate once ends is necessarily irrational. What's irrational about it? Right, again, you gotta focus in here on the kind of performative contradiction that I think is involved at the root of every kind of perversion of a faculty, right? At the same time to use the faculty while undermining its very purpose, right? This is well, to use a evangelical metaphor, right? Like building your house on sand, right? The whole purpose of building house is to have something firm and stable on which a dwelling can sit for decades or centuries to come, but you've built it on sand. This is just a foolishness or irrationality about this. And that's gonna go, right, this is gonna be true of all the kind of perverted faculty arguments, right? This is gonna be a premise on which all the perverted faculty arguments rely where we are saying there's just something fundamentally irrational about behaving in this way, right? And I, of course, irrationality is first saying Thomas one of the hallmarks of immorality, right? He thinks every time you're doing something irrational, you're doing something in moral, and every time you're doing something in moral, you're doing something irrational, right? He has a very intellectual view in this manner of what sin is, right? He doesn't think it's really possible in the final analysis to be a smart sinner, right? Like ever, so this is his plateenism coming out, right? Obviously, St. Thomas is an avial to Aristotelian, but this is his plateenism coming out. He agrees with Plato at a very fundamental level that all moral wrongdoing involves some kind of irrationality or ignorance or just, there's something you're missing in the head, right? All right, and so deliberately doing the irrational is contrary to our nature at the most fundamental level because we are the rational animal. And so on a natural law virtue ethics, perverting doing some kind of perverted act is always in moral in this way. Thank you for the dramatic emphasis. (audience laughing) Yeah, so that's what I'm saying. That's my defense of the premises. Obviously, more than welcome to raise your objections to that during the Q&A. Okay, let me add another important distinction that I think often gets overlooked by people who object to the argument for the intrinsic evil of lying. The difference between truthfulness and candor, right? So very importantly, it's not generally morally wrong to withhold the truth or to mislead, right? There are obviously lots of occasions on which you should not say true things, right? I'm often called upon to comment, for example, on the cuteness of people's babies. (audience laughing) And I don't know, some babies all look alike, right? Unless something horrible happens to your baby during birth, like your baby looks the same as everybody else's baby, at least until they're like six months older. So, and like, yes, I guess babies are generally cute, but like, I don't know what people are talking about when they're saying, oh no, but this baby is so cute, particularly cute. I think people, I don't know what people mean by that. But you know, I'm not gonna, typically, I'm not gonna confront a new mother with like, no, you know, it's important to understand your baby is not especially cute. At best, your baby, at best, your baby is just like average cute, the same kind of cuteness any baby would have. You know, I just keep that to myself, right? Because despite being like a philosopher, I grew up in a family of blue collar working class Irish Catholics who really taught me early on to keep things like that to myself. (audience laughs) All right? Okay, so the duty, you know, there is a duty, there is sometimes in certain important contexts, a duty not to withhold relevant known truths. And that duty is not the duty not to lie, that duty has a special name, it's called the duty of candor. Any of you pre-law? No, no pre-law folks, okay. Right, so again, I don't know anything about the Canadian legal system, or I mean, is law, is there no pre-law in Canada? Is that an undergraduate degree in Canada? (audience laughs) Okay, okay, so that's the same as you know, it says, okay, great, okay. I know it's different in the UK, it's a bachelor's degree in the UK. Anyway, so if you're going into law, right? This is like impressed upon you as a law student, very importantly, right, that it is not sufficient, not to lie to the judge. You have to be forthcoming, you have to be candid with the judge, right? If a judge asks you a straightforward question in court and you give an evasive, but true answer, you could be facing a bar complaint, right? And beyond the practice of law, right? Minor children often, maybe not always, but typically have a duty of candid to their parents, right? It's often morally wrong for minor children to withhold relevant, known truths from their parents, physician, obviously part of what we're doing in bioethics is insisting that physicians be candid with their patients because this is a necessary condition of the patient making an informed decision about their own health care and so forth. So there are lots of contexts like this where there is a duty of candor to go above and beyond not merely lying, but to not withhold relevant known truths. But of course that's not a generally applicable duty. It's often fine to not be candid. It's often morally acceptable to just shut up. It's something that most of us should do more often. Starting with myself. Okay, now let me just press the argument a little bit further here, right, of course, and this is starting to get into the objections that one might have. What about little white lies? That doesn't harm anybody. In fact, not only do they not harm anybody, maybe they are an important exercise of charity. Maybe I ought to tell little white lies to people so as to avoid hurting their feelings. After all, hurting people's feelings generally speaking is not charitable. And our highest moral duty is always charity, right? And here we could talk about a jacose or a fissious lies. And we'll talk more about a fissious lies later on if a jacose lies are lies told for the sake of setting up some kind of joke. And here I wanna, yeah, I wanna make a kind of analogy with the way that Aquinas reasons about fornication. When you, if you read toward the end of the article where he's explaining why fornication is intrinsically evil, he says, well, he anticipates the objection that someone might say, well, let me back up for a minute. Maybe not everybody's familiar with what his argument against fornication is, right? So very quickly, his argument against fornication is, well, human beings are the kind of animals that procreate in such a way that their children are dependent on both parents for an extended period of time in order to receive a good upbringing, right? And be able to become normal, healthy, morally and intellectually well-developed adults, right? And for that reason, you know, their parents have to be in a stable union in order for the children to, this benefit to accrue to the children. And so what's wrong with fornication essentially is that you're putting, you're putting someone's, not just temporal but spiritual welfare on the line and the children that may be conceived, right? And there are obviously lots more that could be said about that argument, but this is a talk about lying, not about fornication. What matters here is he says at the end, he anticipates this objection like, well, what if someone like made provision for the child? What if there was a potential father who, you know, was fornicating, but he made sufficient provision for any children that may be conceived? So they would be taken care of, have a good upbringing, stable housing and good education, the works, everything the child needs, right? And Aquinas makes this very interesting rebuttal to this. He says, yeah, but look, that's not how we make moral judgments. We don't talk about, well, this, you know, what might happen in a particular case, we make judgments about what happens in general. So he says here, a matter that comes under the determination of the law, including the natural law, which he's talking about here, is judged according to what happens in general and not according to what may happen in a particular case. And so, right, like you're not off the hook for fornication, if you've, you know, you're committed to providing for the child or if you're infertile or whatever the case may be, right? Because he thinks, no, look, I mean, we judge according to what happened generally, not according to what happens in a particular case. And so the way he's thinking about this, it's very interesting, right? He's kind of thinking about this, like, look, it's not about what happens with this particular act of fornications, like, it's about what happens to the whole society when you have a society that's full of broken homes, right? And like, and so you don't want to start down that road. You don't want to start down that road. And my suggestion here is like, he should say, he doesn't, but he should say something very similar about lying. Like, yeah, no, I mean, are there lies that don't hurt anybody? Well, technically no, because I think a lie always hurts yourself for the reasons that I've just explained. But aside putting that aside, yeah, sure. Of course, there are lies that preserve people's feelings that don't otherwise hurt anybody. But as good literature and the spiritual life teach us, the road to hell is paid with good intentions. And we are fundamentally broken-fold creatures who are liable to just make excuses and exceptions to any kind of rule that we establish for ourselves. I mean, just think to yourself, you guys, I assume we're all better than I am with this, but how are you dealing with your Latin penance? If you made little exceptions here and there, right? This is the kind of thing like a quietness is really worried about. And I think for good reason, I'm very worried about it as well. So we can kind of reinforce the argument there as it applies to so-called white lies by making this important point that I think he makes about fornication, okay? All right, good. So now we're good into the good stuff. Great line to take out of context, given the slide. All right, so hard cases, starting with, I guess the most famous and interesting hard case, what about the Nazis at the door? I'm hiding Jews in my attic as any good Catholic would do. And Nazi comes to my door, asks me if I'm hiding Jews in my attic, what should I say? And as I promised, I'm gonna tell you, and now you should not lie to the Nazi. And very important here, I'll talk more about this in just a few slides. The reason why is not because the Nazi deserves the truth, the Nazi deserves nothing. But as my slide says, a bullet. The solution to Nazis is bullets, not lies. It's not because the Nazi deserves anything and nothing to do with what he deserves, okay? And I'll talk more about that in just a moment, right? I think one important question to answer yourself, if you're finding this an attractive objection to the argument, a potential counter example, you ask yourself, well, what else would you be willing to do at the door if a Nazi demanded it on the price of somebody else's life, right? Would you be willing to kill some other innocent person to save five Jews who are hiding in your attic, right? Would you be willing to commit anything, any other kind of act that you generally consider to be intrinsically evil, right? And I say here, you know, consequentialism threatens, right? Because this isn't real, I don't think the Nazi of the door is really an objection against the morality, the intrinsic evil of lying. It's an objection against any non-consequentialist moral framework, right? Because there's nothing special in the thought experiment about the Nazi of the door, about the Nazi asking you whether you're hiding Jews, right? And which brings up the morality of lying, the Nazi of the door could just as well be asking you about the moral, could be making any kind of moral demand of you. So just imagine whatever it is that you think is never permissible. And just imagine the case where the Nazi of the door is saying, well, I won't kill the Jews in your attic as long as you do. Whatever it is that you think can never be done under any circumstances. And now, right, I've just turned the Nazi in the door, Nazi of the door case from an account example to the intrinsic evil of lying to counter-example to the intrinsic evil of anything, right? Of anything. I mean, you could imagine in a very extreme case, Hitler himself comes to the door and says, I'll stop the genocide now and surrender to the allies. If you take this pistol and kill the Jews in your attic yourself, you can do that? No? Presumably because you think murder is intrinsically evil. That it should never be done under any circumstances. No matter how good the consequences are, right? OK, so I-- well, I'm just going to say the same thing about lying. I think obviously one thing you should do is exercise mental reservation with respect to the Nazi or to put it in another way. You should not be candid with the Nazi of the door. Be perfectly acceptable, for example, to say something like, well, officer, I haven't seen any Jews all day. It might be literally true, right? Because the impression that obviously you're not hiding any Jews in your attic, right? Or something like that. Something literally true, which is perhaps misleading. All right? And here's something I find with people who make this objection. I put them to the test. I say, OK, yeah. And this gets back to what I was saying with the first answer. Suppose the Nazi of the door knows, you're a good Christian. And he wants to be really sure those Jews aren't in your attic. He comes up and he says, "No, no, I don't want you to just tell me whether they're Jews in your attic, I want you to swear to God that you're not hiding any Jews." And what I often find is people who like this objection don't like it so much when I soup it up with the oath. Like, "Oh, no, no, I'd lie, but I don't want to swear to God about it." And I think that reveals a kind of willingness to do evil that good may come of it kind of attitude on the part of people who make this objection because I think at the end of the day what they're realizing is like, "Oh, okay, yeah, I'd be willing to do something." I'm a minor evil in order to save the lives of some Jews in my attic, but not. I wouldn't commit perjury to save them. At least not if I'm a developed Christian. And as I said, if the Nazis got to your door, that was your first mistake. Okay. Okay, what about Santa Claus? Another fun example, people bring up a lot more light-hearted example than Nazis. We inculcate children with the myth of a Santa who travels the world in a single night to deliver presents to good boys and girls and so on. I think it's worth thinking hard about what is supposed to make this myth so allegedly harmless. I remember my own inculcation by my mother with this myth and like, "It's very systematic and deceptive." She had all the best intentions, she had all the best intentions and so on. But if it were any other issue, any other topic, you'd be like, "Yeah, now this is a strange, bizarre way of behaving with your own children." So I just invite you to think about what is supposed to be so special and so especially harmless about this thing. I mean, I think one thing that's enormously harmful about it is it directly undermines parental credibility matters of religion. Why? Because Santa Claus is a quasi-divine figure in the way that we inculcate this myth. We talked to children about a omniscient, quasi-omni-present benevolent person who is passing moral judgment on them. What does that sound a lot like? Right? It sounds a lot like God. So it's just like really a bad look to turn around and tell your children what I've been systematically deceiving you about the Santa Claus figure for a number of years in your life. But not believe me when I tell you, there is however a God. This is not what I would want to be doing as a parent at any rate. And I think indeed, people often try to make the Santa Claus myth out as not actually a lie. I think the American style Santa Claus myth is indeed a lie. Maybe there are others that aren't, more just like a legend of St. Nicholas or something like that. But the American commercialized Santa thing is just that's a lie. Right? Like people are lying about this. Right? And again, would you swear to God that Santa is real? I think people would hesitate there. Okay. I'm going to try to move a little bit more quickly here. I'm running out of time. Efficient lies. Efficient lies are the kind of lies we tell the state people's feelings. What should I tell my wife when she asks how she looks in the stress? I think this is kind of just like this is the kind of like objection that's born of. This is the kind of objection that's born of people making other bad decisions and trying to reconcile, trying to rectify that situation by talking, by, by, maybe lying. Like if your relationship with your, with your spouse depends on routinely lying to her or him. You have a marriage problem, not a lying problem. Right? You should marry, or you have some other kind of virtue problem. Right? You should marry someone who's not vain enough to be worried about these kinds of things. I mean that's sincerely, right? And I mean it is an important, it's an important point I think too, because we often find ourselves most tempted to lie when we're in the wake of other bad decisions. Trying to fix some other bad thing we should have never done. Right? Yeah, and the other thing here is like learn with, right? Learn how to learn how to reply to these questions like this in a clever but truthful way. Because again, I think this is generally important applies beyond this case because we're often tempted to lie when we lack intellectual virtue. People lie a lot tend not to be very intelligent. Right? There's a reason for that. Okay. Some exceptions. Right? You know, there are pathological liars, higherly intelligent. And here's what I think is actually one of the hardest cases that often doesn't come up. State lies. What do we do about undercover police spies in the military who are often engaged in systematic deception? Right? In ways that were like you just can't do a lot of what the police do or a lot of what certainly like, I mean if, if lines intrinsically evil and we're going to bring the government into line with the natural law, we'd have to shut the CIA down. You just have to shut that down. Right? Like, I mean, what do you mean you could still do signals intelligence, but the NSA does that. You know, that like undercover spy thing is just going to have to go right? This is like the whole. It's a truthful spy. What is that? Right? And I think generally right, the one thing to say is yeah, maybe we should just get rid of that work like this is often bad for people. 16% of people who are undercover agents often suffer from severe pathological issues. However, I think here, if anywhere, right, maybe this is where you can say something where it could be there could be an exception of some kind here. Right? Why do I say, why do I say that? Why am I willing to concede that? Well, of course, we say something very similar about killing. No individual can kill, but at least in principle in military self defense or in principle in the death penalty, I know with all due respect to the revision to the catacasem. In principle, in the case of the death penalty, the state can kill. Right? Maybe something similar is true about the state with respect to assertion contrary to belief. I can assert contrary to believe you can assert contrary to belief. No private party may morally permissibly assert contrary to believe, but maybe the state can. I'm an agent of the state and just like if I'm the executioner swinging the executioner's acts, I'm not a murderer. Maybe if I'm James Bond, I'm not a liar, even when I tell, even when I tell my foreign counterparts bold face falsehoods about who I am and what my objectives are. Maybe I have no idea. Right? I'm just saying maybe. All right. I think this is the hardest case in a certain sense. Yeah. Because at least with respect to undercover police work, there would be a serious drawback to the common good if we were unable to enforce the law in the way that undercover police things do. Right? Okay. Just a final thought here. Coming back to that revision to the catechism. Isn't the proper, you know, you might just think no, isn't the proper definition of lying, the only kind of lying, the sexually bad, the kind that we do to people who don't deserve the truth. Right? Aren't there, aren't there some people who don't deserve the truth? And I want to tell you like, yes, definitely. There are definitely people who don't deserve the truth and you still shouldn't lie to them because I think that's just missing what's important about the essential mouse of lying. It's not fundamentally about whether the person in question is owed the truth or deserves the truth. And you can get some good comparisons here. Right? Like, suppose I say, I'm going to, I'm going to eat this cake until I vomit. That's fine. That's not gluttonous because after all, nobody else deserves this cake. So it's fine for me to just glutton, gluttonously eat it to the point of vomiting. Like, you miss something really important about what's wrong with gluttony. It's not just about what other people deserve. Like, yes, gluttony, gluttony could be made worse by stealing the food that you are gluttonously consuming. But it doesn't make it okay just because you aren't stealing it. Right? Or likewise, right? A running away from this danger in cowardice is fine. After all, no one deserves my courage. May very well be true. Nobody deserves your courage. Maybe you've done nobody in justice. But you're still a coward and it's still morally bad to be a coward. Right? Likewise, right? Lying to the Nazi at the door, I think, is wrong not because the Nazi deserves the truth, but because the essential malice of lying does not depend on whether the Nazi at the door deserves. the truth. It depends on what's good for you as a human being and it's just fundamentally bad to pervert your faculty for assertion. Okay, so conclusion. Right, lying is contrary to natural law and I think it's also insidious in the spiritual life. I think that's what revelation is getting at when it speaks about liars, being condemned to hell. It's not primarily talking about the malice of lying per se. It's talking about the kind of spiritual life that people who habitually lie often have. Right, it's just, it's a kind of spiritual poison that leads to other kinds of voices. It was both the cause and effect of various other voices and we should therefore as a seduously avoid all lying and maybe more importantly any matter of life that would make lying attractive to us. Right, thank you. 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