One sometimes hears otherwise faithful persons say that although they never speak to their friends about their faith, they try to live in such a way that their lives will be a witness to the Gospel.

A bogus quote from St. Francis of Assissi is often used in support of this idea.  No, he did not say “Always preach the Gospel, and when necessary, use words.”

The problem with the idea of being so good that words become unnecessary is that none of us are that good.

Even if we were that good, our friends would need words to know what accounted for the fact.

Besides, our witness rests not on our virtue, but on the mercy of the God who suffered as Man what we deserved.

Christ used words.  Wouldn’t it be strange if our lives were better witnesses than His?

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If you’ve read the Iliad, then you know that whenever the Greeks weren’t fighting, they were wrangling about women, sacrificing to the gods, boasting, feeling sorry for themselves, eating barbecue, or competing athletically.  One of the most popular competitions was racing.  The impromptu racecourse always had an outbound and an inbound leg, like an inverted U.  Contestants dashed for a designated tree or rock, rounded it, and returned to the starting line.

Aristotle used this inverted U as a metaphor for the path of human reasoning.  First we reason up to first principles; that’s the outbound leg of the race.  Then we reason down from first principles to more detailed conclusions; that’s the inbound leg.

In disciplines like geometry, we traverse the outbound leg so quickly that we hardly notice doing so; we assent to the axioms almost instantly.  But imagine a dull student for whom assent doesn’t come quite so easily.  Though the axioms are evident in themselves, they aren’t yet evident to him.  “Teacher, why does the whole have to be greater than the part?  Couldn’t be less sometimes?  And why do two things equal to a third thing have to be equal to each other?  Couldn’t they be unequal now and then?”

The teacher can’t prove the axioms to the boy, because there are no deeper axioms to prove them from.  That’s the whole point of first principles.  But there may be other ways to help the boy assent.  The teacher might draw pictures.  He might give examples.  He might show some of the absurd results of assuming the axioms to be false.  Eventually the boy gets it.  The axioms click, and he assents.

John Henry Newman called this outbound mode of reasoning, so different from formal logic, the “grammar of assent.”  Though we hardly give it thought in geometry, in theology and ethics it is almost the whole action.  Even in skeptical times like our own, it is rare to find anyone who refuses assent to geometrical axioms.  But about the first principles of ethics, people argue.  “Teacher, why is it wrong to do gratuitous harm to my neighbor?  Why not just do as I want?”

This sort of difficulty arises not just among dull students, but even – and especially – among the most powerful and intelligent people in our culture.  Scholars, jurists, and other agents of culture openly avow that there is no such thing as intrinsic evil; that moral distinctions are the product of irrational animus; that the end justifies the means; that since truth is whatever works, successful lies aren’t lies; and that the weak have less claim on our protection than the strong.  Their assumption is “If a first principle isn’t evident to me, then it can’t be evident in itself.”  Thus, to refute a first principle, all I have to do is –- deny it.  This is the grammar of dissent.

Why is the grammar of dissent more troublesome in ethics than in geometry?  I think it would be just as prominent in geometry, if geometry presented us with equally strong motives for defending what is obviously false.  Not many people have vested interests in trying to show that two things equal to a third thing aren’t really equal to each other.  But a lot of people have vested interests in trying to show that their lies are really truths, or their injustices are really just.  To put it another way, we aren’t dealing with honest confusion, but with dishonest confusion – with error that is motivated by corruption.

And why is the grammar of dissent more prominent at the highest strata of the culture?  Since power wakens such great temptations to do wrong, it generates equally great yearnings to justify doing wrong.  Those who have not only power but intelligence are more skillful at making up excuses.  Intelligence is a gift -- but never confuse being smart with having wisdom.

Under duress, the Secretary of State has finally turned over her private email server to the FBI.  Her apparent serious violation of national security laws should certainly be investigated – but in an executive branch in which the administration of justice is so regularly harnessed to political ends, why does the FBI bother?

People will say “This shows that the system is working.”  No, the system is not working.  What one must remember is that the Clinton and Obama machines despise each other.   The Secretary had to be accommodated for a while, but now that the Vice President is expected to run, she has outlived her usefulness.  The wolves are finally ready to bring down the buffalo.

Examples of Telltales

We have been discussing Thomas Aquinas’s claim that the moral basics are universally known.  I have suggested that even violators who deny that they are doing wrong give evidence of suppressed guilty knowledge.  The hypothetical objector has suggested that so-called guilty behavior can be just as easily explained in other ways.  I have promised to provide examples of cases in which alternative explanations are implausible.

Each of these examples is drawn from the annals of a single hot button issue in our culture, abortion, which is rather obviously the deliberate taking of innocent human life, but which many claim to view as entirely blameless.

• The pro-life young woman who gets pregnant, has an abortion, suddenly reverses her views and becomes pro-abortion, looks for opportunities to tell everyone how her abortion solved her problems, but falls into depression around the time the baby would have been born.[12]

• The abortion clinic operator and head nurse who write an article about the psychological burdens of doing such work in an article revealingly titled, “What About Us?”[13]

• The clinic workers mentioned in the article who have dreams of vomiting up fetuses.[13]

• The ones who report suffering from an obsessive need to talk about their experience.[13]

• The ones who refuse to look at the fetus.[13]

• The one who reports increasing resentment because some of the clients don’t seem to feel as bad as she does.[13]

• The women in the clinical trials of the abortion pill who seem glad to submit to the protracted bleeding and cramping of this method of abortion because it makes them feel that they are accepting punishment for what they are doing.[14]

• Other women in the trial, as well as some members of the clinical staff, who refuse to use the term “abortion” and call what is happening a “miscarriage.”[14]

• The pro-abortion counselor, quoted by a pro-abortion journalist, who is frustrated by clients who have had abortions and subsequently feel guilty about not feeling guilty.[15]

• The abortion clinic operator who publishes the bizarre proposal that pregnancy be socially redefined as an “illness” which “may be treated by evacuation of the uterine contents”[16] – a suggestion one finds hard not to view as desperate.

• The pro-abortion activist who insists that the act is not wrong and yet proposes that feminists “hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.”[17]

Do such phenomena provide airtight proof that everyone who claims to consider abortion blameless knows better?  No.  However, I think most reasonable persons would agree that the hypothesis of moral denial explains them much better than the hypothesis of moral ignorance does.

Notes

12.  Anecdote passed on by the young woman’s college chaplain.

13.  Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., and Billie Corrigan, R.N., M.S., “What About Us?  Staff Reactions to D & E.”  Advances in Planned Parenthood 15:1 (1980), pp. 3-8.

14.  Wendy Simonds, Charlotte Ellertson, Kimberly Springer, and Beverley Winikoff, "Abortion, Revised: Participants in the U.S. Clinical Trials Evaluate Mifepristone," Social Science and Medicine 46:10 (1998), p. 1316.

15.  Nicci Gerrard, with Kim Bunce and Kirsty Buttfield, "Damned If You Do ...", The Observer (22 April 2001),

16.  Warren M. Hern, M.D., "Is Pregnancy Really Normal?" Family Planning Perspectives 3:1 (January 1971),

17.  Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic 233:16 (October 16, 1995), pp. 26–35.

Link to Part 11 of 14

A number of comments have been emailed to me or posted online about Lying for Life? and Lying for Life, Continued – some in support, some in protest.  To those who supported the argument:  Thank you for your thoughts and encouragement.  To those who protested:  Allow me one more post to explain why I think your arguments faulty.

My argument was a surgical strike, but some of its critics seem to have misidentified the target.  I criticized only lying -- deliberately saying what one knows to be false with the intention to deceive.   An ambush deceives, a silence withholds information, a statement about the time of day in the context of a stage play may be known by the actors to be false, but these are not lies because the other conditions of lying are not met.  So my criticism of lying is not refuted by pointing out that these other acts are sometimes right.

A variation on that mistake was posted by a reader at the excellent online journal MercatorNet who commented, “It's my understanding that the pro-life people in the videos were paid actors. Pretending is what actors do.  It is very different from lying.”  Yes, it is different, but from the fact that what actors say in a play isn’t lying, it doesn’t follow that what they say offstage isn’t lying.  That is like suggesting that if a locksmith burglarizes a safe, it isn’t theft because opening locks is what locksmiths do.

Quite a few critics object that if lying is wrong, then we must also condemn all “stings” and exposés, which seems to them extreme.  But the inference is mistaken.  Since there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the commission of an illegal act, one may certainly make a secret video of the people who are committing it.  There is no obligation to announce “Look what I am doing!”

Other critics propose false analogies.  Yes, I know about the plot to kill Hitler, but the ethical question in that case was assassination, not lying.  False analogies have also been urged from Scripture.  One writer asked, “Was Nathan the prophet wrong to tell King David a made up story -- a lie -- so as to open David’s eyes to his sin?”  But the very wording of the question explains why Nathan wasn’t lying.  He wasn’t trying to shut the king’s eyes but to open them; he precisely described David’s sin in the form of a parable.  That is why it was so devastating when he declared to his ruler, “You are the man!”

I have also been offered the famous “dirty hands” argument, “Don’t moral obligations sometimes come into conflict, so that one way or another, we are compelled to do wrong?”  Certain moral rules have exceptions.  For example, in most cases I should return property which has been left in my keeping when the owner demands it, but it wouldn’t be wrong to hold onto his car keys when he is falling-down drunk.  Other moral rules have no exceptions.  Such are the prohibitions of the Decalogue.  The prohibition of lying has traditionally been understood as a rule of the latter kind.  Rules of the former kind can come into conflict, but acting contrary to a rule in a case to which it does not properly apply is not disobeying it.  Rules of the latter kind can never come into conflict, so we can never be compelled to disobey them.

The “sin boldly” argument is just the dirty hands argument with a Christian veneer:  “Doesn’t our sinful brokenness imply that sometimes we do the wrong thing?”  Certainly, but that doesn’t make it right.

The most chilling lines of reasoning are the consequentialist one, “How could anything that does so much good be wrong?” and its close cousin, “In war, all things are permitted.”  I ask:  Are there intrinsically evil acts or are there not?  If we suppose that we may do anything whatsoever for the sake of results, then the contest is already lost.  We have become our opponents.  There is nothing left to defend.

St. Paul remarks, “And why not do evil that good may come? -- as some people slanderously charge us with saying.  Their condemnation is just.”