Sunday, February 20, 2011
To Tell the Truth
Hadley Arkes (here) and Peter Kreeft (here) have now joined the debate over the morality of Live Action’s video recordings of Planned Parenthood workers who, in numerous instances, appear to ignore not only the law but the plight of underage girls involved in prostitution and suggesting ways in which statutory rape reporting laws and parental consent laws can be avoided.
Robby George and Rick Garnett have already blogged on this topic at MOJ here and here.
Live Action’s website is available here and the full, unedited footage of the tapes is available here.
To obtain the videos, a woman and a man from Live Action pretended to be something they are not. They visited various Planned Parenthood clinics posing as a prostitute and a pimp seeking testing for STDs and abortions for teenage girls working as prostitutes and present in this country illegally.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/02/to-tell-the-truth.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
Here's a roundup, with commentary by Brandon Watson, of the major articles so far:
http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-recent-dispute-about-lying.html
When reading a number of the defenses of lying (or saying what is not true in order to deceive someone), but particularly that of Peter Kreeft, I kept thinking of the Phoenix abortion case. As I said over on Vox Nova, I think it is probably the "intuition" of the majority that it would not be wrong to save the life of the mother in a life-threatening pregnancy rather than to let both mother and unborn infant die. I'm not saying the majority would be right, but from reading blogs and talking to people about the Phoenix abortion case, the thought of letting both the mother and the unborn child die not merely seems intuitively wrong. It seems cold-blooded and evil.
To "adapt" what Kreeft said, "The most reasonable response to the “no abortion” legalist here is “You gotta be kidding”—or something less kind than that.
If I did not know Kreeft was Catholic, based on his article, I would have assumed he was from some other tradition.
Kreeft says, "Thomas Aquinas said that even torture is sometimes justified; in emergency situations like that; if torture, then a fortiori lying." But it is my understanding that Aquinas's position was that lying is always wrong. So Kreeft seems to draw a conclusion from the work of Aquinas that Aquinas didn't draw himself.
This thought occurred to me. If torture and lying are sometimes permitted, suppose a French woman during World War II as part of the Resistance cultivated a sexual relationship with a Nazi general whom she in fact found physically and morally repugnant, and by means of that relationship, obtained invaluable intelligence. Would we condemn her? If not, does it mean that sex outside of marriage is not always wrong?
Those who see abortion as an intrinsic evil, never to be permitted, use examples like, "Would it be permitted to kill an innocent man to prevent a nuclear war?" The answer they give is no. That certainly goes against my moral intuition, and particularly if the innocent man would die in the nuclear war that taking his life would have prevented.
I do think all kinds of problems arise from taking an absolutist position that speaking any falsehood in order to deceive someone is impermissible. But the Catholic Church has many hard teachings. Jesus had a few himself.