Kant, Catholics, Lying & Natural Law

The Reason why Live Action is
going after Planned Parenthood

The title of this blog post is quite a mouthful. It all converges on a line of thought I was having after reading two articles, one by Dr. Peter Kreeft at the CatholicVote.org blog entitled "Why Live Action did right and why we all should know that" and a Thomistic response to the article over at The New Theological Movement blog entitled "A Response to Peter Kreeft, on lying." The short version of the issue is that Live Action is using a type of deception as their modus operandi for defeating planned parenthood.

The issue at the heart of the debate is not new by any stretch of the imagination. In fact in moral theology and ethics in general, the question as to whether or not it is morally licit to lie to someone to prevent a greater evil has been tossed around for centuries. The Biblical case study is found in the first chapter of Exodus where the midwives are confronted by the Egyptian gestapo and asked why they are not able to report, in time, the birth of new Hebrew children thereby inhibiting the Egyptian officers from following their orders to execute them. The midwives make up a story that Hebrew women are more "robust" and more or less shoot the babies right out like a long snapper before the midwives even get there.

When I was an eleventh grade Bible teacher, I was asked not to teach doctrine so I decided I could teach ethics and basic theology through the philosophia perennis et universalis (perrenial philosophy). Both articles reference Kant's notion of an ethical "categorical imperative" which, as a rule, must be universal (at all times, places, and circumstances) for it to be imperative to follow. In other words, if isn't good all the time it isn't good any of the time.

To teach this to my students, I used a modified version of Kant's example of a murderer chasing after an innocent victim in a dark alley. You, the innocent bystander, are having a smoke in the alley and notice the innocent victim running franticly by you and then come to a "T" in the alley and turn left. Only moments later, the murderer, gun in hand runs up upon you, grabs you by the collar and demands, "Where is he? Tell me where he is, or I'll kill you too!"

What do you do? Or rather as Kant wants us to ask, what ought you to do? Can you lie to save the innocent victim? What if he finds out and comes back and kills you the innocent bystander? What if you tell him the truth and he kills the innocent victim.

Kreeft argues that we have at the level of intuition a clear sense that it is morally good to lie to the murderer. If we don't, we suffer from legalism. He goes on to make a number of arguments for his position but concludes by saying that qua moral intuition, he is not infallible which leaves the issue more than open for discussion.

At the New Theological Movement, the author apposes Kreeft's position pointing out that St. Thomas and others have noted that scriptures praise of the midwives was for their intent to save lives and for the outcome, but not for the method. Their method is a violation of the natural law and as such cannot be praised because it is against the nature of God. In addition, the intuition of the ethical from our experience is correlative to the virtue we possess. I'll come back to this at the end. Returning to Kant, he also points out that when you lie to the murderer you have no guaranteed outcome that the innocent victim will be spared. In fact, you may both die now because of your deceit, or even worse your lie might embolden him to greater treachery!

The response article also points out (in the combox as well) that the midwives were put into their situation against their control whereas Live Action has made deceit their modus operandi. This, I think is an important distinction, but then it gets a little foggy when you move this particular question to another context.

There is a great made for TV movie from the 80's called The Scarlet and the Black about a fiery Irish priest who subverts the Nazi gestapo in Rome by an elaborate system of deceit that creates a cover for thousands of Jews and other persecuted immigrants during Hitler's regime. On the one hand, we can say that Father O'Flannery's involvement was voluntary, he did not have to get involved. However, in some sense he had to get involved in that his moral conscious compelled him because of the atrocity and human suffering he witnessed.

If you haven't seen the move, I highly recommend it if you are willing to wait through the awkward made for TV interludes.

When I was teaching the Bible class to the eleventh graders, I didn't have natural law. I was a sola scriptura guy. That was a problem. By the way, famous protestant apologist J.P. Morland recently warned that Protestants are overcommitted to the Bible. Ouch. Nevertheless, I went back to scripture and more or less told my students that there are certain situations where the law is abrogated for the greater good and for the defeat of the God's enemy. That was the best answer I could give. However, with the natural law as our guide, I can now see how even for a greater good, we cannot be justified in breaking it.

Before I made this post, I had two issues I was working through and actually brought them up at the New Theological movement blog. Kindly, I was given a prompt and pious response which dramatically changed the way I am going to end this post. Before, I was confused as to whether or not "the difference we sense between the two is merely the indifference we have to the fact that babies are being aborted right in our own backyard". In other words, Live Action's subverting Planned Parenthood through deceit is more like the midwives than I previously thought.

However, "Reginaldus", a contributor at the blog, responded to this question highlighting what I think is most germaine to this issue. He said,

"Rather than engaging in sinful practices, we ought to turn our eyes to the mountains: "From where shall come my help? My help shall come from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." We don't need lies to defeat planned parenthood, we have the truth -- that should be plenty enough to destroy them!"

We'll call that my borrowed two-cent moral intuition.

Thanks Reginaldus.

What do you think?