Meticulous Honesty: Why Dishonesty Is ALWAYS wrong

Preface:
Very popular, again, is the view that there are no inherent moral truths. Various thinkers state that moral realism isn’t true, that sometimes lying is good, etc. Often this outlook on ethics emphasizes that the end justifies the means and that “love” is the only rule.

Unfortunately, words such as “love” are empty-bucket terms meaning contradictory acts and are almost meaningless. For instance, the famous Roman Catholic leader, Augustine, in the 4th century wrote, “Love and do what you will. (on the First Epistle of John, Homily 7 on 1 John 4:4-12)

But Augustine was the same Christian leader who brought hard determinism into the Christian religion, condemning all human infants as being guilty of Original Sin, claiming that only a limited number of humans were predestined to be rescued, billions of others left to damnation.

Augustine also used the power of the Roman state to persecute others. And he abandoned his common law wife/concubine of 10 years, and planned, instead, to move to Rome and marry a high-class lady. At least he didn’t abandon his son from his common-law wife.
Etc.

Other Christian leaders have gone even further. Christian theologian, Episcopal priest Joseph Fletcher, in the late 1960’s wrote the book called Situation Ethics which claimed that loving could mean to lie, to commit adultery, to blackmail, even to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians!

According to Fletcher, “nothing is inherently right or wrong” (page 134). Allegedly, later, Fletcher promoted abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, etc. in the name of “love.” (according to Wikipedia)

Paul Tillich, the famous Lutheran philosopher and theologian, wrote that “love is the ultimate law” (Systematic Theology, Volume 1, page 152) then repeatedly committed adultery, etc. The long scholarly biography of Tillich shows how dishearteningly wrong Tillich behaved, like so many others, by holding to the semantically vague idea of "love" as the only guide.
ETC.

Even many Christians who claim to believe in objective ethics (not situation ethics) argue for very strange moral views such as the American Christian leader who declared that the atom bomb is “God’s gift to America”!

Or the millions of Christians (over 78% of American Evangelical Christians) who defend President Trump’s forcefully taking little children under 4 from their refugee mothers and sending the crying toddlers off thousands of miles away from their mothers to U.S. government facilities!

And ALL of those ethically wrong actions happened because the American Christians lied about the nature of the refugees, claiming they were criminals, drug dealers, enslavers, etc.

Even if--let's hypothesize--no bad results came from lying (or what ever other violation of moral truths), that lying would still be contrary to what is good and right.

Tragically, humans who think that morality, justice, human rights, etc. are inherently real and true, not subject to situations seem, often, to be in the minority.

MAIN POINT:
DISHONESTY/LYING is ALWAYS wrong.
Theft, adultery, infanticide, killing, and so forth are ALWAYS WRONG…
AND
Meticulous honesty, sharing, generosity, infant care, compassion, justice and so forth are ALWAYS RIGHT.

WHY:
1. Without meticulous honesty, fields and professions such as science, technology, architecture and construction, medicine, criminal justice, education, and so forth can’t function well or successfully.
Human history and current events are strewn with the millions of cases of scientists, law enforcement officers, politicians, architects, doctors, teachers, etc. who in the name of what ever ethics they followed, lied, deceived, or shaved the truth.
When a doctor lies, it might mean only deeply harming a patient. But when a scientist lies, it could wreak havoc on an entire society causing the suffering and death of millions of humans.

2. Unfortunately, the vast majority of humans have a penchant toward viewing the world from their own advantage point. We tend to justify what looks good for our group or our nation. Consider cases such as how the leading intellectuals and brilliant scholars of the various opposing nations of 1914 led us into the completely wrong Great War, which caused the slaughter of at least 15 million humans.

See Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals
https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Manifesto_of_the_Ninety-Three_German_Intellectuals


See Preachers Present Arms by Ray h. Abrams

As various writers have emphasized the first fatality of war is truth. Lies are the immoral “body-guards” (to twist a phrase of Winston Churchill who infamously claimed that lies are bodyguards who protect truth!)

Another lesser case is the official lies—especially the Gulf of Tonkin lies-- told by the American government which led to over 2 million humans slaughtered in Vietnam including over 50,000 Americans.

Of course, most of these humans lied, deceived, were dishonest from the best of motives (though their motives you notice were based in the group egotism of their particular nation and society).

3. ALL lying, all deception, all dishonesty is to state contrary to reality. For instance, the construction boss needs to get the building finished by October 1st for many good reasons. Yet the inspector has been slow in coming out to certify, so the contractor hedges the truth. After all, in other situations, the minor deception hasn’t resulted in anything bad.

But regardless of whether or not his dishonesty catches up with the construction contractor (even though he meant it for good), the lie is contrary to what is true and real.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE EXTREME CASES?

Extreme cases are, admittedly, difficult. And so various thinkers have stated that honesty must be relative to end results.
People say, wouldn’t it be good to lie to a Nazi, to lie to a murderer?

However, as I’ve already pointed out, these extreme situations don’t normally happen. Yet they are often pulled up to justify more common situations in which many people think a lie is also “good” in their particular difficulties.

Second, lying is always wrong even in desperate situations.
But what if an abused child hides at your house?
Will you lie to protect the innocent child from the abusive father?

What if you can discover no other option?

In that case since no alternative seems available, you can't find a good way to deal with the crisis, then you may choose to do what is wrong, the least wrong action.

Notice, the lying, is still WRONG, BUT COMPARED TO A CHILD BEING FURTHER ABUSED, LYING IS THE LESSER EVIL.

And after the crisis passes, you well-meaning liar, will still need to admit your wrong-doing, and emphasize that you will make whatever amends you need to for your deception.

No where is any well-meant lie—itself--justified.

If only all humans would choose such moral realism, the vast majority of evil actions in the world would be lessened and eventually stopped.

Meticulous honesty, compassion, generosity, defense of human rights, etc. are ALWAYS RIGHT.

In the LIGHT of TRUTH,

Daniel Wilcox

The Debacle of Empty-Bucket Words

Like in the old days of English literature when books had really long phrased OR titles:

The Debacle of Empty-Bucket Words
OR
How I Learned to Love Humpty-Dumpty
by Shoving the Egg-Head of a “God” off the Wall
OR
How I Learned to Stop Using the Vacuous, Empty-Headed Term, “Love”

Preface:
“Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
http://sabian.org/looking_glass6.php

First, the last. I suppose for centuries, “love” has been empty-headed, empty-bucketed, meaning whatever any one in changing centuries applied to the term. Like all words, “love” that chameleon’d-squiggled-word changes in time and place and comes to mean whatever any particular human means it to mean.

Need I give many examples from history, literature, and media, especially movies, to show how ambiguous, contradictory, and empty-bucketed, “love” has been?

Heck, even Christian leaders can’t agree. Millions of them disagree about what “God is love” means. And some leaders get etymological, scholarly, and cite Greek, speaking of the over-inflated word, “agape.” But even in Greek, they don’t agree! (It's Greek to me;-)
Because even then they often mean something entirely different from other Christians.

For instance, Augustinian-Reformed Christians claim that God both loves and predetermines billions of humans to eternal damnation. What?! How could God lovingly torture billions of humans for ever?

And God "loves" some humans so much, he wills for them to get cancer, die in car accidents, drown, burn to death, and so forth!

OR take a look at how the Anabaptist leader Chuck McKnight claims that multiple sexual partner relationships—polyamory--are based in “love,” in “agape-love”!

Huh?!
According to McKnight, and others, the only rule of Christianity is “love.”

We've heard this before!

Paul Tillich, the famous Protestant theologian claimed, "Love is the ultimate law” while himself committing adultery, etc.
Tillich, Systematic Theology, v. 1, p. 152

And Christian ethicist Joseph Fletcher wrote an infamous, controversial book, Situation Ethics, in 1966.

It closed with this view:
“When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the plane crew were silent. Captain Lewis uttered six words, "My God, what have we done?" Three days later another one fell on Nagasaki. About 152,000 were killed, many times more were wounded and burned, to die later. The next day Japan sued for peace. When deciding whether to use "the most terrible weapon ever known" the US President appointed an Interim Committee made up of distinguished and responsible people in the government. Most but not all of its military advisors favoured using it. Top-level scientists said they could find no acceptable alternative to using it, but they were opposed by equally able scientists. After lengthy discussions, the committee decided that the lives saved by ending the war swiftly by using this weapon outweighed the lives destroyed by using it and thought that the best course of action.”

Supposedly, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians was more loving in the long run and therefore more justified!

Whew…Talk about Orwellian…yes, war is peace, hate is love, slaughter is kindness…
--
LOOK at this STRANGE DIALOGUE BETWEEN JOSEPH FLETCHER AND A CONTRARY CHRISTIAN LEADER:

"This book is a transcript of the February 11, 1971 dialogue between Montgomery and Joseph Fletcher (who wrote Situation Ethics: The New Morality). Here are a few examples of their exchanges:

FLETCHER: "I think there are no normative moral principles whatsoever which are intrinsically valid or universally obliging.... If we are, as I would want to reason, obliged in conscience sometimes to tell white lies, as we often call them, then in conscience we might be obliged sometimes to engage in
white thefts
and white fornications
and white killings
and white breakings of promises
and the like." (pg. 15)

FLETCHER: “I want to suggest that methodologically there are basically only three alternatives strategies… the three options open to conscience at work are to be simply labeled as legalism, antinomianism, and situationism… In between these [first] two extremes lies situationism… and a mediating position in the spectrum. The situationist enters into troubling moral situations armed… [with] some reflective generalizations about what is ordinarily and typically the right thing to do. But unlike the legalist he refuses to absolutize … any normative principle… he is prepared to depart from a usually applicable generalization if in the particular case the consequence of following the rule is to minimize rather than to optimize … the first-order value to which he’s committed.” (Pg. 19, 23-24)

MONTGOMERY: “The insurmountable difficulty is simply this: there is no way… of knowing when the situationist is actually endeavoring to set forth genuine facts and true opinions, and when he is lying… Why? Because deception is allowed on principle … .as long as the ultimate aim is love. Consider: if Professor Fletcher acts consistently with his premises… he can to this end introduce any degree of factual misinformation, rhetorical pettifogging, or direct prevarication into the discussion… Our restatement goes: ‘If a situation ethicist … tells you that he is not lying, can you believe him?’… [This leaves] the audience entirely incapable of ever being sure that Professor Fletcher means what he says.” (Pg. 31-32)

MONTGOMERY: “This is precisely the claim of the historical Christian faith: that biblical revelation constitutes a transcendent word from God establishing ethical values once for all… Absolute moral principles are explicitly set forth; these inform love and guide its exercise.” (Pg. 44)

FLETCHER: “Are you saying, sir, that we must in conscience always tell the truth? And if there are exceptions, when might we prevaricate and why?... are you saying that tyrannicide is never justifiable? If it might be, when and why?... were you or weren’t you saying that interruptions of pregnancy are always wrong? But if there are times when it might be done, why would it be?... Christian ethics … have never allowed that human rights are anything but… relative and contingent.” (Pg. 49)

MONTGOMERY: “the greatest difficulty in situation ethics is revealed exactly at this point. The situation ethicist properly recognizes the ambiguity of situations and the extreme difficulty, often, in knowing what ought to be done; but he endeavors, in these situations, to JUSTIFY HIMSELF. In terms of the ethical approach that I outlined, one CANNOT so justify oneself. If, concretely, I were put in the position that you described of either informing a killer as to where a child was hidden or lying about it, it's conceivable that I would have to lie. But if I did so, I would be unable to justify this ethically; in short, I would be unable to get off the hook. In Christian terminology, I would have committed a sin which should drive me to the cross for forgiveness. This is what I find almost totally lacking in your writings: no one is driven to the Cross.” (Pg. 51)

FLETCHER: “you have said in reply to my question ‘Is it always wrong to have an abortion?’---‘Yes, it always is.’ It seems to me absolutely unbelievable that anybody could say that… Since the tragic complexities of life sometimes call us to do what we might call the ‘lesser evil,’ you WOULD be an instrument because the alternative to the abortion would be greater evil than the evil of the abortion.” (Pg. 52-53)

FLETCHER: “It is ethically foolish to say we ‘ought’ to do what is wrong! What I want to argue philosophically… is that the rightness or the wrongness of anything we do is extrinsic, relative, and dependent upon the circumstances, so that to have an abortion out of loving concern for everybody’s best interests involve, is not an excusably evil thing to do, but a good thing to do.” (Pg. 53-54)

FLETCHER: “And I have to say in all candor that when I examine the Gospel account of Jesus’ teaching in light of our question… he said nothing directly or even implicitly about it one way or another. Jesus was a simple Jewish peasant.
He had no more philosophical sophistication
than a guinea pig,
and I don’t turn to Jesus
for philosophical sophistication.” (Pg. 55)

MONTGOMERY: “Well, sir, I think that’s your trouble.” [Laughter and applause from the audience.] (Pg. 55)

FLETCHER: “Aren’t you in effect telling us that in your ethics we are sometimes morally obliged to do what is wrong, and does that make any sense in terms of ethical analysis?” [Applause from the audience.]
MONTGOMERY: “No, obviously it does not make any sense in terms of YOUR ethical analysis, but that’s what we are trying to determine---whether that ethical analysis is right… What I’m saying is that it may be necessary to choose a lesser of evils. But such a choice still remains an evil.” (Pg. 69-70) Situation ethics; true or false?: A dialogue between Joseph Fletcher and John Warwick Montgomery (Dimension books)
Quoted by reviewer Steven H. Propp on Amazon
--

Even the word "LIGHT" means various contradictory things to different humans, including different Friends.

No, we can't escape semantics, so it behooves us to very carefully define words when we use them. And give very lucid examples.

Daniel Wilcox

The Seductive Nature of Subjectivity in Ethics

The acceptance and use of subjectivity in ethics by humans almost always leads to the escape clause by which "we" and our actions are the just and necessary exception to traditional moral rules. Often those who adopt this way of ethics even claim their actions are the most loving.

Yes, lying is usually morally wrong, but in some cases, it is necessary and the most loving act to do. For instance, I needed to lie...because...

Yes, suicide is sometimes good, because my act will bring about good for others.

Yes, torture is morally wrong for the enemy to do, but because we, the Americans, are the good guys it may be necessary for us to do this to those who are bad.

President George W. Bush: "Another technique was waterboarding, a process of simulated drowning. No doubt the procedure was tough, but medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm."

"Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked. In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was unwilling to take."

Merriam-Webster Dictionary: torture-- “the act of causing severe physical pain as a form of punishment or as a way to force someone to do or say something.”

UN Convention Against Torture: “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession… when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public office or other person acting in an official capacity.
U.S. Constitution: no “cruel and unusual punishment”
And it is against the Geneva Conventions.

Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz: “Under the definition of torture, no it’s [waterboarding's] not” [but] I would not bring it back in any sort of widespread use.”

"His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown." -Lt. Grover Flint, Philippine-American War
waterboarding.org
--

Suicide:

“The self-immolation of Norman Morrison had been a violent act of love
that brought
diverse people together in strange and unexpected ways. It connected them
through a bond of unimaginable sacrifice that reached from Washington to
Vietnam, from the heart of peace to the heart of war.

Moreover, there must have been many more, including in Washington, whose consciences were
awakened by Norman's self-immolation, even in the Pentagon."
Norman’s Triumph: The Transcendent Language of Self-Immolation
by Nicholas Patler
Quaker History, Fall 2015

On the contrary! Violence can never be an “act of love”!

Especially not lethal violence--the intentional killing of others or one's self.

Violence even in its denotative meaning is to “violate” whether the violence is against others or self-inflicted.

What a misuse of linguistics! War isn’t peace, suicide isn’t a "violent act of love"…

Remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s powerful spiritual words, that one seeks peace by doing peace, never by lethal violence.

A Quaker stating that suicide is a "violent act of love" sounds like the absurd language of the U.S. government, “we had to destroy the village to save it.”
"'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today.
He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town
regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
Major Describes Move."
New York Times. 8 February 1968

And consider the horrific thinking of Joseph Fletcher, professor
of Christian Ethics at Episcopal Divinity School, who even advocated
the slaughter of many thousands of civilians including children
by atom bombs as a loving act!

Furthermore Fletcher had this to say about killing Down’s Syndrome children:
"People [with children with Down's syndrome]... have no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down's syndrome baby away, whether it's "put away" in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible lethal sense. It is sad; yes. Dreadful. But it carries no guilt.”

“True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person."
Bard, Bernard; Joseph Fletcher (April 1968). "The Right to Die".
The Atlantic Monthly: 59–64.

Fletcher supported abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and eugenics.
Wikepedia

ALL in the name of "love," of course....


Work against this "ocean of darkness,"

Daniel Wilcox