I was reading the work of a modern, progressive moral theologian the other day. And he gave what has become a disturbingly common response to the classic moral conundrum: whether you can lie if you are hiding Jews in your house and Nazis knock on your door to ask whether you are hiding Jews in your house. “The Nazis don’t have the right to the truth, so you can lie to them.” Now, although you are not obligated to say everything you know to anyone who asks, the easygoing acceptance of outright lying troubles me.
My first reaction to all such classic moral riddles is to question the premise. “Nazis don’t knock on your door and ask whether you’re hiding Jews. They break down the door and search.” There’s another famous story about a man who is exploring caves with his buddy when the water begins rising. The only escape is through a small hole, and your friend, who is fat, gets stuck in it. You have some dynamite. Do you blow him up, or let yourself drown? I always ask, “Wait, you went cave exploring with dynamite? Why? Just in case you might need to blow someone up? Who goes into a cave with that guy?
Most of these stories are crafted precisely to undermine a moral principle. If I can lie to the Nazis, then not all lying is wrong. If I can dynamite my chubby buddy, then killing an unborn child endangering the mother’s life must be okay.
Unless both are wrong.
My question about lying to the Nazis is this: Where does someone get the right to the truth? Students say things like, “I have a right to play my music in my dorm room!” The proper response is: “No. You don’t.” There is no such “right.” Where would such a “right” come from? Was it imparted by God? Is it a requirement of human nature?
Perhaps we ought to let you play your music, depending upon how it affects the common good of the community. But there is no absolute “right” that trumps all other considerations, such as the ability of others to sleep and study.
So too, perhaps I ought to tell you things you want to know, but perhaps not. I don’t see how it helps to claim that this person has or doesn’t have a “right” to the truth. This only confuses the matter, especially in American culture, where we take rights to be “absolute,” where rights are “trumps” that outweigh a utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits.
It was for this reason that utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham described natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” If someone has a right to life (as the Declaration affirms), then we would need a compelling interest to deny someone that right. So too, if there is a right to the truth, then we would need a compelling reason to deny someone that right, even by remaining silent.
Even if we could supply a convincing account for this particular situation of Nazis at your door, my concern is that this little tale will result in an easygoing assumption that you can lie whenever you think that people do not have the right to the truth. Okay, so maybe (and notice I said “maybe”) you can lie to the Nazis about the Jews hiding in your house, but does that mean I can lie to my mother about where I went last night because, let’s be serious, does she really have a right to the truth? If I witnessed a crime, do the police, the judge, and the jury have the right to the truth?
I knew a case in which a car of four law students hit and killed a young woman as she walked along the side of the road on a dark, rainy night. They did not stop, likely because they had been drinking. The driver’s story was that he knew he had hit something, but he didn’t know what.
Let’s say the verdict depended on the testimony of his friends in the car. Did the judge and jury have the right to the truth? I ask my students how they would testify if they had been the friends in the car. Tell the truth about what happened? Or not? They are torn. What good would it do? It won’t bring back the girl. It will simply destroy this young man’s life. Oh, but don’t her parents deserve the truth?
Who has the right to the truth in this case and who doesn’t? These students would be much better served, not only morally but also legally (perjury is a crime), if they simply realized they must not lie. There is, after all, a divinely revealed commandment against lying. Does God just not understand these things?
But whatever one thinks about these little moral riddles, there is a deeper problem. When a man says that he is allowed to lie if the people he is addressing do not have the right to the truth, then we have to wonder whether he thinks we have the right to the truth.
If he does not judge that we have that right, then he could be lying to us. Once a man has accepted the principle that lying might be acceptable in certain circumstances, we have reason to doubt the truth of anything he says. And if he can convince others of this principle, then we will have reason to be suspicious of anything people tell us. It might be especially good if politicians and the press understood this.
In the movie A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise’s character shouts, “I want the truth!” If instead of “You can’t handle the truth,” Jack Nicholson’s character had said: “You don’t have the right to the truth” – if he can’t “handle” the truth, does he really have a “right” to it? – then our progressive theologians might say: “Well, you know, he has a point.”
