Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Kaczor reviews Tollefsen on Lying (updated)

At Public Discourse, Prof. Christopher Kaczor reviews Prof. Christopher Tollefsen's new book, Lying and Christian Ethics.   (The review includes links to a lot of items having to do with the Planned Parenthood videos and the arguments over the morality of the tactics used to get them.)

Here, by the way, is Kaczor's defense (written about 5 years ago) of these tactics when the same debate was raging about an earlier video-sting.  He concluded:

Tollefsen’s principles would seem to prove too much. They would seem to exclude undercover sting operations undertaken by law enforcement. They would exclude infiltrating a terrorist cell. They would exclude spies working to foil enemy battle plans. They would exclude investigative journalism that cultivates trust with the object of investigation. It could be that morality demands an end to all such activities, but it seems more likely that such activities are ethically permissible for serious reasons. By the same reasoning, it seems that the basic strategies undertaken by Live Action need not involve intrinsically evil acts that must always be avoided whatever the cost.

And, here is a post that I did, around the same time.

UPDATE:  On Twitter, Ryan Anderson takes me to task for quoting from the older Kaczor piece and not from the review (that is the subject of this post and to which I linked).  In the current review, Kaczor says, among other things (as Ryan points out):  "Tollefsen has caused me to seriously reconsider my own earlier stated position..., and for that I am grateful." His review concludes with this:

On Tollefsen’s view, perfect love for all human beings and perfect obedience to the Father also enjoin us to never assert falsely. Lying and Christian Ethics provides a powerful case for the thesis that false assertion violates the goods of personal integrity (love of self), sociality (love of neighbor), religion and truth (both pertaining to obedience to and love of God). Readers inclined to think lying is sometimes justified owe it to themselves to read this book.

This is, of course, an important question, and "serious[] reconsider[ation]" is always a worthwhile exercise.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2015/09/kaczor-reviews-tollefsen-on-lying.html

Garnett, Rick | Permalink