Oh! I forgot!

Some readers pointed out this fine piece by Ed Feser on the morality of lying. Turns out it’s a sin.

The best analogy I’ve heard so far to try to get at the badness of lying vs. the goodness of people doing it in a good cause is this: Suppose you are in some situation like the Great Escape where you need to create a diversion so that innocents can escape. For some reason, it occurs to you to shoot yourself in the foot with a concealed gun. Sure enough, all the guards come running and the innocents escape. You are a good person trying to do good. But nobody would call a bullet through the foot a good thing. Lying is like that. Indeed, part of the point is, if you had considered some other way of creating the diversion, you might not have had to do the bad thing of shooting yourself in the foot. Which is why we have these sorts of thinks in advance instead of trusting to spur of the moment decisions in a panic. It’s also why we suggest that building an entire campaign against Planned Parenthood involving shooting oneself in the foot is inadvisable.

Okay, it’s a rather improbable scenario, but you get the idea.

Alright then. To work, Shea!