most objectionable to Englishmen in the scholastic doctrine were devised by their authors with the intention of limiting the realm of Equivocation and of safeguarding the truth more closely.
All rational men are agreed that there are circumstances in which words must be used that are primâ facie contrary to truth — in war, in diplomacy, in the custody of certain professional secrets. In such instances the non-Catholic rule seems to be: Tell a lie, and have done with it. The basis of such a principle is Utilitarian Morality, which estimates Right and Wrong merely by the consequences of an action. The peripatetic philosopher, on the other hand, who maintains the intrinsic moral character of certain actions, and who holds mordicus to the love of truth for its own sake, is not content to rest in a lie, however excusable, but endeavours, for the honour of humanity, to demonstrate that such apparent deviations from truth are not such in reality. For he perceives in them two meanings — whence the name Equivocation — one of which may be true, while the other is false. The speaker utters the words in their true meaning, and that the hearer should construe them in the other sense is the latter’s own affair.
“Not at home” may mean “out of the house” or “not inclined to receive visitors.” It is the visitor’s own fault if he attaches the first meaning to the phrase rather than the second, or vice versâ.
No sensible man would consider a prisoner to be “lying” in his plea of “Not Guilty,” because a certain juryman, in his ignorant simplicity, should carry off the impression of the prisoner’s absolute, and not merely of his legal, innocence. Yet the plea may mean either both or only the latter.
Similarly, an impertinent ferretter-out of an important
secret needs blame none but himself if he conceives the answer “No” to intimate anything else than that he should mind his own business.
As to such facts there is, I should say, an overwhelming agreement of opinion. That they differ from what we all recognise as a sheer “lie” is pretty evident. It is, therefore, convenient and scientific to label them with some other name, and the Scholastic hit upon the not inapt one of Equivocation.
The malice of lying consists, according to Utilitarian Philosophy, in the destruction of that mutual confidence which is so absolutely necessary for the proper maintenance and development of civilized life. But the Scholastic, while fully admitting this ground, looks for a still deeper root, and finds it in the very fact of the discrepancy between the speaker’s internal thought and its outward expression. The difference between the two positions may be more clearly apprehended in the following formula: — The first would define a lie as “speaking with intent to deceive;” whereas the second defines it “speaking contrary to one’s thought” (locutio contra mentem), even where there is no hope (and therefore no intent) of actual deception. The latter is clearly the stricter view, yet very closely allied with, and supplementing, the former. For we may perhaps say with Cardinal de Lugo — and à la Kant — that the malice of the discrepancy mentioned above lies in the self-contradiction which results in the liar, between his inborn desire for the trust of his fellow-men and his conviction that he has rendered himself unworthy of it — that he has, in other words, degraded his nature.
Now, where there do not exist relations of mutual confidence, such malice cannot exist. An enemy, a burglar, a lunatic, an impudent questioner, etc., are, in
their distinguishing character, beyond the pale of mutual confidence — i.e., when acting professionally as enemies, burglars, etc.