In regard to such outlaws from society, some moralists would accordingly maintain that the duty of veracity is non-existent, and that here we may “answer a fool according to his folly.” If a burglar asks where is your plate, you may reply at random “In the Bank,” or “At Timbuctoo,” or “I haven’t any.” If a lunatic declares himself Emperor of China, you may humour him, and give him any information you may imagine about his dominions, etc.
Such is the teaching of, v.gr., Professor Paulsen, of Berlin, in his “System of Ethics,” in which he is at one with Scholasticism, though, I daresay, we should not follow him in all his applications of the principle. He prefers to call such instances “necessary lies,” whereas we should say they were not lies at all, because they would not be rightly considered to imply speaking strictly understood, that is, the communication of one’s mind to another. There is no real speech where there are no relations of mutual confidence. Practically, however, it is so far a question of name rather than of reality, of theory rather than of fact.
The doctrine of Mental Reservation seems to me to differ from that of Equivocation only in this, that Equivocation implies the use of words which have a two-fold meaning in themselves, apart from special circumstances, and are therefore logical equivoques. Thus to the question: “What do people think of me?” one might diplomatically reply: “Oh! they think a great deal!” which leaves it undetermined whether the thinking be of a favourable or unfavourable character.
But more commonly words, apart from special circumstances, have one definite meaning, e.gr., “Yes” or
“No.” When Sir Walter Scott denied, as he himself tells us, the authorship of “Waverley” with a plain simple “No,” he was guilty of no logical Equivocation: but the circumstance that it was generally known that the author intended to preserve anonymity gave his answer the signification, “Mind your own business.” This is what I should call a moral equivoque. The Scholastics call it broad mental reservation (restrictio late mentalis). The origin of this terminology seems to me to lie in a bit of purism. Some moralists were not content with merely moral equivoques: they appear to insist on the junction with them of logical Equivocation; and so they would have directed the equivocator to restrict (and so double) the meaning of a word in his own mind. Thus to Sir Walter they would have said: “Don’t say ‘No’ simply, but add in your own head, ‘as far as the public is concerned,’” or something similar.
When this addition could not be conjectured by the hearer, it received the name of pure mental reservation (restrictio pure [or stricte] mentalis): as when one might say “John is not here” (meaning in his mind “not on the exact spot where the speaker stood”), though John was a yard off all the time. Such a position has not found favour in the body of Catholic moralists. They regard it as not only a useless proceeding, but as one which, although intended out of respect for truth, is liable, from its purely subjective character, to easy abuse.
But when objective circumstances (as in the case of Sir Walter) enable the hearer to guess at the double meaning and to suspend his judgment, then we have a case of broad mental reservation: for it is writ large in social convention that, where a momentous secret exists, a negative answer carries with it the limitation (restriction, reservation), “secrets apart.”
I trust I have made it sufficiently clear that the doctrine of Equivocation, properly understood, has been devised in the interests of Veracity. That we may find in some writers, whether St. Alphonsus de Liguori or Professor Paulsen, particular applications in which we do not concur, surely does not affect the validity of the principle.
I may add that all Catholic theologians with whom I am acquainted limit its use by requiring many external conditions: v.gr., that the secret to be preserved should be of importance; that the questioner should have no right to its knowledge, etc. In one word, that the possible damage to mutual confidence resulting from the hearer’s self-deception should be less than that which would certainly accrue from the revelation of a legitimate secret.
No one feels more keenly than we do that to have resort to Equivocation is an evil rendered tolerable only in presence of a greater evil of the same nature; and I venture to say, from an intimate knowledge of my brother “religious,” that no one is less likely to recur to it, where only his own skin is concerned, than a Jesuit.