Newman on lying

Over at American Catholic there is a long excerpt from Newman about when it is okay to lie.

It's one of those things that I recommend highly to anyone in the mood for such a thing. I know, I'm equivocating. Is that a lie?

The thing about this sort of reasoning is that it ends up being a  kind of moral phenomenology. Newman walks around the thing looking at it from every angle and considering every option. And that makes us impatient. We think, why walk around the problem when you could go straight to the heart of it and just deal with it?

We can see the contrast with a  couple of examples.  First, here is Newman:

Another mode of verbal misleading is equivocation or a play upon words; and it is defended on the theory that to lie is to use words in a sense which they will not bear. But an equivocator uses them in a received sense, though there is another received sense, and therefore, according to this definition, he does not lie.

Notice that Newman doesn't tell us what he thinks or even tells us what is right. He says something more like, one kind of argument is this. And he gives us about twelve such arguments before getting down to business. And the impatient person might want to try and corner him and say, 'Stop with all this beating around the bush and get to the point: is lying right or wrong?'

Newman gives a good example of the other approach just a  paragraph or two down:

St. Augustine took another view, though with great misgiving; and, whether he is rightly interpreted or not, is the doctor of the great and common view that all untruths are lies, and that there can be no just cause of untruth.

And, if we have read the whole Newman article, we might get to this and think, "What a  relief to finally get an answer that is nice and clear and goes right to the heart of the matter.'

And the problem is not that Augustine's advice is impossible. If it were, the argument would be simple. But we can follow his strictures. If someone pulls a gun out and asks the person in front of us if they are a Christian and shoots them when they say yes and then asks us the same question, we could actually tell the truth and die. Nothing is stopping us.

As with his teachings on sex, the Augustinian approach is hard not impossible. And, again, some people will insist that is all we need to know. And who are we to argue?

I won't go on about it now/again but I think the way forward is virtue ethics.