Why Aquinas Should Have Held That One May Intentionally Tell A Falsehood to an Unjust Aggressor

Abstract

Abstract Aquinas argued that one may never intentionally tell an outright falsehood, that is to say, lie, even if one is doing so to help save another person’s life. Yet his position here is very different from how he treats the nature of other moral norms such as stealing, promise-keeping, and murder. For the latter Aquinas defends exceptionless moral norms, but by carefully defining what constitutes stealing, promise-keeping, and murder, allows a limited number of disassociating circumstances wherein morally relevant situations (such as a grave necessity or the presence of an unjust aggressor) take actions out of the categories of stealing or murder strictly speaking. Aquinas furthermore allows divine disassociations from the moral law in cases of murder, stealing, and even adultery, which remove certain acts from being included in prohibited categories because of divine decree, but he does not do so for lying. As a consequence, Aquinas has to resort to various elaborations as to how what seems to be a telling of a falsehood by an Old Testament figure is not really so. I will argue here that there are reasons to think Aquinas was inconsistent in his approach, and that given his philosophical presuppositions he could have and indeed should have held that it is licit to intentionally tell a falsehood to an unjust aggressor, and that this would have rendered his thought more coherent as a whole.