However, May explained that Catholics can, in good conscience, strategically withhold significant or sensitive information in certain settings. They may also legitimately have recourse to the technique known as “mental reservation,” which involves the use of a statement that can be taken in two different ways.
By these criteria, Live Action's actors could have employed statements that were technically true: for instance, by saying they were involved in “sex work” and meaning chastity education; or by saying they “knew some young girls” – who were in fact merely their younger siblings – and asking about what could be done “if they got pregnant” by an older person.
Through the careful use of ambiguous statements, Live Action might have invited Planned Parenthood employees to disclose sensitive information about hypothetical scenarios, without actually lying. Moral theologians and Church authorities have consistently distinguished these types of mental reservation from outright lies.
Like Professors Grisez and May, Dr. Christopher Kaczor – a Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University – has written extensively about ethics and the natural law from a Catholic standpoint. Like Prof. May, he believes Live Action would have been in a more readily defensible position if it had employed a careful strategy of mental reservation – rather than outright lying – in approaching Planned Parenthood.
But Kaczor expressed strong reservations about lines of argumentation that would forbid Live Action's work because of its use of lies.
These arguments, Kaczor wrote in a Feb. 11 piece for the Public Discourse online journal, “would seem to prove too much.” He was responding to a Feb. 9 piece by Christopher Tollefsen, another philosopher who claimed that Live Action's ends did not justify the means of lying.
Tollefsen's criteria, Kaczor said, would exclude most undercover police operations, investigative journalism involving a pretense, infiltrations of terrorist networks, and espionage work on behalf of intelligence agencies.
“It could be that morality demands an end to all such activities,” Kaczor acknowledged. “But it seems more likely that such activities are ethically permissible for serious reasons.” By the same standards, he said, Live Action's strategies might also be justified.
Speaking to CNA on Feb. 10, Live Action's President Lila Rose acknowledged the seriousness of the ethical concerns raised by her fellow Catholics. But she urged them to consider Planned Parenthood's role in the deaths of millions of children, and how this extraordinary reality might inform or change activists' moral obligations.
While Rose and her group are strongly opposed to violence against abortionists, she did compare the current situation to a “just war,” in which things may be done that could not be in a time of peace.
“During times of war, espionage does take place,” Rose pointed out. “Is it time, in our country, for us to use undercover work as a tactic to fight? I would say, and I think many Catholics would say, 'absolutely'.”
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
To some Catholics, her rationale may sound similar to “situation ethics” – which holds that the concrete particulars of a situation can alter what is right or wrong. Rose also acknowledged that the analogy – between war on the one hand, and a moral and legal struggle on the other – was not a perfect comparison.
Rose also believes there is precedent for her work in the case of some Catholics who lied to save Jews during World War II, or priests who assumed a false identity in order to minister under communist regimes.
Additionally, as Dr. Kaczor has pointed out in his essay, at least two of the Fathers of the Church – St. John Chrysostom in his book “On the Priesthood,” and St. John Cassian in his “Conferences” – defended the use of lying to save an innocent person.
Such a difficult question, coming in response to the reality of abortion, may continue to divide those who are otherwise firmly allied in their defense of unborn life.
The question is unlikely to be resolved to anyone's complete satisfaction in the near future. However, Rose said she intends to provide CNA with a longer position statement explaining her group's perspective on the morality of its work.