I. THE DILEMMA

An interesting and familiar ethical dilemma goes like this: Say you’re living in Germany during the Third Reich. Ann Frank and her family comes to you for help, and you hide them in your attic. Later, an SS officer comes to your door and asks “Are there Jews in your attic?”

While most people are familiar with the Ann Frank dilemma only as a rather grim riddle, it presents a serious and largely unconsidered issue of how we ought to make moral decisions. The dilemma challenges not only what you might do in a given situation, but who you are and what you believe at the most fundamental level. Although the dilemma is designed to have no “good” outcome, its difficulty relies on a mistaken interpretation of “lying.” After studying this dilemma for some time, I’ve concluded that a Protestant Christian ought to tell the Nazi officer that there are no Jews in the attic, and can do so without sinning. (The Catholic is out of luck, as shown below).

The dilemma is interesting because it forces a mutually exclusive decision between two systems of moral judgment that we typically use every day without noticing the inherent contradictions between them. The first system is deontological ethics, or “an approach . . . that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions.” Robert G. Olson, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Deontological Ethics,” (Paul Edwards, ed., 1967). The second system is consequentialist ethics, an approach that holds that “the rightness of an action is determined by its consequences.” Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, “Consequentialism,” (2d ed. 1979), which was famously championed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

The Ann Frank dilemma is designed to coerce the responder to decide which ethic they believe in more deeply by forcing them to choose which they are willing to violate. The fundamental choice is between avoiding the wrong of lying regardless of the consequence, or committing the wrong of lying to prevent the wrong of murder. Most attempts to escape the dilemma in a way that satisfies both deontological and consequentialist ethics are ill-conceived. One Catholic scholar, for example, has proposed responding with the literally true statement “There are no Jews here,” with here indicating the exact spot where the speaker is standing. The Catechism of the Catholic Church shows that the dilemma is not so easily avoided, stating that the Bible “forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relations with others.” While “there are no Jews here” is literally true, it is a deliberate misrepresentation of the truth to the Nazi officer, and thus, under Catholic doctrine, a deontological error.

Assuming that the Catholic scholar cannot succeed in his attempt to escape the dilemma with his deontological and consequentialist credentials both unsullied, the Catholic responder must choose between a deontological and a consequentialist approach, either sinning in fact or permitting sin in consequence.

II. DEONTOLOGY OR CONSEQUENTIALISM?

Any thoughtful response to the Ann Frank dilemma must begin by determining a method by which to choose between deontological and consequentialist ethics. The most sensible first step for a Christian responder is to turn to Scripture and see what it has to say on the issue.

A survey of Scriptures shows that Christianity categorically and unambiguously rejects consequentialist ethics. In the books of Romans, Paul refers to reports that Christians embrace a consequentialist ethic as “slanderous”: “Why not say—as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say—’Let us do evil that good may result?’ Their condemnation is deserved.” Romans 3:8. Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary describes this passage expressly as a rejection of consequentialism: “The believer knows that duty belongs to him, and events to God; and that he must not commit any sin, or speak one falsehood, upon the hope, or even the assurance, that God may thereby glorify Himself. If any speak and act thus, their condemnation is just.”

The Gospels routinely suggest that moral duties are absolute and should be approached without regard to consequence. For example, Matthew 18:6-9 and Mark 9:42-47 say: “If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.” The duty to avoid sin is absolute; the passage rejects absolutely the weighing of results central to consequentialism.

Luke 17:4 says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” From a consequentialist perspective, this level of forgiveness is unethical because its likely result is to enable the brother to sin infinitely and the Christian to be victimized endlessly. The passage is only coherent from a deontological perspective, in which the duty to forgive is absolute, regardless of its likely results.

More could be said about the Scripture’s commitment to deontological ethics, but, in the interest of space, I’ll return to the Ann Frank dilemma. The Christian responder now knows that he ought to respond based on a deontological commitment to right. In the words of Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Bible, “The believer knows that duty belongs to him, and events to God . . . .” The Christian responder’s duty is to obey his moral obligations to Christ–the results of that obedience are left to God.

Deontological ethics forbid the Christian from violating the commandment against lying, and allows one of two obvious responses to the SS officer:

1) There are Jews in my attic;

2) There are Jews in my attic, but I choose to sacrifice myself to resist you until they can escape.

III. ONE PROPOSED SOLUTION FOR PROTESTANTS

For Protestant Christians unbound by the doctrinal constraints of the Catechism, there is a third morally correct option:

3) There are not Jews in my attic.

The premise of this option, which was developed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and first suggested to me by professor G. Robert Blakey of Notre Dame Law School, is that the commandment against lying simply does not prohibit all deliberate falsehoods. Studying Scriptures closely suggests that the moral definition of a “lie” just isn’t the same as the literal definition.

The Bible contains no commandment prohibiting all deliberate falsehoods. It prohibits only, “bear[ing] false witness against your neighbor.” Exodus 20:16; Deuteronomy 5:20. There are two obvious differences between the literal definition of “lying” as “any deliberate falsehood” and what the Scriptures actually prohibit:

1) The Scriptures prohibit “bearing false witness.” This is a narrower category than “deliberate falsehood.” “Bearing witness” is not just making any statement, but rather making a statement in a legal proceeding, where the speaker has a legal and social obligation to state facts accurately. “Bearing witness” is, in the broadest reasonable construction, a statement in which the speaker has a particular duty to speak truthfully. “Bearing false witness,” then, is not merely speaking a deliberate falsehood, but rather speaking a deliberate falsehood when you have a particular duty to speak the truth.

2 ) The Scriptures prohibit the act of bearing false witness only “against your neighbor.” Assuming that this phrase isn’t mere verbiage, and that it was intended to have meaning, the duty not to “bear false witness” does not apply to every person in the world for every statement. That is, the moral duty to speak the truth is not owed to everyone, but only to some people. What constitutes a sinful lie when spoken to one person may not if spoken to another. Logically, the broadest conceivable group that could qualify as “your neighbor” in the context of bearing witness are the people that have a right to hear the truth with regard to the statement spoken.

The contours of the moral duty to avoid bearing false witness against your neighbor do not need to be defined with precision for application to the Ann Frank dilemma. The responder cannot have a particular duty to speak the truth when doing so will result in a sinful murder, and, even if he did, the SS officer cannot have a moral right to hear the truth when he intends to use it to commit a sinful murder. In the absence of a general duty to tell the truth about Ann’s whereabouts, and in the absence of a right on the part of the SS officer to learn the truth about Ann’s whereabouts, the Protestant Christian responder does not sin by stating a deliberate falsehood.