an untruthful or ambiguous answer by purely self-regarding feelings.  They feel that to give an untruthful answer, even under such circumstances as I have supposed, would be to burden themselves with the subsequent consciousness of cowardice or lack of self-respect.  And hence, whatever inconvenience or annoyance it may cost them, they tell the naked truth, rather than stand convicted to themselves of a want of courage or dignity.”

[Footnote 1:  Principles of Morals, II., 159-161.]

“Veracity, though this was by no means always the case,” Professor Fowler continues, “has become the point of honor in the upper ranks of modern civilized societies, and hence it is invested with a sanctity which seems to attach to no other virtue; and to the uninstructed conscience of the unreflective man, the duty of telling the truth appears, of all duties, to be the only duty which never admits of any exceptions, from the unavoidable conflict with other duties.”  He ranges the moral sense of the “upper ranks of modern civilized societies,” and “the uninstructed conscience of the unreflective man,” against any tolerance of the “lie of necessity,” leaving only the locality of Muhammad’s coffin for those who are arrayed against the rigid moralists on this question.

While he admits the theoretical possibility of the “lie of necessity,” Professor Fowler concludes as to its practical expediency:  “Without maintaining that there are no conceivable circumstances under which a man will be justified in committing a breach of veracity, it may at least be said that, in the lives of most men, there is no case likely to occur in which the greater social good would not be attained by the observation of the general rule to tell the truth, rather than by the recognition of an exception in favor of a lie, even though that lie were told for purely benevolent reasons.”  That is nearer right than the conclusions of many an inconsistent intuitionist!

Leslie Stephen, a consistent agnostic, and a believer in the slow evolution of morals, in his “Science of Ethics,"[1] naturally holds, like Herbert Spencer, to the gradual development of the custom of truthfulness, as a necessity of society.[2] The moral sense of primitive man, as he sees it, might seem to justify falsehood to an enemy, rather than, as Rothe and Smyth would claim, to those who are wards of love.  In illustration of this he says:  “The obligation to truthfulness is [primarily] limited to relations with members of the same tribe or state; and, more generally, it is curious to observe how a kind of local or special morality is often developed in regard to this virtue.  The schoolboy thinks it a duty to his fellows to lie to his master, the merchant to his customer, and the servant to his employer; and, inversely, the duty is often recognized as between members of some little clique or profession, as soon as it is seen to be important for their corporate interest, even at the expense of the wider social organization.  There is honor among thieves, both of the respectable and other varieties.”