Ninguém está obrigado

An aggressive, violent man enters the room, a gun in his hand, points it a Joaquim's head and asks him in no ambiguous terms:

"Are you Joaquim?".

Joaquim keeps his cool, looks casually at him, the gun pointed at his head, and says:

"Oh, are you looking for Joaquim? He has just left. If you you go up the street you will catch him in two minutes."

The man lowers the gun and leaves in a hurry running up the street.

Joaquim might go to hell. He has just lied.

In an earlier post Joaquim has raised the question of whether lying is an ethical acceptable behaviour in the context of an argument by Ayn Rand against Kant's categorical imperatives.

I checked on this subject the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992 under the direction of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which I consider one of the most comprehensive philosophical works published over the last century.

After condemning lying in the most severe terms, the Catechism says in articles 2488-2489:

"O direito à comunicação da verdade não é incondicional. Cada um deve conformar a sua vida com o preceito evangélico do amor fraterno, mas este requer, em situações concretas, que reflictamos se convém ou não revelar a verdade a quem no-la pede.

(...) O bem e a segurança de outrem, o respeito pela vida particular e o bem comum são razões suficientes para calar o que não deve ser conhecido ou para usar uma linguagem discreta (...) Ninguém está obrigado a revelar a verdade a quem não tem o direito de a conhecer."

What a beautiful book this is and what a beautiful, flexible and humane ethical system this book contains. It has decent, reasonable answers for the most difficult ethical questions we face in life. All of them supplied to you in direct, clear, simple words and sentences; no mambo-jambo, no obscure arguments, no attempt to deceive you. Occasionally, you might not agree with the answers or the arguments but they are so honestly and clearly presented that they become the ideal reference for you to contest them.

I just felt no need to go back to Kant and Rand: by lying to his own would-be killer Joaquim will not go to hell.