Archetypes of the Accused 2

The Ethical Liars

Shiphrah and Puah were midwives when, as the story goes, the Hebrews were an enslaved caste in an ancient Egyptian civilisation. When nationalist anxieties are roused because these foreign slaves are becoming "more numerous," Pharaoh tells Shiphrah and Puah to kill all the newborn Hebrew boys. But of course, they don't.

With rather lacking moral imagination, Pharaoh accuses Shiphrah and Puah: "why did you not kill the boys." The midwives make up the story that Hebrew women are warriors who give birth so quickly that they keep arriving too late to do the grim deed. 

I find many biblical narratives morally ambiguous. Usually, a tale is told and there is no moralising conclusion or window into the mind of God on the matter. One story follows another without comment. Perhaps this is because the moral is obvious to the writers. Or perhaps it is because it is ambiguous and life is ambiguous, so who can say? In this case, however, it is said that God smiles upon the ethical lie of the midwives. 

I suppose they could have taken the route of Principled Truth Telling. They could have refused point blank and borne public witness to the tyrant's malignance. Maybe they reasoned that if they'd done that they wouldn't have been able to covertly save lives. Perhaps they just didn't want to go down for refusing to comply. Who knows and who can judge? This is the paradigm of the ethical liar. To "sin boldly!" as Bonhoeffer put it. The bravery to dance knowingly with a morally ambiguous landscape. This, it seems to me, requires two prerequisites: a morally disastrous situation, and a catastrophic power gap. I wish these two things were rare, but they're really not. 

As for those who desire power: they can be sure that fewer and fewer people will tell them the truth.