Many a debate about ethical systems gets illustrated by the Corrie Ten Boom conundrum posed as Nazis knocking on your door to inquire whether you are hiding innocent Jews in your home. You can either tell the truth and sacrifice the lives of your refugees, or you can lie and, assuming you have the world’s most gullible Nazi at your door, spare the lives of those you have committed to protect. This scenario captures a classic question of which sin is the greater, and it presumes that there is no other option.

“Knock, knock.”

-“Who’s there?”

“The Nazis.”

-“The Nazis wh—” [SLAP]

“Vee vill ask de questions!”

Many a debate about ethical systems gets illustrated by the Corrie Ten Boom conundrum posed as Nazis knocking on your door to enquire whether you are hiding innocent Jews in your home. You can either tell the truth and sacrifice the lives of your refugees, or you can lie and, assuming you have the world’s most gullible Nazi at your door, spare the lives of those you have committed to protect.

This scenario captures a classic question of which sin is the greater, and it presumes that there is no other option.

There are three main ethical systems by which people try to attack the problem…

1. Graded Ethics – Shades of grey

This is the most common layman’s ethic. It holds that life is not black and white, but includes shades of grey between right and wrong. You can identify graded ethics easily from catchphrases like “lesser of two evils” or “necessary evil” and “greater good” or “white lie.”

Employing graded ethics, you don’t ask yourself “Is telling the truth right or wrong?”— but rather “Is telling the truth better or worse than selling out innocent lives?”

Or you may say “A lie is wrong, but allowing innocent people to be killed is more wrong, so that means lying is the lesser of two evils and a necessary evil to accomplish the greater good of saving lives.”

The problem with this view is it is extremely subjective. Hitler and his Nazis saw ridding the Aryan race of Jews as the right thing to do for the greater good. To me that seems crazy.

Another problem is that graded ethics holds that at times it is justifiable to sin. But just because a sin is “the lesser of two evils,” doesn’t make it any less evil than God’s holy standard.

 2. Situational Ethics – An ethic for every occasion

This system avers that an action may be right in one situation but wrong in another. If you ask a situational ethicist (like Father Joseph Fletcher) if an act is right or wrong, he’d say “It depends.” If the result in a particular situation is clearly good, then the sin is excused as the right thing to do under the circumstances.

Lying is not always better than saving lives, it depends on the life you are saving. Lying to a Nazi in order to protect an innocent life is acceptable to God, but lying to the cops to protect the life of an escaped convict is wrong.

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