I think most people would agree that telling the truth is generally better than telling lies. The issue is whether it’s the highest priority or whether there are other principles that are greater than the principle of telling the truth.
Would you tell a lie if doing so would save somebody’s life? Would you tell a lie to keep a family member from being sent to prison? Would you tell a lie to a foreign spy trying to obtain information that would harm your country? I think most people would feel there are times when telling a lie is more moral than telling the truth.
Why is you family more important that, say, the family of the people wronged by your family? Can they lie and send your family to prison?
Maybe we’re all talking about different things. If the nazis came for Anne Frank, damn straight I’d lie. I’d push them off a roof to protect her. But the nazi’s didn’t put me under oath. They just kicked in my door.
It’s not a issue subject to rational debate. People love their family members in a way that they don’t love random strangers. It’s not even just a human trait; most animals feel the same way.
Are you willing to kill them to protect Anne Frank? Or are you just mad because they broke your door?
If the Nazis had politely knocked on your door, brought you back to headquarters, and put you under oath, would you have still lied to protect Anne Frank? Or would you have told them where she was because your oath was more important than her life?
What happens if they read you the oath in court and you say “I don’t” instead of “I do”? Contempt charge? Drop you as a witness?
On topic, I may lie in court for some kind of drug possession charge for a family member. If it was something like a rape, murder type of crime, I would not lie when the evidence is there.
I still shake my head in wonder when family members cry innocence when someone is caught red handed, on tape, with 100 witnesses against them. Ghislaine Maxwell’s family comes to mind.
No. Oath are not meaningless. An oath is an obligation to tell the truth under of penal sanction.
Going to jail for perjury is absolutely no superstition as
Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare discovered.
Sure, not meaningless in a punitive legal sense, but for personal ethnics, whether I am “under oath” or not makes not a lick of difference to me as to whether I tell the truth or not. From that perspective, they are absolutely meaningless to me.
You can be sure that the risk of that is something that would affect my decision.
I was referring to the religious aspect of it as superstition, not the effects of being caught in a lie. That would exist whether I swore or affirmed (and I’m only ever likely to do the latter)
In the moment, if I thought the circumstances were unjust and I was being charged with some crime I was strongly opposed to, I would probably lie. If I’ve been though enough shite to be stuck in some circumstance where telling the truth would be detrimental to everything I hold dear, I would probably lie.