Is there a Santa clause?

What do the figures at left all have in common? None of them exists. Nor would any parent ever tell his child that Superman or Batman is real. Yet some parents tell their children that Santa Claus is real. Perhaps some also tell them that the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy is real.

They shouldn’t. These are lies. Parents who do this certainly mean well, but they do not do well, because lying is always wrong. Not always gravely wrong, to be sure, but still wrong. That is bad enough. But there is also the bad lesson that children are apt to derive from this practice, even if the parents do not intend to teach it – namely, the immoral principle that lying is acceptable if it leads to good consequences. There is also the damage done to a child’s trust in his parents’ word. “What else might they be lying about? What about all this religion stuff?”

This issue came up in the comments section of my recent post on lying, and I decided that it was important enough to address in a separate post. My more secular readers might not find it worth the attention. But the reason might be that they think that I am obviously right. Ironically, it is (I suspect) more religious and traditionally-minded people who are most likely to tell this sort of lie. Certainly there are many religious people who do it.

I would urge them to stop. A child is completely dependent on his parents’ word for his knowledge of the world, of right and wrong, and of God and religious matters generally. He looks up to them as the closest thing he knows to an infallible authority. What must it do to a child’s spirit when he finds out that something his parents insisted was true – something not only important to him but integrally tied to his religion insofar as it is related to Christmas and his observance of it – was a lie? Especially if the parents repeated the lie over the course of several years, took pains to make it convincing (eating the cookies left out for “Santa” etc.), and (as some parents do) reassured the child of its truth after he first expressed doubts? How important, how comforting, it is for a child to be able to believe: Whatever other people do, Mom and Dad will never lie to me. How heartbreaking for him to find out he was wrong!

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/11/there-is-no-santa-clause.html

I don’t wish to belabor this issue. But it crops up every year, so it’s worth discussing.

Likewise, I don’t care about the Santa tradition one way or the other. It’s a trivial case to illustrate larger, more important issues.

As a doctrinaire Catholic, Feser’s sectarian allegiance commits him to whatever the Magisterium teaches (especially de fide teaching).

However, I’d draw the opposite lesson. I think it’s important for kids to learn how to make moral distinctions. Acquire moral discrimination. Have a sense of moral discretion.

Now some options are intrinsically right or wrong. Some options are morally black-and-white.

But everything doesn’t come down to choice between intrinsic good or intrinsic evil. In many cases, intentions are morally relevant. In many cases, circumstances morally relevant.

If a child is taught a very simplistic view of morality, where every decision is a stark choice between right and wrong, where morality is reducible to a single criterion, then he is, indeed, prone to disillusionment. He hasn’t received the kind of ethical instruction he needs to make morally sound decisions in the real world. He’s been conditioned to be oblivious to any morally relevant qualifications in evaluating right or wrong actions. In distinguishing between good and evil, on the one hand, and better or worse, on the other hand. Every falsehood is not a lie from the pit of hell. That type of pedagogy is setting him up for moral downfall.

The effect is not to make him more uncompromising and principled. Rather, the effect is to turn him into a pure pragmatist or Machiavellian the moment his childhood indoctrination crumbles on contact with the moral complexities of life in a fallen world.

People should be able to draw basic ethical distinctions between perjury, pranks, polite lies, fiction, hyperbole, satire, sarcasm, euphemisms, military deception, &c.

Now, someone might agree with me in general, but say Santa Claus is a bad example. That’s fine. My point is that we need to raise the debate to a more sophisticated level.