Evasion (ethics)

In ethics, evasion is an act that deceives by stating a true statement that is irrelevant or leads to a false conclusion.

Quotes

• What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.
  • Irving Babbitt, "English and the Discipline of Ideas " (1920), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 66.

• The more a man's life is shaped by the collective norms, the greater is his individual immorality.
  • Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types - The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.6 (1971), p. 449

• The most ruinous evasion of all is to be hidden in the crowd in an attempt to escape God's supervision.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart.

• The most pernicious of all evasions is—hidden in the crowd, to want, as it were, to avoid God’s inspection of oneself as a single individual, as Adam once did when his bad conscience fooled him into thinking that he could hide among the trees.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 127-128 (1847).