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.

• Each human being, as a single individual, must account for himself to God; and while no third person dares to introduce into this settling of accounts between God and the single individual, the speaker dares to and ought to remind us with his question that this is not forgotten, remind us that 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).