ABSTRACT
Divine justice is not justice administered by the Divine Being—this is impossible—but justice passed by humans. Fichte's cynical answer is a mockery of ethics. He equated moral behavior with truthfulness at the very instance when the well-being of the woman would imply that one must be obliged to withhold the truth, not just for twenty-four hours as in the former example, but indefinitely. Heymans wrote within a different context: "The duty to tell the truth may thus occasionally collide with other duties, and this duty has, sometimes, to yield and to be overruled by the other duties." The duty to save a life (by concealing the truth) overrules the duty to tell the truth. To maintain that the postmaster would have ignored the feelings and therefore the well-being of the community if he would have divulged the contents of the telegram on Friday night, might not be besides the point in the eyes of the liberal.
