A believed higher end makes supporting falsehoods feel truthful to honest people

Evidence

A thing becomes true because it serves a higher end; men who would be horrified to assert that the end justifies the means, readily come to believe a means to be just in itself, if it leads to an end of sufficient moment, as they suppose, to the world. … Data were chosen because they were useful to an exalted end; writers did not think in terms of truth for its own sake, although they would have been sincerely horrified and understandably annoyed at any suggestion that their ‘truths’ were untrue; the whole good of true religion, of humanity, made a ‘fact’ seem probable, and probability is usually a ground of belief. The truth of the end made the data which seemed to demonstrate that end seem true. They seemed to prove the Christian faith, but what really happened in the mind of the polemist was that the Christian faith proved whatever supported it to be true. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1391

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias literature from social psychology, plus bad-faith epistemic analyses of ideology. — connects to: False news reached more people than truth on Twitter, driven by human sharing. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 346; People paid less to lie rationalize the lie as genuine belief — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 86
• SEED: Angle: how sincere belief in a noble end silently licenses fabrication in contemporary journalism, advocacy, and even science communication.