I recently discovered this fancy thing in ethics, and I'm so fascinated by it, that I feel like sharing. It is called Prudential Evidentialism.
This is a process wherein facts are obscured, removed, lied about or twisted, because revealing such facts to the public would lead to an outcome that is undesirable. The person engaging in the cover-up, removal, obfuscation or lie, believes in their own mind, that they are acting ethically -- because the outcome resulting in the long term is better.
At first you might see this definition and be like "This sounds like people who lie for their own benefit. Everybody does that, so what?" But this is very different from lying for one's own benefit or to escape punishment or blame for one's self. A person engaging in Prudential Evidentialism is under the impression that the concealment of the fact is crucial for the greater good of the entire society.
In media journalism -
A mass shooting takes place on a campus. The shooting is ended when someone else with a gun shoots back. Several more "Left-leaning" media outlets conveniently leave out the fact that the person who stopped the on-going shooting was himself armed. The journalist or media reporter has calculated this fact should be removed from the story, maybe because it does not fit a 'bigger narrative' that the outlet has promulgated in the past (likely gun control related issues).
In education -
Black inner city youth score lower on standardized tests than their caucasian counterparts, even after having adjusted for economic and social factors. Should this fact be bandied about in public or shouted from rooftops? Perhaps not. Perhaps it should be quietly swept under the rug. Spreading it around in the public dialog might feed into racism. We conclude that hiding this fact is the 'ethical' thing to do.
In Culture -
The HIV virus does not spread by transmission at a n equal rate among different populations of people. Worse, HIV infection spreads through gay male communities at a rate that is 700 times faster than in heterosexual communities. The probability that HIV infection is transmitted by vaginal intercourse between a man and woman is surprisingly low (3.7% or some such). You may have noticed that the TV media never told you this little inconvenient fact. Of course they didn't. It doesn't fit with the "narrative". The journalists who made this omission believed they were acting ethically.
Science vs Religious Belief
Consider the facts to be found out in the wild regarding biological lifeforms on earth. One would be that the boundary between species out in the wild is 'fuzzy'. Another would be hybridization (which can often yield a third variant for use in agriculture). These facts run contradictory to Biblical Creationist narrative about the origins of life. Some people conclude that such facts may be dangerous for adolescent minds -- since they may cause them to question creationism, in turn question their Christian religion. So it is feared that they may lose their moral center. Certain parents on the fundamentalist spectrum may choose to shelter their children from science to deter their teenage children from going apostate. These parents believe in their heart that they are doing something ethical.
In recent years, this subject was quite political. President George W Bush has called that "both sides" be taught on classrooms in public schools. More relevant to today, sitting vice president Mike Pence has called for teaching "both sides" in classrooms. These men are adopting the ethical stance that not just their children, but all children should be equally "sheltered" from science in public schools. One way is to create a lingering doubt in evolution by natural selection. However and regardless of how unfounded those doubts are in reality. Ethically the desired outcome is not good science, but pious christians. The ethical argument goes something like "We need american children to grow up good christians otherwise they would be indoctrinated into secularism , and the moral fabric of society would come unwound and {insert other scary predictions here}".
Criticism
I've given some examples above where grown adults engage in abusing facts for the sake of social outcomes they desire. One criticism of Prudential Evidentialism is a contrary ethics -- which sets bounds on what counts as justified belief. The motto that evidence, and only evidence alone should justify one's beliefs. This is practically the entire motto of Richard Dawkins in his public life.
"Evidence and evidence only" is often repeated by judges in court rooms to juries. That is, as a juror you are not to consider the punishment that a person might receive in prison if found guilty. (that woudl be applying prudential evidentialism) Your job as a juror is to merely decide on the facts of the case, hand down a verdict to that end, and little more.