About lying to murderers (Immanuel Kant)
If a murderer comes to your door, and asks where your friend is, are you morally obliged to tell the truth?
Well, Kant apparently, notoriously, thinks YES (though he was by no means the first).
| Truthfulness in statements that one cannot avoid is a human being's duty to everyone, however great the disadvantage to him or to another that may result from it... [I]f I falsify... I... do wrong in the most essential part of duty in general by such falsification... that is, I bring it about, as far as I can, that statements (declarations) in general are not believed, and so too that all rights which are based on contracts come to nothing and lose their force; and this is a wrong inflicted upon humanity generally... For [a lie] always harms another, even if not another individual, nevertheless humanity generally, inasmuch as it makes the source of right unusable. ---- "On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy", Berliner Blätter, September 1797 |
Kant goes on to add that (on his model of civil laws) you're responsible for any negative consequences of lying, whether you lied with good intentions or not -- but if you told the truth, then nothing could legally be held against you.
***
Now, an awful lot of ink has been spilled on this short piece of writing, but here's what I think are three obvious responses.
1. Reject Kant -- and reject the whole Kantian ethical system, because it leads to counter-intuitive results. And presumably this is the most popular choice among non-Kantians. But if you take this option, don't you need to defend the authority of intuitions and why anyone should follow any of them? And is this straightforward...?
2. Accept Kant, despite the counter-intuitiveness. And you could argue for this option "from the ground up" -- defending the use of reason as an ethical epistemological tool.
Incidentally... Mary J Gregor (Practical philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1996) refers to Kant's Doctrine of right, which was published in January of the same year. Kant had included in each person's innate freedom the freedom to say whatever he likes "whether what he says is true and sincere or untrue and insincere; for it is entirely up to [other people] whether they want to believe him or not." -- So how to reconcile this with his September article?
Well, Gregor reads Kant as saying that lying is always wrong in the context of contractual right, but is permissible if you haven't entered into a contract by promising to tell the truth.
She also seems to suggest that lying could be acceptable in the context of virtue as opposed to right (as if Kant employed a distinction something like that between rule and act utilitarianism).
3. Modify Kant -- and this might be the most popular option among Kantians -- rescuing him, reinterpreting him, supplementing him...
One version might go: Kant's basic principle is to only act in a way that everyone can follow. Kant thinks that lying to murderers is paradoxical, because if everyone lied, then no one would be believed, and it would be impossible to lie. However, Kant doesn't add enough details. If he added all of the contextual information, including the gullibility of the murderer, then there would be no paradox. You'd wind up with a more finely-differentiated maxim for truth-telling, or with numerous complementary maxims, instead of the crude blanket of "Never lie under any circumstances".
***
One final thought...
Even if you're non-Kantian, there are arguably grounds for telling the truth to the murderer.
Other duty-based, rule-based ethical systems can lead to the same result. So if you have a rule like "Obey God", then, Abraham, you obey God under all circumstances, even if it means sacrificing Isaac.
And on a consequential line, which might take some value like "human happiness" as a good to be maximized... Perhaps a perfectly truthful society is the best one, and, though consequences are unpredictable, perhaps we create the greatest happiness in the long term by behaving now as if the lie-free society were already here.
-- Friday 3 August 2007: Kinda related to including contextual information and modifying Kant...
Kant basically thinks you should act in such a way that everyone can follow you. But isn't there always indeterminacy in how to characterize an act -- which is the correct description? How is it determined what maxim, exactly, you're willing?
-- Wednesday 5 December 2007: Jay Bernstein interprets Hegel as making the following "That's just empty formalism" argument against Kant. "Kant, you can't use the categorical imperative as the basis for morality. Sure, if you steal then the system of private property might break down -- but what's wrong with a world without private property? What makes something right or wrong is 'hypothetical', not 'categorical' -- it's contingent on what norms and values, what form of life, you've already committed to, willed, communally."
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Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
And I don't know whether Kant believed in good and evil, but he did believe in objective. That is, "Every other system is wrong, and my system is the correct one, in the same way that if you think 2x2=5, you're still doing maths, but you're incorrect. There is a standard (pure reason) by which to judge whether something is correct or incorrect."
Comment by Damo
Here is a thought.
Say you are sitting at home with some friends and murderer knocks on the door looking. George Washington answers the door. What would his answer be?
"I cannot tell a lie, your victim is sitting in the lazy chair out back."
I think taking a simplistic approach to lying is unrealistic.
The one answer that was never given was, "I refuse to tell you."
The other thing that is absent is a sense of moral weighting. Lying may be wrong but allowing a person to be murdered is a far greater wrong. In a choice between a trivial indiscretion and assisting a murder the is no competition. By misleading the murderer you saved a human life and therefore you are excused for lying.
Comment by Justin
Comment by Uula Limanski
Thinking The World
Comment on the last 2 comments given before...
The way you're reasoning falls perfectly into utilitarism, which is: "the ethical action is the one that maximizes the good".
It seems quite a good way of seeing things, but there's a problem there too....utilitarism lets you think that the "ends justify the means". Since the guy is going to kill someone in the end, it's good to lie.
Hehe, and are you sure you agree that the ends justify the means?
Old ethical systems mate...either you follow Kant or Utilitarism, you'll be inevitably doing something "evil"...Anyway, nowadays we are quite beyond this...
cheers. Uula
Comment by Damo
I'm not going to tell you.
Then you can deal with that consequence.
Here we have not lied and have not aided the murderer either.
The murderer than says that if you don't say where the person is you will be killed.
Your answer answer must be, "I refuse to tell you."
You argue for twenty minutes and finally you are murdered.
All hail the hero.
Comment by Competitionqueen.com
From the example given it seem the murderer is a murderer because it the death of your friend is preplanned. THerefore, he or she is not after you, and perhaps we could assume has not interest in murdering us for refusing to tell us where the friend is. Or not!
Comment by KylieW
Celebrity Obsession
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
A variety of interesting responses! Thanks for reading, guys. This won't do any justice, but two thoughts in reply...
Firstly, I think Ulla's comment is apt. Damo and Justin do seem to at least verge on consequentialism... for instance when Damo speaks of the lesser of two evils... and there are problems with consequentialism, though these problems needn't defeat it.
In previous conversations, though, I think Damo has denied being a consequentialist (for instance, I think he's a hard-liner as regards various actions -- he wouldn't torture anyone under any circumstances, if I understand him properly, even if he somehow had certain knowledge that he'd prevent a disaster by doing so)...
I'd tentatively suggest that it's not that Damo is a consequentialist as such, but that he just doesn't regard lying as a moral wrong in and of itself. It's rather a trivial breach of decorum, not a sin.
Secondly...
I think Competitionqueen.com gives the same thought as one of Justin's and Damo's. Which is: why are we restricted to saying "He's here" or "He's not here"? Aren't there other possible answers? Couldn't you try to confuse 'em, like Pinocchio. KylieW in similar vein asks: But how do we know he's a murderer anyway?
The reply might be: these things are simply stipulated. It's simply stipulated that, for whatever reason, we only have two options -- to say the truth or to lie; and it's simply stipulated that we know the murderer is a murderer.
The follow-up question is: But isn't that completely unrealistic? Why bother talking about it at all?
Well, this might be a justifiable accusation, and there might not be a good reply. But I reckon an attempt to answer (whether or not successful) could take either of these forms:
The first is: No, it's not unrealistic! This reply might try to argue that there may have been near-enough legal situations in history where silence or refusal to speak were taken to be a "yes" or a "no", and where one couldn't in practical terms escape answering.
And the second is: Even if IS unrealistic, it's not impossible -- it violates no laws of logic. So, as a hypothetical, it would still be worth contemplating if your answer to the hypothetical had significance for more everyday decisions.
This reply would think of ethical thought experiments as something like physics thought experiments: what if acceleration due to gravity were not 9.8metres per second squared, but 980000... or what if Schroedinger put a cat in a box and... or what if Goedel had enough rocket fuel to travel across space time -- is the whole universe curved such that you'd wind up back where you started? Etc... Such physics questions would still have answers, and those answers might be significant -- even if the actual scenarios wouldn't obtain in reality...
Comment by wiredbadger
though, i suspect kant would premise that we assume the result.which brought him out of hiding inre to hume.
also, i think that it wouldnt coincide with aristotle's divulgence of relationships.if it were a working relationship then maybe, but this is depicted as a freind relationship.not even a business one.
see, in order for the information to be passed.the murderer would have to be recognized as a freind.else something is expected or some mutual goal.there is none here, save telling the murderer the information.which since it is done so simply for the joy of aquaintance, i would suspect that such an incedent wouldnt exist...even if it were a form of deciet, consider that it would be along the business or common goal...that the information would be released...say a cop or some authority.at which point we are back to kant and the poor turkey.who, is fed every day at 1pm and one day gets its head hacked off.the turkey was never wrong.
Comment by D. Armenta
The Florida Keys and Everglades
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When murderer knocks and asks, you return the question with another question, i.e. "Isn't that him over there?"
When murderer turns to look, slam and lock door.
Phone police.
That's the pragmatist's theory.
No lies told, no harm done.
When something is that black and white, I'm going to be the one looking for the grey area...
Comment by BigCountry
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
Could one simply tell the murderer to piss off? Well, in the thought experiment, it's somehow assumed that one can't. In real life, whether you can or can't would depend on any number of factors. Is this WWII, and the murderer is a Nazi officer with a group of SS agents behind him? If you tell him to piss off, he'll break the door down and shoot you, then search your house anyway. Or is the murderer a vengeful 5-year-old, who won't be able to succeed in murdering your friend even if you escort her to where your friend is standing? Simply stipulating that you can't tell the murderer to piss off sidesteps all the ifs, depends ons, and maybes.
I think the situation is comparable to empirical experiments. A high school maths teacher might give you a problem about whether you should bet on horse 1 or horse 2, given their starting speed, accelerations, and the length of the track. In real life you might say, "I'll go up to the horses before the race, cripple one, and inject steroids in the other." Or you might say: "I don't believe in gambling. I'm not betting." But for the purposes of the question, it's simply assumed that these options aren't options.
So, in real life, everything depends on the details, whereas thought experiments are supposed to be simplified.
But do they oversimplify, to the point where they're no longer of use at all? Well, I'm not sure... Another question for another time.
Comment by BigCountry
I guess alot of it depends on the courage you have of your convictions. I LIKE TO THINK that I have the courage to tell the SS bastards to piss off then see how many of them I could take to the grave with me, or send to the grave before I escaped. But again, I DON'T KNOW how I would react. Peter denied the Christ 3 times, so who knows? But I still think the right thing would be to tell them to go to hell. But then again, I've been accused of being an arrogant, unyielding, asshole on more than 1 occaision.
Comment by jonas
Or, I could be wrong.
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
[quote]Then in a Dexteresque way, wouldn't the murder of your friend be in service to the greater good?[quote]
Traditionally, Kantianism is opposed to moralities like utilitarianism -- it's considered a classic case of deontological, duty-based morality -- moralities where the right thing to do is the right thing to do, and consequences don't matter. Christian ethics is arguably also deontological. Eg if God tells you to kill your son, then, Abraham, the right thing to do is to kill your son, regardless of what human or heavenly good or bad it brings.
It should be mentioned that some people (like JS Mill) do try to argue that Kant is in fact consequentialist, not deontological. Kant's practical workings-out of his morality do seem, at least on the face of them, to involve consequentialist considerations.
Comment by jonas
Also agree: take Kant toward literal application (as opposed to somewhat fanciful "what-ifs"), we have a most difficult time not thinking consequentially. Life turns out to be fairly messy away form the armchair.
Funny how much Kant's view of morality can so easily be compared to religious examples....
Appreciate the feedback.
Comment by Kyle Foley
If you asked Kant: "tell me where your daughter is I want to kill her," there is a very strong possibility that he would tell you where she is. If anyone reads anything about Kant's moral philosophy, the first thing they should read is his essay answering a critic, On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns, which will at once expose him as a bankrupt philosopher, incapable of thinking his way out of a paper bag. The very heart of Kant's fallacy is that he loses sight of what the supreme moral principle of the Universe is, namely, the Hippocratic Oath, that one should do no harm. I have yet to meet anyone who doubts we should not harm, however, what constitutes harm is by no means a certain thing. I have in another essay tried to prove a more precise supreme moral principle, but for now I will only summarize the general idea. In order for a system to resist implosion there must be a mechanism whereby it defends itself against threats to its existence. That system that the Designer of intelligent life on Earth has created is called morality whose principle can be summed succinctly:
act in such a way that you maximize the durability of the system of life as a whole.
In an accidental Universe, each accident competes against one another to survive, and there is no objective means to determine what accident should survive and which accident should perish. The predator and the prey, for example, cannot coexist, and neither the predator nor the prey can point to an eternal maxim that justifies his existence. Kant does not understand this highest principle. He seems to think that there are a number of highest principles, one of them being the importance of telling the truth. He does not comprehend that there can only be one principle. It is Kant's reverence for truth that forces him to commit this outrageous blunder. He asks himself: [Is anyone] "not actually bound to be untruthful in a certain statement which he is unjustly compelled to make in order to prevent a threatening misdeed against himself or someone else," or to put it more clearly, can anyone lie to prevent a harm to himself or someone else. Anyone with any common sense would say, if it is to save a life, absolutely one can lie. Later on he says: "Truthfulness in statements that cannot be avoided is the formal duty of man to everyone," and later he repeats himself: "truthfulness ... is ... an unconditional duty which holds in all circumstances." Again he makes the mistake that that is the highest duty of man, when to my mind: "act in such a way that you maximize the durability of the system of life as a whole," is a much more prudent principle. Kant then tries to justify his position by pointing to the importance of contracts: "All rights based on contracts become void and lose their force, and this is a wrong done to mankind in general. Hence a lie defined merely as an intentionally untruthful declaration to another man does not require the additional condition that it must do harm to another." The importance of contract enforcement is high on the list of requirements for a functioning society, but it is not the highest on the list, death prevention is certainly higher on the list. Kant then states quite clearly that obeying a murderous person absolves the person of guilt, thus the Nazis could certainly have used Kant at the Nuremburg trials: "A lie always harms another; if not some other human being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general. ... If by telling a lie you have in fact hindered someone who was even now planning a murder, then you are legally responsible for all the consequences that might result therefrom. But if you have adhered strictly to the truth, then public justice cannot lay a hand on you." Kant then makes another outrageous blunder. He says if you aid a murderer by telling him you harbor his intended victim then you are not guilty, but if you lie about it and attempt to prevent the death and then the murderer due to your lie accidentally comes across his victim then it is you who are culpable. How anyone can actually believe this is beyond me: "If you told a lie and said that the intended victim was not in the house, and he has actually (though unbeknownst to you) gone out, with the result that by so doing he has been met by the murderer and thus the deed has been perpetrated, then in this case you may be justly accused as having caused his death. For if you had told the truth as best you knew it, then the murderer might perhaps have been caught by neighbors who came running while he was searching the house for his intended victim, and thus the deed might have been prevented." He then seems to think that if we make an attempt to prevent harm and our attempts result in greater harm, then we are responsible for that, heaven for bid, the person who actually did the harm should be responsible, but again Kant can't understand that (pun intended). "Therefore, whoever tells a lie, regardless of how good his intentions may be, must answer for the consequences resulting therefrom even before a civil tribunal and must pay the penalty for them, regardless of how unforeseen those consequences may be." Again, he commits this mistake because he believes truthfulness is the be-all end-all of moral principles: "This is because truthfulness is a duty that must be regarded as the basis of all duties founded on contract, and the laws of such duties would be rendered uncertain and useless if even the slightest exception to them were admitted ... For every man has not only a right but even the strictest duty to be truthful in statements that are unavoidable, whether this truthfulness does harm [but not wrong] to himself or to others, Therefore he does not himself by this [truthfulness] actually harm the one who suffers because of it; rather, this harm is caused by accident." There is nothing accidental about telling a murderer where his victim is and then, lo and behold, contrary to all expectations the murderer finds this victim and kills them. Who among us would be so naive as to tell a judge: "your honor, when I told Ted Bundy where his intended victim was, it wasn't my fault that he found them, it happened just by accident, I was just doing my duty."
Much of Kant's other moral philosophy falls apart basically for the same reason that his essay, the Right to Lie, does: he never comes up with a supreme principle. He says for instance that we should act such that our action could be a plausible universal maxim, but he never comes up with a technique for what to do when two laudatory maxims contradict each other. For instance, Kant would scarcely deny that one should act in such a way that they prevent death. And we already know how he feels about telling the truth. But what do you do when you cannot both tell the truth and prevent death, as in the example of above? It is this inability to find a single universal principle which can never be violated and which one defers two when two seemingly moral actions contradict each other that renders Kant's moral philosophy useless.
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
Okay, couple of quick thoughts in reply:
1. Doesn't Kant have a highest principle? The categorical imperative? People do debate, though, over how to interpret this. There seem to be four versions in his Prolegomena.
2. Is the absence of a highest principle enough to doom a system?
3. Are difficult questions enough to doom a system? Don't all ethical systems, religions included, have difficult questions?
4. Can you meaningfully critique Kant simply by asserting a principle he doesn't hold (like do no harm), then condemning him for not holding it? Could you respond to an argument for God's existence by simply asserting, "the problem with this argument is that God doesn't exist"?
5. Does the fact that a system result in unusual conclusions doom it? You sometimes appealed to common sense in your essay, but is this a convincing appeal? Didn't it use to be common sense that the world was flat?
Comment by Anonymous
This leaves just actions, which include barring the door or fighting the murderer if he should attack. Regardless of the outcome, the decision would be moral, no?
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
Thanks for mentioning this!
Comment by Anonymous
If I am correct, one would have to challenge the validity of the thought experiment, no? And the thought experiment includes the case where one cannot bar the murderer entry or does not have the means to fight the intruder. Case in point, a weaponless and incapacitated person who lives in a tent, whose only option would be to lie (or truthfully deceive the murderer aka Kant).
To change tack, there are many people who reject the morality that is presented categorically in many religious institutions, let's say the Ten Commandments in Christianity. But is it the case that we reject that another person may levy a principle categorically against another, or do we reject that there does exist in some 'higher' (intellectual) sense some categorical imperative?
I think I have strayed bit, but it is late and the day was long. Thanks all for your consideration.
Comment by Anonymous
That's a whopper of a false alternative. "Be a Kantian or be a moral intuitionist." You really see no problem with that?
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
For instance, from memory, the post itself was about presenting a number of options if one considers counter-intuitive results to be a problem with Kant, so I wouldn't claim there are just two options here, if this is what you're saying I'm saying.
Or are you saying something else? For instance, suggesting that the Kantian system is based in intuitions?
And how, in any case, do you use the word intuition, or understand me to be using it? For example, from memory Rawls at the start of Theory of Justice opposes his system to intuitionism, treating intuitionism as a sort of anti-system, where what one has instead is a grab bag of different impulses. That's not exactly the way I tend to use the word intuition.
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
"Nonymous is suggesting that there are only two options: you're a Kantian or you're an intuitionist, intuitionism being the anti-systemic grab-bag view that one should just act according to one's feelings. In presenting these two options, and treating them as mutually exclusive, Nonymous is ignoring all the other systems out there, or is classifying them all as a species of intuitionism, or at the very least is ignoring any actual or possible combination of Kantian and intuitionism."
If this is a fair interpretation of your comment, I have to say that I didn't intend it. I actually regard what I was saying as rather trite.
Maybe this is a rephrase of the basic idea: "Some people find that the consequences of Kant's systems violates some deeply held commitment. Because of this, they reject the system holus bolus." -- So I'm not suggesting that they must reject the system holus bolus, but merely observing that they do; and also suggesting that this is a logically legitimate option. I basically use the word "intuition" to mean "deeply held commitment" #not exactly, but basically#.
The same thing, incidentally, can be said of any other ethical system. For example, some people think utilitarianism leads to one or more consequences that violates one or more deeply held commitments, and because of this they bow out of the utilitarian project entirely, and want to reconceptualise the foundations.
Does that help at all? I'm skeptical that you're actually disagreeing with me, but curious to find if you do.