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
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
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
Cinematrix
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
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
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
The Black Sheep Chronicles
What constitutes bad manners?
The male mystique
Debate Fan
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...