Philosophy 051-01

April 10, 2002

1. Kant on lying.  As you read in the essay, Kant is very tough on lying.  Even if a murderer comes to your door and asks where your friend is, you must say “Yes” or remain silent (though the murderer may take your silence to be a “Yes”).  Why is this?

• First of all, Kant dismisses an account of lying that says that you only need to tell the truth to people who have a right to the truth.
• Lying to murderers violates the second form of the Categorical Imperative.  It uses them as tools rather than rational persons.
• It is essential to remember here that the fact that the murderer is guilty is irrelevant.  He is still a person and we still can’t use him.  Even if we think capital punishment is OK, we probably don’t think we can eat murderers or use their skin for making lampshades.  That is contrary to their human dignity, a human dignity that remains even if they do wrong.  
• Note that if capital punishment is morally acceptable, it need not be thought of as using a person.  Rather, one is treating the person’s actions as things that have consequences, and one is respecting the person’s choice to do things that in justice have a certain extreme consequence.
• Lying to murderers violates the first form of the Categorical Imperative.  First of all, it’s easy to see that the maxim “Lie to get ahead!” violates it.  But so does the more sophisticated maxim “Lie to save lives!”  For if everyone acted on this maxim, then the murderer would not believe you, because he would know that everyone would lie to save a life, and hence would know that you would misinform him, and so there is a contradiction in conception in universalizing this maxim—the point of it, the saving of lives, would not be achieved.
• Actually, one Kant scholar, Christine Korsgaard, thinks that Kant’s first Categorical Imperative would allow lying sometimes.  She says that in practice murderers don’t usually come to your door saying: “Hi, I am a murderer!  Where is your friend so I can go and kill him?”  Rather, the murderer comes to your door and asks: “Have you seen your friend?  Where is he?” while smiling and hoping that you won’t guess his purpose.  Since she is deceitful, you think you can deceive her back.  So, the maxim you are acting on is: “If a murderer tries to deceive you about her intentions, lie to her!”  That seems fair—she deceived you, so you can deceive her back.  Now, if everyone tried to follow this maxim, it would work.  For, the maxim would only apply when you’ve seen through the murderer’s deception.  But because the murderer is trying to deceive you, she probably thinks she’s succeeded.  So she wouldn’t know that you are applying this maxim, because she wouldn’t know that you know that she is a murderer.  However, note how Korsgaard’s solution still leaves the fact that one is violating the second form of the CI by lying to the deceitful murderer.  Korsgaard, unlike Kant, thinks you should always follow the first form of
• Moreover, Korsgaard’s account still makes it wrong to lie to a murderer who advertises the fact that he is a murderer—say, a Gestapo officer who is known by everyone to be a killer of Jews and who asks you: “Do you have any Jews in your basement?”  But is it any more wrong to lie to such a Gestapo officer than to the secret murderer?
• Kant also says that the lying attacks the very foundation of rights, and talks about contracts.  The idea is that human honesty is the foundation of civil society.  I think Kant is thinking of people’s rights as being based on the enforcement of contracts here.  Your right to your property is based on your right to assume that what you have bought fair-and-square is something you can keep—that the seller can’t renege on his contract. 
• One might think of every lie as a breaking of a contract.  When I open my mouth to tell you something, I am making a contract with you, a contract to tell you the truth.  By opening my mouth to tell you something, I am soliciting your trust.  If I didn’t want to solicit your trust, I could say: “I am now going to lie to you.”  Or I could just remain silent.  But by speaking I solicit my listener’s trust.  Now, if I lie, then at the same time I solicit someone’s trust while betraying it.  So I am betraying the person whose trust I sought.  And that is the breaking of a contract, a betrayal of trust.
• But why should we not lie to murderers?  Would society and human rights fall apart if we started lying to murderers?  Don’t we already lie to murderers?  Why should we keep contracts we make with murderers?  Well, in general, we probably should keep contracts made with murderers.  Even murderers have rights in a civil society.  In a civil society, for instance, there is the rule of law, and one of the most basic laws is that one not enter into fraudulent contracts.  This includes contracts with murderers.  If we were in a habit of entering into fraudulent contracts, then we could not in any way privately bargain with a murderer for the life of our friend—I will give you lots of money tomorrow if you don’t kill my friend—because the murderer would have no reason to trust one.  Moreover, the murderer even when brought into a court of law, has various legal rights.  For instance, he has the legal right that we not give false testimony against him in court—even if he is guilty.  We do not want to have a society where evildoers have no rights.  And, again, keeping to contracts is one of the most basic rights.  A society without contract enforcement—like to some extent present-day Russia—is a mess.
• It seems, then, that lying to murderers goes against Kant’s categorical imperatives.  We have two choices, then:  We can reject Kant’s theory as too strict.  Or we can say: “Yes, lying to murderers is wrong.” 
• If one takes the second route, one might still allow that there are some things one can do with the murderer.  For instance, the story is told of a man who was running from soldiers.  The soldiers caught up with him but did not recognize him and asked him if he knew where the man they were looking for was.  The man answered, truthfully: “Yes, he is not far from here.”  That was certainly true.  One worries a little that this is too close to a lie—that there was an intent to deceive—but perhaps not: perhaps the only intent was to communicate the truth, but not the whole truth.  (This is why in court we swear to tell the whole truth, I suppose.)  So perhaps one can speak truthfully, but not tell the whole truth.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, but perhaps then sometimes there is nothing one can do—other than to attack the murderer physically and die in the process of defending the victim.
• Here’s a different thing one can do if one thinks lying to murderers is wrong.  Suppose a Gestapo officer comes to your door and asks: “Are there any Jews in your house?”  And suppose there are Jews in your house.  What can you do?  I think—and I haven’t been able to convince that many people of this!—that if you say “No” you are not lying and you would be lying if you said “Yes.”  The Gestapo officer is an anti-Semite.  He thinks Jews are malicious sub-humans.  He is not really looking for Jews to kill—he is looking for malicious sub-humans to kill, and he wrongly thinks that Jews are such.  So the question he really wants an answer to, the question he is really asking in a sense is: “Are there any evil sub-humans in your house?”  The truthful answer to this question is “No”—presumably, you wouldn’t keep any malicious sub-humans in your house?  If you said “Yes”, you would be lying—you would be telling the Gestapo officer that there are malicious sub-humans in your house.  The Gestapo officer does not mean by the word “Jew” what you mean by that word, and when you’re speaking to him, you need to understand the word as he understands it—that is, as a word for a malicious sub-human.  Unfortunately, again, this doesn’t always work.  What if the Gestapo officer is so evil that he knows, and you know he knows, that Jews are just as human as other people and no more malicious than other people, but still wants to kill them—just because he is evil?  On this account, if he asks: “Are there any Jews in your house?” then you must either say “Yes” or remain silent. 
• There is another problem with Kant’s theory.  Remember my little argument about how lying is a betrayal of trust.  (A murderer would only ask if she trusted you to be honest in your answer!)  By speaking, you enter into a contract to say the truth—whether you swear or not.  This argument did not presuppose the categorical imperatives.  And this argument only shows that lying is wrong.  However, Kant’s theory more generally prohibits not just lying but all forms of deception.  Suppose I am hiding from enemy soldiers and am behind bushes, and I hang up my hat on a stick so that the enemy might shoot at it, thinking me to be underneath, as I sneak away elsewhere.  By doing this, I am intentionally deceiving the soldiers.  I am not, however, lying to them.  They won’t have a right to feel betrayed by me if they find me out.  I have not solicited their trust the way I do by speaking. 
• But deception just as much violates the CIs.  I am manipulating the enemy soldiers, trying to get them to act in a different way than they have chosen to act, using their intellects as my tools—“If I hang up this hat, they will think me to be under it, and will shoot at it, and won’t notice my sneaking away.”  I am using their thinking as a tool for my benefit.  This violates the second form of the CI.  Also, what I am doing can’t be universalized.  If everyone did this, nobody would be fooled! 
• However, even if one thinks that lying is always wrong, one is unlikely to think that deception always is.  There is nothing wrong in hanging up the hat like that, we almost all think.
• Kant’s theory, thus, doesn’t make a distinction between lying and deception, even though one might think this is an important distinction.

2. The good will.  In Section 2, Kant tells us that the only thing truly valuable is our will or reason, because that is the thing that gives value to everything else.  (Not a very plausible thesis.  Surely whales and dolphins would be valuable even if we did not value them.)  In Section 1, Kant approaches this differently.  He wants to look at what is unqualifiedly good.  He will conclude that only the good will is, namely the will that always acts from duty.

· At the beginning of Section 1, Kant argues that only the good will is good without qualification.  Kant thinks of qualities such as intelligence, courage, riches, power and perseverance, and says that these are not always good.  Don’t the evil person’s intelligence, courage, riches, power and perseverance make him even worse?

o Aristotle would seem to disagree about courage and perseverance.  Courage is fearing the things that should be feared.  Thus, Aristotle’s courageous person does fear doing evil!  And Aristotle would say that the virtue of perseverance is the mean between never giving up and always giving up, and the mean is when one perseveres in the things one should persevere in—e.g., not in evil!

o Probably, by “courage”, Kant just means “ability to stand fast in the face of danger”, and by “perseverance” just “ability not to give up”, rather than the Aristotelian virtues.  So there really is no disagreement here.  Aristotle builds in good will into his definition of courage, for instance.

o Recall C.S.L.’s idea that all instincts sometimes go wrong.

· Even happiness can lead to pride and arrogance, and this would be a bad thing.  Moreover, the happiness of a bad person is a bad thing.  Kant says that if someone is very bad, then his “uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator.”  Thus, happiness is not good without qualification.

o Obviously, Kant has a different notion of happiness than Aristotle or Aquinas.  For Aristotle, happiness was the exercise of virtue, and the proud and arrogant person is not virtuous.  For Aquinas, happiness was the vision of God, and Aquinas thought that having the vision of God makes one like God, i.e., a good person.

· Thus, only the good will is good without qualification.  Happiness is good with the qualification that it be deserved.

· “A good will is good and not because of what it effects or accomplishes, nor because of its fitness to attain proposed and; it is good only through its willing, i.e., it is good in itself.” (p. 7)

· Once again, Kant thinks that it does not matter what comes of an act of will, but the act of will is worthwhile on its own.

· Is this true?  Is attempted murder just as big a crime as murder, say?

o Or take this.  If one person intends only to beat up another, but kills him accidentally, he’ll be charged with manslaughter or second degree murder.  But if he doesn’t kill him, he will be charged with much less.  Does this mean that what results matters?

o Discussion.

§ Well, whether he kills him or not depends in part on how hard he hits.

§ Also, having the law set up this way encourages people to be more careful when fighting.  And it encourages people not to finish off their victims if they change their minds about a murder.

§ Is one more guilty if one succeeds?

§ Certainly one owes more.  If I am beating you up, and I intend only to break your arm, but I poke out your eye as well by accident, I ought to compensate you for your loss of vision.  But am I more guilty?

· Second argument that happiness is not the one unqualified good that every reasonable person needs to seek.  Kant first makes the assumption that everything in nature has a purpose.  He then asks why we have reason.  Reason can lead us to unhappiness.  Reason can, after all, easily be deluded.  If nature’s purpose for us was our happiness, then nature would not have given us reason, but simply an instinct that leads us to becoming happy.  Reason sets goals for us.  Thus, it can set a goal for us that does not involve happiness.

· This argument works a little better if instead of “reason” we talk about free will.  If nature’s purpose for us was to be happy, why would we be able to choose unhappiness?

· But if our purpose is to gain a good will, then it makes sense for us to have reason, since for Kant, will is very closely tied to reason.  Good will just is reason’s control over our actions.

o Recall how action worked for Aristotle.  The intellect chose what things we should have desires for, and the appetitive part followed this, and the appetitive part then caused our actions.  For Kant, the intellect directly makes us act when we have a good will.  But we can also act from inclinations such as fears or desires.  So each of these two aspects of us (reason and inclination) can cause action separately.  [[Thus, Kant can say that we are only truly free when reason causes our action.  And he thinks that when reason causes the action, the action accords with the CI.  (Problem: Didn’t he just tell us that reason can be deluded?  Or is he using “reason” in two different senses?)  Thus only the right actions are truly free.]]