Great Kant,
As a believer calls to his God, I call to you for help, for comfort, or for counsel
to prepare me for death. Your writings prove that there is a future life. But as for this
life, I have found nothing, nothing at all that could replace the good I have lost, for
I loved someone who, in my eyes, encompassed within himself all that is worthwhile, so
that I lived only for him...Well, I have offended this person, because of a long drawn out lie,
which I have now disclosed to him, and his love vanished. Oh my heart splinters into
a thousand pieces! If I hadn't read so much of your work I would certainly have put an
end to my life...Now put yourself in my place, and either damn me or comfort me. Answer me,
I implore you.
Yours faithfully, Maria von Herbert, August, 1791.
In 1791 the philosopher Immanuel Kant received a letter from a young aristocrat named Maria
von Herbert. The letter was more or less as you've just heard: Maria had told a lie to
a man she loved, and when he found out he was not happy. Maria was a massive fan of
Kant's philosophy, according to which it is never, never acceptable to tell a lie.
Ever.
I've talked about Kant's philosophy in more detail on the show before, so I'll give you
the short version. He tried to show that morality comes from within - it is a system
of rules that we actually place on ourselves - and part of being a rational being, a being
who can weigh reasons and make decisions, is that there are some reasons that will always have
effect on all of us. Just like having mass means that wherever we go, if there is gravity that gravity
will pull on us, part of having a mind is that the moral reasons that come
from within will similarly always be pulling on us. There are some reasons that, because we have
minds, we have to listen to. Kant called them the categorical imperatives. The imperatives - the
orders - that we have to obey categorically - in all situations, no matter what.
Kant provides 3 formulas for the categorical imperative - this supposed deep moral programming
of the mind. They were all supposed to be different ways of spelling out the same thing,
so we're only going to focus on one today - the so-called Humanity formulation. The
idea is that we should always treat other people as if they are ends in themselves,
never merely means.
In modern terms, other people are capable of having their own goals and objectives and we always
need to remember that. It's not okay to treat another human being as if they are merely a tool
for achieving our goals.
The word "merely" is important there. We do sometimes treat people kindof like means,
like if I go to a restaurant I want them to give me some food and they are helping me
achieve that goal. But I still appreciate that the staff have their own goals; I wouldn't
enslave the chef and demand that they cook for me no matter what they wanted to do. They
share the goal of bringing me some food and they are still free to abandon that goal if
they want to or need to.
So our friend Maria von Herbert has told a lie to her dear love, and Kant thought lying
was one of the worst things a human being can do. He did eventually write back to Maria, saying
that a lie may be harmless, "but it is not on that account innocent. It is a serious
violation of a duty to oneself; it subverts the dignity of humanity in our own person,
and attacks the roots of our thinking." In fact Kant thought lying was so bad that
we must always be completely honest no matter the consequences. Doesn't matter if it's a little white
lie, fake news, or Ubisoft lying about "Beyond Good and Evil 2" being at E3 this year. Kant said
no lies of any kind, ever.
Something that people sometimes find difficult to grasp about Kant's moral theory is that
he thinks actions are good or bad completely apart from the consequences they have. For
him, the only important thing is that you obey the categorical imperative and obey it
for the right reasons. His ethical theory isn't about the consequences of your actions
at all.
Kant was so down on lying that he even thought if a murderer came to your house when you
were sheltering a friend and asked you where that friend was so that he could murder them,
it would actually be wrong to lie to the murderer.
The categorical imperative requires that we treat other people as having their own ends,
and never to treat them as merely tools for ours. When we lie to somebody we disguise
what our true ends are and so we actually make it impossible for them to agree or disagree
with those ends.
For Kant, lying is the worst kind of objectification: treating a human as an object that can't have goals and is just there to be used.
He uses the example of somebody lending you money and you have no intention to pay it back.
They have chosen the end of lending you the money temporarily. But in fact your true end is nothing to do with that. Your true end
is to keep the money. They can't choose whether to agree or disagree with that
and so Kant says you've treated them merely as a means to your end, not as a being with ends in themselves.
Not only does lying violate the categorical imperative, but Kant thinks you will be responsible
for everything that happens after the lie. Part of being rational beings
is having the power to shape events to our will. When you lie to somebody
you take that power away from them and make them a tool
in your design for how events will turn out. And Kant sad if you take the reins of destiny away from somebody else, you are
on the hook if it crashes.
If we lie to the murderer and say our friend is next door, it might turn out that unbeknownst
to us he really has gone and hidden next door - and tif he murderer goes there and murders her
we will be responsible for that happening! Whereas if we just tell the truth,
and say that our friend is in the house then the murderer might be caughtbefore he gets there, or he might even change his mind. But
even if he does murder our friend Kant says the moral guilt of that is all on him. Better to just keep our hands clean.
If you do the right thing and, crucially, do it for the right reasons, then we can't have done anything wrong.
It's important to note that Kant's prohibition on lying doesn't just apply to saying outright
falsehoods, but also any kind of strategic speech that disguises our true motives. In
some circumstances that might mean only telling selective truths, or staying silent. You must
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
For some people, having to tell the truth to the murderer at the door means that Kant
must have gone wrong somewhere. A lot of people see this as just naive: we know that humans
can do horrible things: is it really unreasonable to deny somebody information if we can guess with
almost certainty that they're just gonna do evil with it? And lying, or at least not always telling the complete
truth about what we think, is a big part of social interaction for a lot of people.
But it's not that Kant is naive about the human capacity for evil, and he knows that lying plays a social function.
He just says that lying to someone
is putting yourself above them: it's treating them like you're better than they are. And yeah you might turn out to
be correct about what they're gonna do with the information you give them, but for Kant remember it's not about the consequences.
It's not about who's correct about what'll happen; it's just about who's human.
Incidentally, this perspective on lying is not just limited to Kant. The journalist Laura
Kate Dale, who is a person with Asperger's syndrome, has said that her social experience
is affected by her tendency to regard all lies as bad, which she attributes to her Asperger's.
Obviously she can't stand in for everyone with the syndrome but if you have Asperger's or are on the spectrum in some way
and you similarly hate lies even if neurotypical people like me seem to have some kind of scale when they're allowed to be used,
you are not alone in that perspective: one of the greatest philosophers, certainly one of the most celebrated philosophers of all time, would say you are completely correct in that.
Still, somebody else might say, and many philosophers have, that Kant is too idealistic here. Maybe there's
some way to get around having to tell the truth to the murderer at the door, but I leave
that to you. What you think about Kant's recommendation that we always tell the truth no matter the consequences?
A huge thanks to ContraPoints for providing the voice of Maria von Herbert this week.
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