Immanuel Kant Essay: Is There One Lie?

Anyone who says they’ve never lied is almost definitely a liar.
But that’s not necessarily “bad” or immoral. For the purposes of this essay, a “lie” will be defined as an intentionally false statement, so any hypothetical speaker would have to mislead their audience by choice rather than accidental ignorance. Consider the following situations: a researcher tells half the subjects of an experiment that their placebo drug is real in order to get accurate data, a girl’s brother lies about her location to her abusive boyfriend for her safety, parents telling their kids that the family dog “went to live on a nice farm” to shield them from pain. While these are obviously cases in which lying appears to be the right answer, no one considers dishonesty a …show more content…
In his classic example, a murderer comes to your door demanding to know where he can find his intended victim, who happens to be hiding in your home. While it may seem rational to lie and tell the murderer you don’t know, Kant states that doing so would result in the immoral treatment of a person “as simply a means” and not “as an end in themselves.” By lying to the murderer, one would be using the murderer as a means to fulfill their own desire of saving the life of the victim. Furthermore, Kant believes that if people act in ways that can be made into universal maxims, those actions are ethical. From this, he reasons that lying to the murderer is unethical because that would require lying to be allowable in every situation; that would result in an obviously unacceptable system as it would be difficult to believe any statement’s truthfulness and society would be unable to function. So even though telling the murderer the truth would result in a single death, it would serve to reinforce being honest—and following other universal maxims—as the best