Immanuel Kant Lying

Are there circumstances where it is acceptable to tell a lie? Lying is often viewed as an act without virtue, and armed with vice. This is due to a lie’s potential use in deceitful, immoral, and harmful manners. This has lead numerous people, such as followers of virtue ethics or Immanuel Kant, to conclude that under any circumstances, lying is morally wrong (Mazur) However, there are also cases where lying is neither deceitful, immoral, nor harmful, and as a result, lies can cause more benefit than detriment, they can align with our culture’s view of morality, and they can help make us more human. As such, it becomes apparent that there are indeed circumstances where it is acceptable to tell a lie. The most common argument brought up …show more content…
One of the most prominent philosophers to state that lying restricts our humanity is Immanuel Kant (Mazur). Kant found that all humans had the dignity to make decisions of their own free will, which was a human’s defining feature (Mazur). Essentially, by telling a lie, humans were denied the ability to make a decision under the true circumstances and were stripped of their humanity; thus, making lying immoral under any circumstances (Mazur). While it is true that under most circumstances, lying strips the ability to make a decision knowing the truth, this is not the case for every scenario. In situations where a lie is not heard by anyone who is not aware of the lie, or a situation where the lie is not registered as the truth, the lie does not affect the person’s ability to choose rationally because the individual did not base their choice on the false information. This means so long as anyone who hears the lie is aware of the nature of the statement, or so long as anyone who hears the lie cannot register the meaning or simply ignores the statement, it is acceptable to lie. Additionally, lying can make people more free in certain situations because even if a person is deprived of the ability to make a choice while knowing the truth, the result of the lie could potentially result in the person having more human rights given to them. For example, if a sick child was going to die because of a curable disease; however, he would not ingest the cure because they believed the cure was dangerous, telling the child that the substance is not the cure would result in the child’s life being saved. From then, the child would then be granted all the human rights that would have been deprived, and he would also have the ability to choose whether to live instead of having no free will as to whether or not he would live from the sickness. As a