Kant and the perfect duty to others not to lie

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 653-685

  Mahon, James Edwin ^a  

^a WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43249151870     PISSN: 09608788     EISSN: 14693526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09608780600956407     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. A: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht) (1798), translated by Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974)
2. C: Correspondence (Kant's Briefwechsel), translated and edited by Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
3. CPR: Critique of practical reason (Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft) (1788), translated by Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 133-271
4. E: The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (Über Pädagogik) (1803) (edited by Friedrich Theodor Rink), translated by Annette Churton (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1960)
5. G: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten) (1785), translated by Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, 37-108
6. LE: Lectures on ethics (Vorlesungen über Ethik) (1924) translated by Peter Heath and edited by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
7. MM: The metaphysics of morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten) (1797), translated by Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, 353-603
8. M: On the miscarriage of all philosophical trials in theodicy (Über das Misslingen aller philosophisehen Versuche in der Theodizee) (1791), translated by George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, edited and translated by Allen W, Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 24-37
9. O: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen) (1764), translated and edited by John T. Goldthwaite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)
10. R: Religion within the boundaries of mere reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft) (1793), translated by George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, 39-215
11. RL: On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy (Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen) (1797), translated by Mary J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, 611-15
12. In the Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of The Metaphysics of Morals, in 1797 (among other places) Kant points out that 'It is noteworthy that the Bible dates the first crime, through which evil entered the world, not from fratricide (Cain's) but from the first lie (for even nature rises up against fratricide), and calls the author of all evil a liar from the beginning and the father of lies.' (MM, 6 (431): 554)
13. It is interesting to note that in all of these invectives Kant does not distinguish between lies, or different circumstances in which lies are told. All lies are uniformly and equally condemned. Arnulf Zweig has pointed out that 'Kant spoke of his father as honest, hard working, and deeply intolerant of lies - an intolerance that his son evidently internalized' ('A Sketch of Kant's Life', in Immanuel Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Arnulf Zweig and edited by Thomas E. Hill, Jr., and Arnulf Zweig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 8)
14. Unlike the two duties not to lie, which are perfect negative duties, the duty to be candid is an imperfect positive duty. For more on the imperfect positive duty to others to be candid to others in Kant's ethics, see my 'Kant on Lies, Candour and Reticence', Kantian Review 7 (2003) 101-33
15. Nelson Potter has commented on this: In the Tugendlehre [Doctrine of Right] lying is classified as a violation of 'The Human Being's Duty to Himself Merely as a Moral Being'. In fact, it is the greatest such violation ... This classification has had a certain amount of attention from scholars, since more commonly, and perhaps more intuitively, lying is considered a violation of duty to the person lied to. ('Duties to Oneself in Kant's Ethics', in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays, edited by Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 386)
16. Leslie Mulholland, 'Kant: On willing maxims to become laws of nature', Dialogue 18 (1978) 95
17. Kant docs assume that, among other things, it is a contingent truth about people that they are not naturally disposed to give handouts to others. As Shelly Kagan has pointed out: 'Regardless of which interpretation we accept, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that the argument makes use of various contingent, empirical facts. The argument assumes, for example, that people have memories' ('Kantianism for Consequentialists', in Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 131)
18. Mulholland argues that Kant's argument is that making promises would be impossible, and hence, that making a lying promise to obtain money would be impossible, and hence, that obtaining money by means of making a lying promise would be impossible: given that no one believed what was promised him, it follows that it would be impossible to make promises. Promises are made only if they are accepted. But promises are accepted only if they are believed. Hence, if no one believed what was promised him, promises could not be made. (Mulholland, 1978: 98) My argument is the weaker one that Kant's argument is that obtaining money, by means of making a lying promise, would be impossible, since lying promises would not be believed. I do not argue that Kant argues that making a lying promise to obtain money would be impossible, much less that he argues that making promises would be impossible. Here I agree with Allen Wood that it is far from self-evident that if M2 [the maxim] were a universal law of nature then there could be no promises at all. It is much easier to convince oneself that U2 [the universalization of the maxim] as a universal law of nature would simply render it impossible to achieve one's ends by making false promises. (Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 89)
19. W. D. Ross, Kant's Ethical Theory: A Commentary on the Grundlegang zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) 30. A similar interpretation has been offered by Thomas W. Pogge in 'The Categorical Imperative', Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten: Ein kooperativer Kommentar, edited by Otfried Höffe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermans 1989) 172-93
20. H. B. Acton, Kant's Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1970) 22. Many other commentators have made the same claim. See also, for example, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 31 n.14
21. Onora O'Neill, 'Kant's Virtues', in How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, edited by Roger Crisp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
22. In my 'Kant on Lies, Candour and Reticence' (see n.3) I distinguished between duties of narrow obligation and duties of wide obligation, rather than perfect duties and imperfect duties. I now believe that although these two distinctions are equivalent in the Groundwork, they are not equivalent in the Doctrine of Virtue. Everything that I said about narrow and wide duties in the earlier article should be read as applying to perfect and imperfect duties
23. Barbara Herman, 'Moral Deliberation and the Derivation of Duties', in The Practice of Mond Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) 152. See also Sally Sedgwick, 'On Lying and the Role of Content in Kant's Ethics', Kant-Studien 82 (1991) 42-62. I take it that this is also the argument of Thomas E. Hill, Jr., when he says There are many cases where lies could have saved innocent people from being sent to a miserable death in a concentration camp. Aware of this and other extraordinary circumstances, many people could honestly say that their maxim is to tell lies, but only in cases of that sort. (Immanuel Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 163)
24. Jens Timmermann, 'The Dutiful Lie: Kantian Approaches to Moral Dilemmas'. Kant und die Berliner Aufklarung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. edited by Volker von Gerhardt et al. (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 2001) 350. See also Norman Gillespie, 'Exceptions to the Categorical Imperative', reprinted in Kant und das Recht der Lüge, edited by Georg Geismann and Hariolf Oberer (Würzburg: Könighausen and Neumann, 1986) 85-94
25. Christine M. Korsgaard, 'The right to lie: Kant on dealing with evil', reprinted in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 137
26. This expression is used by Christine Korsgaard in 'Kant's Formula of Universal Law', reprinted in Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 100. The example that follows is my own, however
27. By 'intcrrogational torture" is meant torture for the purpose of obtaining information from the victim. Not all torture is interrogational torture. Terroristic torture, for example, has the purpose of intimidating people other than the victim. See Henry Shue, 'Torture', in Torture: A Collection, edited by Sanford Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 53f
28. Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998) 116
29. The implication of Korsgaard's rhetorical question (see n.33 above) is that if one consents to be lied to by another person, without knowing which lies one is to be told, then one will believe that everything that the other person says is a lie. Jonathan Adler has argued, against Korsgaard, that even if one consents to be lied to by another person, without knowing which lies one is to be told, nevertheless one may not believe that everything that the other person says is a lie: 'Contrary to Korsgaard, the answer to her rhetorically intended question, when applied realistically, is sometimes 'yes'.' ('Lying, Deceiving, or Falsely Implicating', Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 441)
30. For the best recent attempt to demonstrate the existence of duties to oneself, see Lara Denis. Moral Self-Regard: Duties to Oneself in Kant's Moral Theory (NY: Garland Press, 2001)