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Kant believed that morality is a matter of following absolute rules that admit no exceptions, that must be followed come what may. He uses the example that a person should never lie no matter what the circumstances. Kantian ethics, thus, tends to focus ones attention on the less relevant aspect of lying: the deception rather than the betrayal. Kant believes that his moral theory prohibits lying under all possible circumstances, even those where there is a murderer at the door wondering if the innocent victim is in your house.
After all, if everybody lied, even just to murderers at the door enquiring about the whereabouts of ones actions, then the lying could not succeed since no murderer would believe what one says, and hence the action violates the first form of the Categorical Imperative. Kant states you should never lie no matter what the circumstance, even death. His example is that suppose a murder was chasing after a victim. He stops and asks you where the first man has gone.
If you are quite then the man may possibly find his victim although if you lie he might never locate him. Kant would say you should not lie even under these circumstances because the consequences may be great. Suppose you said, the victim was at his house and the murderer did not believe you so he looked elsewhere. Also, suppose the victim had left his house with out you knowing and the murder gets him. In this case, you are at fault by lying. Another example of lying can prove Kant being wrong.
Suppose you are only allowed to have four absences during one semester of school. The teacher gives you a notice halfway through the semester telling you that you are going to be withdrawn because of one access absence. This means you will not be allowed to graduate. You decide to lie to the teacher and tell her you attended a funeral on the day you were absent. The teacher then excuses the absence, and you are allowed to remain in the course and you receive a degree. Your lying certainly out weighed the consequences of not lying.
In this case, Kant's theory would be wrong. Even in his own example, the chances would be fifty-fifty that the murderer would not believe you. Kantian ethics is unable to see the morally significant difference between lying and deception. An innocent victim is fleeing a murderer. The victim comes to cross-roads. She lays a false trail leading to the left, dropping her handkerchief and leaving footprints in the mud.
Then she carefully goes on the right-hand road, ensuring no footprints are visible for a while, hoping that the murderer will see the false trail, come to believe that she went left, and thus permit her to escape. The victim has done nothing wrong according to most peoples moral intuitions. Observe that the act is in a significant way different from lying. For while asserting a sentence commits the speaker to the truth of what the sentence expresses, laying a trail and dropping handkerchief does not commit one to anything. In doing it, the victim does not invite the murderers trust. The murderer when following the false trail does not do so out of trust in the victim but out of trust in the inductive generalization: Where there are footprints, there likely a person has gone.
Following an inductive generalization is very different from trusting a person. The murderer would have no right to feel betrayed by the victim were the murderer to learn what happened. Here we have deception but no lie and no moral wrong. I think that there is a need to look at the moral side of the issue.
If the consequences of you lying means saving someones feelings with a probability of hurting them in the future to a bigger extent then it would be morally incorrect to lie. I think Kant is right, however, exceptions should be made under severe circumstances.
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Research essay sample on Lie No Matter Inductive Generalization Victim
