IS IT ALWAYS WRONG TO TELL A LIE?

Immanuel Kant vs John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant on the Morality of Telling a Lie

Immanuel Kant

 

In Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Immanuel Kant argues that not only is it morally wrong to tell a lie but there are no circumstances in which a lie is justifiable, including situations in which telling a lie would be to your own benefit or to the benefit of others. The duty to tell the truth is absolute, allowing no exceptions. 

Kant’s argument for this involves an application of his supreme moral principle, the Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” (Grounding, 402). All moral actions imply the application of a maxim or rule, whether or not you are aware of the maxim. It is the maxim we should test by the Categorical Imperative whenever we make a moral decision about right and wrong. 

 To illustrate what the principle means and how it should be used in moral decision-making Kant gives several examples, the most famous of which is the example of “a man in need [who] finds himself forced to borrow money.” Suppose you are an impoverished philosophy student, always short of money, and your next car payment is due. You do not have enough money to make the payment. You know someone who will lend you money, but she wants you to “firmly promise to repay it within a fixed time.” However, having just lost your job, you know that you won’t be able to repay her by the designated time. What should you do? Should you tell her the truth about not being able to repay her when payment is due, or should you hide this fact and make the promise anyway? Now suppose you take the latter option and decide to make the promise to repay the loan. Let’s call this a “lying promise” because it is a promise based on the lie that you will keep the promise. Kant says that the maxim you are acting on can be expressed as follows: “When I believe myself to be in need of money, I will borrow money and promise to pay it back, although I know that I can never do so” (422). This is a subjective rule because it applies only to you. Kant says that the moral question before you is not whether this maxim will promote your own self-interest or future welfare, but whether the maxim is morally right. The way to answer a question about whether an act is right is to transform your subjective maxim into a universal law: “How would things stand if my maxim were to become a universal law?” In this case, it would be a law that says, “Anyone believing himself to be in difficulty could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it.” It is obvious, Kant writes, that if this law were to be adopted by everyone, then “promising itself and the end to be attained thereby” would make promising itself “quite impossible.” Kant means that promising would be logically impossible, not merely difficult or destructive. This is because no one would believe what had been promised him, but “would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretense.” (422). The end to be attained by a promise is to put oneself under an obligation to do a certain act (e.g. repay a loan). But if it is generally understood that the person making the promise does not believe he is bound to keep it, then this defeats the purpose of making a promise and having it credited by the person to whom the promise is made. The obligation to do what is promised is contradicted by the intention of the promiser not to keep his promise, if this suits his purposes. 

 This is how Kant later puts it: "I can indeed will the lie but cannot at all will a universal law to lie. For by such a law there would really be no promises at all, since in vain would my willing future actions be professed to other people who would not believe what I professed or if they over hastily did believe, then they would pay me back in like coin. Therefore, my maxim would necessarily destroy itself just as soon as it was made a universal law" (423). 

Seventy-five years after the publication of Grounding, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill heaped heavy praise on Kant while at the same time writing that Kant "has not proved that …there would be any logical impossibility… in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur" (Utilitarianism, 4). 

But Kant does not say that a universal law permitting lying promises would have bad consequences. He says that the universal adoption of such a law is logically impossible. Something that is a logical impossibility can have neither good nor bad consequences. For example, if I tell you that we should adopt a rule allowing married bachelors to join the priesthood, you will not respond by saying that this would have bad consequences for the Catholic ministry. Instead, you would say that such a rule could not exist because the very idea of a married bachelor is a contradiction in terms. And that is what Kant says about the universal adoption of a maxim allowing us to tell lies when we think that a lie would be beneficial. Such a maxim could not logically exist. 

In a later passage Mill takes a different tack. He argues that there are occasions on which it is not only morally right but obligatory to tell a lie. At the conclusion of chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, Mill believes he has proved that justice is a name for a group of moral rules that “stand higher in the scale of social utility” than other rules, and therefore put a stronger obligation on us. These are the rules that are based on an individual’s right. And yet there are some cases in which the demands of utility will overrule a general rule of justice. Thus, "to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal or take by force the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap and compel to officiate the only qualified medical practitioner" (62). Let us assume that our utility calculations require that we steal food or medicine to save someone’s life, or that we must kidnap at gunpoint the only doctor in town because he has refused to leave his house at 3 a.m. to give necessary medical help to our dying child. Should we say that utility trumps justice in these cases, or should we say that justice aligns with utility, that is, it is “not unjust” (wrong) to steal the food and medicine and not unjust to kidnap the doctor? Mill chooses the latter alternative, explaining that language allows this manner of describing what has happened and avoid saying that there can be “laudable injustice” (62). And this is what Mill would say about telling a lie. It would not be wrong to tell a lie if this would save someone’s life. 

Kant was aware of criticisms of his work many years before Mill’s publication of Utilitarianism. In 1797 the French philosopher Benjamin Constant wrote that “this philosopher [Kant] goes so far as to assert that it would be a crime to tell a lie to a murderer who asked whether our friend who is being pursued by the murderer had taken refuge in our house” (France, VI: No. 1, 123). Constant writes that it is not a crime to tell a lie to the murderer because the duty to tell the truth is not unconditional.  "The concept of duty is inseparable from the concept of right. A duty is what one man correspond to the right of another. Where there are no rights, there are no duties. To tell the truth is a duty only with regard to one who has a right to the truth. But no one has a right to a truth that harms others" (id.). The murderer has no right to be told the truth about whether our friend has taken refuge in our house. Therefore, Constant says, we have no duty to tell the murderer the truth. Indeed, if we told him the truth and as a consequence, the murderer pushed us aside, ran into the house and stabbed our friend to death, we would not only feel guilty about telling him the truth, but we would also think of ourselves as accomplices in our friend’s death. I doubt that we would feel proud about telling the truth in circumstances such as this. 

So, my dear students, there you have it. The German philosopher is at a standoff with an English and French philosopher about the moral justification of telling a lie. Here is my question: Is it always wrong to tell a lie (Kant) or are there circumstances in which telling a lie is not only morally right (Mill) but also a moral obligation (Constant and Mill)?  

I pass the philosophical baton to you.

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Constant, Benjamin. [1797] "On Political Reaction" in France, VI: No. 1, 123.  See H.J. Paton, "An Alleged Right to Lie" in Kant-Studien 45 (1953-54).

Kant, Immanuel. [1785] Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, Third Edition" in Ellington, James W. (translator). Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis. 1981.

Mill, John Stuart. [1861]. Utilitarianism, Second Edition. ed. George Sher.  Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis.  2001.

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If you need extra help understanding either Kant or Mill, see my books on both of these philosophers, available at low cost at the Amazon online bookstore:

Houlgate, Laurence. Understanding Immanuel Kant: The Smart Student's Guide to Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals.

Houlgate, Laurence. Understanding John Stuart Mill: The Smart Student's Guide to Utilitarianism and On Liberty.