Welcome back
Welcome back. This time, we’re going to be looking at our final piece from Immanuel Kant, and thinking about the question of lying. For Kant, there is a moral duty to never lie. If we remember, Kant was seeking moral principles that were always and everywhere true. This solves problems that go back at least to Plato’s Euthyphro. If we can get hold of a principle like—and properly apply it—then think about how much better it would make life.
And yet… surely there are times when we can lie…
What we’ll do today some close-reading. We’ll do this in groups. Then, once we have got the basic argument clear in our minds, we’re going to explore some of the limitations of it.
What is a Categorical Imperative?
Before we start, I want to say more about this important term, “categorical imperative”? What does it mean? An imperative is a demand: it says you must do X. For example, “You must clean the dishes!”, or “Thou shalt not kill!”, or “You must attend the meeting.” Many imperatives are hypothetical. They say:
(IF X IS THE CASE) → YOU HAVE A DUTY TO DO Y
For Kant, a categorical imperative, on the other hand, is an imperative that holds for everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances
(WHATEVER IS THE CASE) → YOU HAVE A DUTY TO DO Y
Last week, many of you said, “But our duties and obligations depend on circumstances.” And it is true, many do. But Kant wants to argue that there are some duties that are independent of circumstances. They are unconditional. How do we work these out? Fortunately, for Kant, we are not just influenced by our circumstances, but we can reason ethically, and we can act in accord with this reason. This is what makes us properly moral beings.
But what about those circumstantial duties / obligations, those hypothetical imperatives? There’s a deeper level here as well, because if all ethics depends on circumstances, if all our duties are of the order “If X is the case, you have a duty to do Y,” then it is difficult to know what “duty” means across all cases. How can we be sure we are even talking about duty, rather than expediency? Hypothetical imperatives may be a useful shorthand, in other words, but they possess morally binding force (and can be morally evaluated) only to the extent that you can trace their authority back to the categorical imperative.
Close Reading
These are the rules for close reading. We have five pages to read.
In your groups:
- Identify what you think are the most important sections of the reading.
- Summarise in your own words what the author is saying in these sections.
- Explain why these sections are important to the author’s argument.
- Give a practical example that can help us understand the argument.
To do this, you have to have the text open in your groups, so you can read it carefully, and talk about what it is actually saying (not what you guess it might be saying!).
Move through the text sentence by sentence, line by line. If you get stuck, move on (sometimes later passages make sense of earlier ones). You may need to re-read.
Discussion
We’ll feed back to the main group.
Part Two
Let’s think about some difficult cases on the ground. The case that Kant refers to—if there is somebody who knocks on the door and asks for somebody that they are seeking to kill—is something that will have resonances for those of you in contemporary Myanmar/Burma.
So let’s talk about this. What is Kant saying about lying? And why should we take him seriously?
- What are the best arguments in favour of Kant’s claim that lying is always wrong? How might you deal with challenges to these arguments?
- What are the best arguments against Kant’s claim that lying is always wrong? How might you deal with challenges to these arguments?
We may return to Kant’s first text and explore it together, to finish off today’s work.
Homework
Next time, we’re going to be moving on to explore another approach to ethics. And that is utilitarianism. Maybe we do, after all, need to think about outcomes. This, of course, will come with problems of its own. But let’s explore the next text, Jeremy Bentham’s The Principle of Utility. You can find the link here: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/jeremy-bentham-on-the-principle-of-utility/
Leave some comments on Canvas before the next class.