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 is our usual trick of 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.
Close Reading
Just as a reminder… these are the rules for close reading. We have five pages to read.
In your groups:
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Identify what you think are the most important sections of the reading.
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Summarise in your own words what the author is saying in these sections.
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Explain why these sections are important to the author’s argument.
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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!).
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?
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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?
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What are the best arguments against Kant’s claim that lying is always wrong? How might you deal with challenges to these arguments?
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 found the link here: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/jeremy-bentham-on-the-principle-of-utility/