This long essay, “A Theory of Human Dignity,” presents and defends a general theory of human dignity, with special attention paid to spelling out its background metaphysics, formulating and justifying a basic set of dignitarian moral principles, and critically addressing hard cases for the theory.
“A Theory of Human Dignity” is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download, read, and/or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.
This tenth installment contains section IV.4.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Refuting the Dignity-Skeptic and Debunking a Dignity-Debunking Argument
III. The Metaphysics of Human Dignity
III.2 Real Persons and Minded Animals
III.3 A Metaphysical Definition of Real Personhood
IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
IV.0 How Nonideal Can a World Be?
IV.2 How to Solve the Universalizability and Rigorism Problems
IV.3 How to Solve the Problem of Moral Dilemmas
IV.4 Policy of Truth: The Murderer-at-the-Door Revisited
V. Some Hard Cases For Broadly Kantian Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
VI. Enacting Human Dignity and The Mind-Body Politic
VII. Conclusion
IV.4 Policy of Truth: The Murderer-at-the-Door Revisited
[…. Now] I want to apply The No-Foolish-Consistency Interpretation of the broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian hierarchical structuralist system of moral principles to the classic example of a moral dilemma in Kantian ethics: the notorious murderer-at-the-door case, described in Kant’s essay, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy.”
As everyone who has ever taken or taught an Introductory Ethics course knows, in this classic and indeed all-too-familiar example, a murderer appears at the door of your house and demands to know whether your friend is inside (RTL 8: 425). The context makes it evident that he intends to kill your friend. You can either tell the truth to the murderer and let him kill your friend, or else you can prevent harm to your friend by lying to the murderer. The context again makes it evident that you have no other relevant choices—for example, saying nothing but still somehow fooling the murderer, physically overpowering him, or calling the police in time to stop him.
What makes this example not merely notorious but indeed notoriously notorious is that, as everyone who has taken or taught Introductory Ethics also knows, in “On a Supposed Right to Lie” and elsewhere Kant himself takes the hard or purist line, and insists that you must tell the truth to the murderer and let him kill your friend. His rationale is that truth-telling or not-lying is a so-called strict, perfect, or ethical “duty”:
To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is … a sacred command of reason prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by any conveniences…. Every individual … has not only a right but even the strictest duty to truthfulness in statements that he cannot avoid, though he may harm himself or others. (RTL 8: 427-428) (See also LE 27: 59-60, 254, 257, 444-450, 604-605, 699-702)
In other words, for most contemporary philosophers, Kant comes off as a moral fanatic about not lying and truth-telling. For, quite apart from the notorious murderer-at-the-door case and relevantly similar cases, sharply contrary to Kant, almost everyone believes that (i) failing “to-tell-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth,” and (ii) so-called “white lies,” that is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “harmless or trivial lies, especially those told to avoid hurting someone’s feelings,” are both very often morally permissible, depending on the act-context. Even so, it remains true that, proceeding here both casuistically and with maximum interpretive charity, Kant could be gotten off the philosophical hook. For we could note that the complete title of his essay is “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropic Motives,” which can then be taken to say that what he is rejecting is not the moral permissibility of lying as such, but only the moral permissibility of lying from philanthropic motives. This, of course, is perfectly consistent with claiming that, provided an agent of good will had only non-selfish, non-egoistic, non-hedonistic, non-consequentialist, and thus non-philanthropic motives for lying in certain special act-contexts, then there could still be a right to lie from respect for the Categorical Imperative and for the dignity of persons—hence, a right to lie from strictly moral motives—in those special act-contexts. And in effect, that is precisely what The No-Foolish-Consistency Interpretation of the broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian hierarchical structuralist system of moral principles will ultimately yield as a result.
Nevertheless, the historical and textual evidence for Kant’s own personal moral fanaticism and purism about not lying and truth-telling really is just too overwhelming. So we must frankly admit that Kant is clearly and even scandalously mistaken on this important point. He has not only forgotten or overlooked the logical, semantic, and normative implications and resources of his own theory of moral principles for solving the problem in a satisfactory way. He has also fallen headlong into the disastrous flatlander fallacy of forgetting or overlooking the essentially hierarchical structure of his own system of moral principles and mistakenly treating all moral principles as if they occurred at the very same level. Or in other words, on this particular point, I think that Kant badly screwed up, and also that the 1980s new wave band Depeche Mode were much wiser than Kant:
Hide what you have to hide
And tell what you have to tell
You’ll see your problems multiplied
If you continually decide
To faithfully pursue
The policy of truth[i]
Still, as I mentioned before, I also think that by standing straddle-wise on the shoulders of Kantian ethical giants like Kant himself and Ross, we can see a little further than they did. The core of the solution provided by The No-Foolish-Consistency Interpretation, then, is that the murderer-at-the-door case, and all cases relevantly like it, are real local, logically restricted, or context-sensitive moral dilemmas, hence real conflicts between first-order substantive ceteris paribus objective moral principles. But at the same time, they do not constitute global, logically unrestricted, or context-invariant violations of the hierarchical structuralist system of moral principles—hence they are never real conflicts of duties, and thus they are never real violations of the Categorical Imperative.
So let’s assume that The No-Foolish-Consistency Interpretation is correct, and also that The No-Global-Violation Constraint, The Excluded Middle Constraint, and The Lesser Evil Principle all hold. What are we to do about the murderer-at-the-door?
In this act-context, each of your two options is an evil. On the one hand, if you tell the truth to the murderer and let him kill your friend, then you’ve allowed the murderer to harm your friend and have violated the first-order substantive ceteris paribus objective moral principle requiring us to produce positive benefits for others and prevent harm to them. But on the other hand, if you prevent harm to your friend by lying to the murderer, then you’ve violated the first-order substantive ceteris paribus moral principle requiring us not to lie, other things being equal. So you’re between a rock and a hard place.
Nevertheless, clearly and distinctly,the lesser evil in this context is preventing harm to your friend by lying to the murderer. It is wrong to lie, other things being equal: but in this context you are morally obligated to lie. Again, it’s not just morally permissible that you lie in this context: it is morally required that you lie in this context.
Why? As I’ve just said, lying is wrong, other things being equal, and that is why this option remains an evil. But the commonsense, everyday moral phenomena of permissibly failing to-tell-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth and of permissible “white lies” self-evidently show that other things are very often not equal. Correspondingly, by lying in this context there’s no global, logically unrestricted, or context-invariant violation of the Categorical Imperative, since you have chosen to lie solely for the sake of preventing harm to your friend, thereby stopping the murderer from treating her as a mere means or as a mere thing, like the Nazis treated people, for no good reason at all. This clearly, distinctly, and most deeply keeps rational faith with the Categorical Imperative in that act-context, by analytically entailing and adequately expressing The Formula of Humanity as an End-in-Itself. And if I’m correct that this choice clearly, distinctly, and most deeply keeps rational faith with the Categorical Imperative by analytically entailing and adequately expressing The Formula of Humanity as an End-in-Itself, the dignitarian moral principle par excellence, then since all the formulations of the Categorical Imperative are analytically equivalent, it also necessarily follows that it clearly, distinctly, and most deeply keeps rational faith with and thereby adequately expresses The Formula of Universal Law, The Formula of Autonomy, and The Formula of the Realm of Ends too.
Moreover, given The Excluded Middle Constraint, it’s self-evident that in this act-context, to tell the truth to the murderer would be to accede to, or condone, the murderer’s intention to harm and treat the victim as a mere means or as a mere thing, like the Nazis treated people, for no good reason at all, and thus would clearly and deeply violate The Formula of Humanity as an End-in-Itself. So in this act-context, it’s self-evidently deeply morally wrong not to lie to the murderer. Telling the truth to the murderer in this act-context would be a betrayal of rational faith in the Categorical Imperative, and a failure analytically to entail and express the Categorical Imperative.
Again, it is a moral fact that you do lie in this act-context, and that lying is wrong, ceteris paribus and objectively. But lying in this context is not globally wrong: on the contrary, it is locally obligatory, and only ceteris paribus wrong. And then there are also all those commonsense, everyday permissible failures to-tell-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth and permissible “white lies.” All this, in turn suggests an apt and instructive, if somewhat long-winded, bumper-sticker slogan for Kantian moral guidance in a thoroughly nonideal natural and social world:
Think Globally, Lie Locally—But Only When You Have Overriding Good Reasons To Do So, And Only For The Sake Of, Or At Least Consistently With, The Categorical Imperative.
And then you must bravely, stoically, and perhaps even life-affirmingly take your hit, and take complete moral responsibility, with no excuses, for your choice to lie, just like Camus’s absurd existential hero Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain. Letting the murderer kill your friend by telling the truth, clearly and distinctly, is the massively greater evil in that act-context, and therefore you must choose the lesser evil of preventing murder by lying. Lying is chosen only as the contextually-selected means to the end of preventing murder, which in this context keeps rational faith with the Categorical Imperative to the greatest extent. But you must also take deep moral responsibility[ii] for your lie. That’s the Kant-Sartre Insight.
Here’s a further point that needs to be made especially emphatically. In this act-context, if you could have avoided the lie and still prevented mortal harm to your friend, say, by saying nothing but still somehow fooling the murderer, or by physically overpowering him, or by calling the police in time to stop him, then you would have done so. You do not lie “from philanthropy” or for act consequentialist reasons. On the contrary, you lie for the sake of the Categorical Imperative, and also for the sake of the human dignity of your friend, and you also tell that lie with a tragic sense of life. So your choice has moral worth, but you also take personal deep moral responsibility for the lie, with no excuses, and you bravely, stoically, and perhaps also life-affirmingly accept whatever awful hit may follow from that complete moral responsibility, whether it be in the form of agent-regret; or in the form of the moral criticism, blame, or punishment applied by to you by others; or even in the form of the sheer cruelty of others towards you. For example, in the tragically all-too-true, post-World War II, Nazi-at-the-door variant on Kant’s original case, lying to the Nazi at the door means that you seriously risk going to the wall for it, that is, being cruelly murdered too, if your lie is discovered or even seriously suspected.
At the same time, it’s also clearly and distinctly true that anyone else who actually criticized, blamed, or punished you for this particular lie would be a moral purist fanatic: a moral martinette, a prig, and a rule-monger. –As Kant himself personally seems to have been, in certain respects. Moreover, in the Nazi-at-the-door version, the Nazi killers who would send you to the wall for it, and cruelly murder you, would also be near-satanically evil moral monsters. Of course, the world contains all-too-many moral purist fanatics, and all-too-many near-Satanically evil moral monsters. Our world is a thoroughly nonideal natural and social world, a wheel of Ixion, and vale of tears. It is a once-powerful and arrogant father driven to madness by tragic regret and sorrow, an eyeless man, and a cynical-wise fool, all stumbling together over a storm-blasted heath in Shakespeare’s amazing King Lear,or in Kurosawa’s equally amazing Ran. But that isn’t your fault.
NOTES
[i] D. Gahan, M. Gore, and A. Fletcher, aka Depeche Mode, “Policy of Truth,” Violator (1990).
[ii] On the important distinction between deep moral responsibility and shallow moral responsibility, see R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), esp. chs. 4-5, also available online in preview HERE.
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