To lie about a supposed right out of philanthropy

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A short essay by Immanuel Kant from 1797, in which he took the view that there is no right to a lie (“white lie”) even when there is danger to life and limb, is a short essay by Immanuel Kant about a supposed right to lie out of human love .

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Kant turned against Benjamin Constant with the essay , who in a section of his work On the political counter-effects, which appeared as "Sixth Piece, No. I" in the anthology of France in 179 , took the view: "The moral principle: it is a duty to tell the truth, if it were taken unconditionally and separately, it would make any society an impossibility. We have proof of this in the very immediate conclusions that a German philosopher has drawn from this principle, which goes so far as to assert: that the lie against a murderer who asked us whether our friend he was persecuting did not come to our house fled would be a crime. ”() Constant had argued as follows, ibid. p. 124:“ It is a duty to tell the truth. The concept of duty is inseparable from the concept of right. A duty is what corresponds to the rights of another in one being. Where there are no rights, there are no obligations. So telling the truth is a duty; but only against those who have a right to the truth. But nobody has the right to a truth that harms others. "

Kant, on the other hand, who referred Constant's article to himself, defended his thesis: “The lie, then, merely defined as a deliberately untrue declaration against another person, does not need to be added that it must harm another; as the jurists demand for their definition ( mendacium est falsiloquium in praeiudicium alterius .) Because it always harms another, if not another person, but humanity in general, by rendering the legal source useless. "

First, Kant referred to the difference between truth as an epistemological concept and truthfulness (honesty) as a moral virtue: “Because truthfulness is a duty that must be seen as the basis of all contract-based duties, its law, if only that admits the slightest exception, is made vacillating and useless ", Kant came to the conclusion:" It is therefore a sacred, absolutely imperative, rational command that cannot be restricted by any convention; to be truthful (honest) in all explanations. "

The basis for this view is the ethics of duty of Kant, developed in the foundation of the metaphysics of morals , which leads him to the categorical imperative . A lie always affects the value of truthfulness. Kant thus turned against ethical conceptions that pursue the purposeful rationality of a utility- oriented utilitarianism as the overriding principle ( consequentialism ). The duty to be truthful, on the other hand, is an unconditional duty because reliance on promises is one of the principles that hold human society together.

In the legal area, a lie is only punishable if the false speech is made with fraudulent intent ( falsiloquium dolosum ). In other respects the lie is a violation of a virtue. Duties of virtue are initially only subjective. Kant leaves out the question of one's personal attitude to lies and thus the question of weighing up interests and treats the question as a legal problem, so the note in the footnote. For him there can be no right to lie. The prohibition of lies, the duty to be truthful, still applies in general, because otherwise the basis of every community and with it the possibility of the categorical imperative is formally suspended. When it is allowed to lie would then be determined according to subjective standards. Those who follow this principle exclude themselves a priori from the community. Therefore no law can force people to lie.

reception

All criticism directed against Kant's moral philosophy in general applies to the essay, as does Hegel's thesis of an empty formula . Similar to the statement of Adorno and Horkheimer in the dialectic of the Enlightenment : "Pure reason became unreasonable, an error-free and meaningless procedure."

But there is also a broad front of criticism against the absolute ban on lying. Schopenhauer criticized early on : “The deductions, at Kant's instigation, of the illegality of lies from human language skills, given in some compendia, are so flat, childish and absurd that one could be tempted to do so just to scorn them Throwing the devil in the arms and saying with Talleyrand : 'Man has received the language in order to be able to hide his thoughts'. "In general, Kant is accused of rigorism because he neglected the possibility of resolving a conflict of interest in favor of the principle of the categorical imperative . A well-known criticism is that of Ernst Tugendhat , who proposes to resolve a value conflict based on the opposition of two different maxims by developing a new maxim in an intermediate step, the two values ​​(the protection of life as well as the commandment of Truthfulness). But Kant did not go exactly this way. Tugendhat states: “Of course, Kant himself decided the above-mentioned example exactly the other way around, with a very strange argument. The basic reason why conflicting duties hardly played a role for Kant was the assumption that negative duties [not to do something] always have priority over positive duties [to do something]. In this way, except within conflicting positive duties, no collision can arise, since the negative duty is always already fulfilled if the person does nothing. No collisions can therefore occur between negative duties, and every collision between a negative and a positive duty is already decided in favor of the negative for Kant. "

Gerhard Schönrich points out in favor of Kant that in his essay he by no means follows a pure ethic of convictions , but also discusses the question of the consequences of the action. Critics who ignore this do not do Kant justice. An important argument of Kant is that the actual consequences of an action cannot be foreseen with certainty. In particular, it is questionable who determines when a breach of the law is to be justified. In the interests of a functioning society that is dependent on adherence to moral rules, this cannot be arbitrary. This becomes important, for example, with the question of a right to resist (see also Radbruch's formula ). The case law in the Daschner trial in connection with the kidnapping of Jakob von Metzler itself judged the threat of torture as illegitimate despite all the sympathy .

literature

  • Georg Geismann , Hariolf Oberer (ed.): Kant and the right of lies . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1986, ISBN 3-88479-252-0
  • Arno Baruzzi: philosophy of lies . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1996, ISBN 3-534-13054-5
  • Martin Annen: The problem of truthfulness in the philosophy of the German Enlightenment. A contribution to ethics and natural law in the 18th century . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, ISBN 3-8260-1226-7 , in particular pp. 97-124
  • Simone Dietz : Immanuel Kant's reasons for the ban on lying . In: Rochus Leonhardt, Martin Rösel (Hrsg.): Are we allowed to lie? Neukirchener, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2002, ISBN 3-7887-1929-X , pp. 91-115

Web links

  • Text of the academy edition
  • Text at zeno.org
  • Benjamin Constant, "From the political counter-effects (Des réactions politiques)", in: France in 1797 , ed. by Karl Friedrich Cramer , Altona 1797, limited preview in the Google book search.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Benjamin Constant: From the political counter-effects (continued) . In: Karl Friedrich Cramer (Ed.): France in the year 1797. From the letters of German men in Paris. with receipts . 1st edition. 2, sixth piece. Altona 1797, p. 123 .
  2. ↑ Constant referred to Johann David Michaelis : Moral , ed. by Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, Göttingen 1792.
  3. ↑ so also the footnotes in the text
  4. ↑ Translation: A lie is a false statement, to the detriment [prejudice / error] of another.
  5. ^ Otfried Höffe: Kant . Beck, Munich 7th edition 2007, 199f
  6. ↑ Hariolf Oberer: Kant. Analyzes, Problems, Criticism . Volume 3, Königshausen & Neumann, 1997, 69
  7. ^ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy III . Theory work edition. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer u. Karl Markus Michel. Vol. 20. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1971, 367-369
  8. ↑ Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklerung , S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1969, reprinted as paperback 1988, 82
  9. ↑ Arthur Schopenhauer: The two basic problems of ethics. On the basis of morality , § 17, Zurich 1977, 265
  10. ↑ Michael Hauskeller: I think, but am I? Beck, Munich 2003, 123-125; see also: Karl-Otto Apel : Discourse and Responsibility , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1988, 328ff; Jürgen Habermas : Explanations on Discourse Ethics , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1991, 23; Albrecht Wellmer : Ethics and Dialogue. Elements of moral judgment in Kant and in discourse ethics , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1986, 26
  11. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures on Ethics . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 3rd edition 1995, 148f
  12. ↑ Gerhard Schönrich: On occasion discourse , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1994, 9-16