Why Lying is Grey

When people think of philosophy and morality, one of the main philosophers that they think of Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant born in 1724 and living until 1804 was someone who believed that everything could be thought of rationally. In fact, one of the questions he posed was what someone would do if they opened their door to find another person injured and asking for help. Would they let them in and help them? Most people will say yes, so he asks another question.

Why would the person help the injured? If you answer because you feel bad for them, then Kant would believe that you didn’t make a moral decision. In fact, the only way to make moral decisions, Kant believed, was to throw all emotion out of the window and only think rationally.

Kant then took morality a step further and gave a principle that some may follow to this day. Lying is never moral, no matter the circumstance. Think of the question above, but instead of someone injured outside the door it is a friend who is running from someone trying to kill them.

They ask for help and then hide in the house. The next person to show up is the would-be murderer asking for the friend. Kant believed that even though the friend was probably going to get murdered, anyone who is asked this question should answer honestly about where their friend is. Which is strange, is it not. Why would anyone tell a murderer where their friend was hiding when the outcome was clear; the friend is going to die? Lying is not something that can only be black or white though.

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There is no way to state that no matter what people cannot lie, and it still is not quite right to say that everyone should lie one hundred percent of the time.

Instead, lying, for the individual and society as a whole, is a morally grey area that should be thought of as a situation based morally good and bad choice. In the book Ethics for A-Level, there is a chapter called ‘Kantian Ethics’ which is where the ethics and beliefs of Immanuel Kant can be found in a simple and easy to understand way. In this chapter, the authors, Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher, talk about Kant’s beliefs on Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives. Kant believes that there are three formulations of ‘Categorical Imperatives’, and in the first formulations, he talks about acting a certain way only if you can make that act become a universal law (Dimmock and Fisher 35). With this in mind, anyone can make the assumption that Kant does not believe in lying because there is no way anyone can make a universal law out of lying.

An example that Dimmock and Fisher make is only lying if it can benefit the person who is lying. If we go by what Kant believes in morally correct, acting in a way that anyone could make a universal law out of, then this means that everyone can lie and be morally correct if they are going to benefit from the situation. Obviously, this would not work in Kant’s mind because if everyone was lying when it would benefit them then no one would know the truth anymore and lying to benefit themselves would not work anymore. Yet, with these examples and assumptions, people also need to think about what lying is. In an article written by Michael Cholbi, he states ‘A lie attempts to cause another person to act on a belief that the liar believes to be false so as to further the liar’s aims’. A few paragraphs later, Cholbi then expands on what he said to include, ‘

What makes lying a distinctive (and distinctively egregious) form of deception is that it not only aims to deceive but does so by exploiting others’ willingness to believe what we have explicitly encouraged them to believe’. If we are to go by what Cholbi says lying is, then are people not already acting like this in society? Think about parents in children in society. There is a universal law of lying put in place already that goes with Kant’s belief of ‘Categorical Imperatives’. This law is one that many people understand and follow without thinking: children in elementary school should not know that Santa, the Easter bunny, the Sandman, or any of these other ‘mythical’ beings do not exist. Does that make the people in our society morally wrong though?

If we go with Kant’s thinking then yes we are. He stated it that lying is not acceptable in any situation, so if we were wanting to be morally correct in his eyes then we should stop lying to children and tell them that Santa Claus is not real. Yet, when people in society do just that, they are usually judged and told that they were morally wrong by telling the truth. This is where lying falls into a grey area. Sometimes lying can be morally good. If it is helping keep wonder and life alive for people who have yet to see the harshness of the world, then lying can be good. Sometimes though, if we are deceiving and lying to children about Santa Claus it can be morally wrong. If the only reason someone is telling their child that Santa Claus is real is just to keep them behaving the way that they think they should, then it could start falling into the morally wrong category like Kant believes. By then you are lying just to benefit yourself and not the people around you, and that can be wrong.

Once again, there are many sides and levels to lying that people have to look at before deciding if lying is inherently good or bad. Inherently moral or not. ‘It is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone directly wants to do so’. This is a quote that comes from the 2017 translated work of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals. This basically means that Kant believes that one must always keep themselves safe and healthy, no matter what. While he was mostly talking about not harming oneself intentionally, one could argue that Kant was saying that no matter what everyone should self-preserve. If we follow this idea of keeping ourselves safe, then could lying potentially be correct in Kant’s eyes once again. Think of another story this time. Instead of you lying to the murderer about where your friend is, you are lying about what you saw. Say you were captured by a gang of criminals who believed you saw a crime that they committed, and you did. They have threatened to kill you because of what you saw.

Here is where Kant’s belief in self-preservation should be kicking in, but in order to preserve your life, you are going to have to lie. Not just lie but lie repeatedly. Constantly beg for your life by telling the gang leader you have no idea what is going on, that you haven’t seen anything and that you are not a threat. In reality, you are. You know their faces, know the number 911, and can be an eyewitness to two crimes. Are you really going to say that though? Are you going, to tell the truth, and hope they see the error of their ways and let them go? No. If you want to keep living, then the best way out of there is to lie. Not saying that you will get out, but that could be the only option that you have. By living in this scenario the person inside of it though would be following and contradicting Kant’s beliefs. In one belief he says to protect yourself and yet in another, he says to never lie. If this comes true, if someone is ever in a situation like this, then the best thing they possibly could do is lie.

Think about society as a whole though and where lying could keep yourself alive. Not just in that scenario, but as a society, we have a system where people lie about who they are to keep themselves alive. This system is one the government put in place and it is called the witness protection program. The witness protection program is based on lying to save oneself. People get a new name, new history, new house, new everything basically. All of these are founded on lies, but it is to save lives. So according to Kant, who was around before the witness protection program actually became a real program, lying would be a respectable, moral choice in his eyes. On the other side of this though, there are people in society who lie about their entire life to save themselves because of deeps that are not morally good. Criminals who are on the run from the law forge documents to live somewhere else and not get caught by the police or die at the hands of the law.

This is where lying would be morally wrong. A person has done something bad, and instead of owning up to it they are lying and hiding away from the people who can catch them. It is in situations like these where lying can be a morally gray area. On one hand, we having lying to protect people who might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time or those who are owning up to their mistakes to catch other people who may or may not be worse than them. In this sense, lying could be morally acceptable because it follows Kant’s belief of self-preservation, one of the duties that Kant stresses, and can be for a good reason. On the other hand, we have people who have made bad, morally wrong choices, and choose to lie instead of owning up to them. This is where Kant’s belief of never lying could come into play, but even then it’s a grey area.

No one can say if lying should never happen or if it should always happen. We can tell people not to lie all we want, but there are times in life where people are going to lie. According to Kant, you will never be moral by lying, but is that the truth? Can people lie and still be moral? Can it be all right to lie? These are questions people are still asking themselves to this day. There is no way for society to be one hundred percent honest, and there is no way for society to go in the completely opposite direction. Lying is something that society has deemed acceptable and wrong at the same time. We tell our children lies, we hide our true identity to people, and sometimes we leave out the whole truth. All of this is lying and it happens in society enough that people have almost stopped having an opinion on it.

This is an issue that will never go away. Lying has been ingrained into society too much for people to stop, but that doesn’t mean that we should listen to Kant and how he believes it is morally wrong to lie. If a murderer did show up looking for someone’s best friend, who can really say they would tell the murderer where their friend was? And who is to tell you that what you did was wrong by not letting your friend get murdered? Lying is a grey area in society that we haven’t figured out yet. Sometimes it’s acceptable and sometimes it’s wrong. Really, deciding if lying is moral or not should be based on a situation and not a person’s belief in universal law. Sometimes there are things in this world that you cannot make a universal law over.