Kant follow-up

Dear Virtuous Students,

I've been thinking about our discussion last week, particularly the part about Kant.  I asked Dr. Langguth who is much more familiar with Kant's work about our application of Kant to research ethics situations, which sparked a great conversation between he & I.  He wrote me this clarification about the lying to the Nazi situation (below).  We can discuss further how that applies to, for example, psychological experiments.

Cheers!
Dr. Cate

from Dr. Langguth (my emphasis)
By the way, I was looking through some of Allen Wood's (the Kant scholar coming to UC) papers and found his reply to the notorious murderer at the door case. It gets a bit technical, but the basic idea is that Kant makes a distinction between uttering a false statement when you are making a "declaration" (lying under oath, to a police officer, etc.) and a false statement in other, more ordinary, contexts ("I am the King of England" said by me) that we can exploit to get Kant out of trouble. I [Dr. Langguth] did not know this, but apparently the murderer at the door case was originally (sometime in the 1770s) part of a correspondence with Benjamin Constant in which Kant was trying to defend the first claim about declarations against the counterclaim that it is only when you are communicating with people who have a "right to truth" that you are under any obligation to be truthful. The murderer at the door is someone who, due to his malevolent intentions, has no right to the truth. Furthermore, lying to him is not only harmless but prevents harm. Kant replies that some harm is always done to humanity when a "lie" (in the sense of a false declaration) is told, even if the harm is not apparent. All of which may not get Kant off the hook since he did reply to Constant that the murderer at the door case doesn't change anything. A lie is a lie.

But Wood argues that the murderer case as it is usually discussed does not involve a "lie" at all in Kant's official sense, but a mere false statement. He also notes  that Kant discusses a case in which you are the victim of a robber who demands to know where your money is. Kant says it's OK to lie in this case because the robber seeks to "misuse the truth" in order to get your money (I hate when that happens). If it is permitted to lie to protect your money, then it seems reasonable that protecting someone's life would be even more OK. Of course, not everyone buys Wood's gloss on all of this. Here is a paragraph from Wood's article with some relevant quotes from Kant:


" In the usual interpretation of Kant’s position, no thought at all is given to the fact that he would see no violation of right whatever in a mere falsification uttered to the would-be murderer about where his intended victim is. Although the category of “declaration” includes more than assertions made under oath or in a contract, it is no part of Kant’s theory to hold that just anyone who knocks on your door might automatically require from you a solemn declaration regarding the present whereabouts of some person. Perhaps a policeman, as in Kant’s original example, is in such a position, which is why the servant might be criminally liable as an accessory to his master’s crime. Of course if the murderer at the door could not require a declaration from you, then telling him an intentional untruth would not count as a lie (mendacium). In quotation F, Kant explicitly allows that no lie, and no violation of right, occurs if we commit a falsification in order to prevent another from making wrongful use of the truth:


11“I can also commit a falsiloquium when my intent is to hide my intentions from the other, and he can also presume that I shall do so, since his own purpose is to make a wrongful use of the truth. If an enemy, for example, takes me by the throat and demands to know where my money is kept, I can hide the information here, since he means to misuse the truth. That is still no mendacium.” (VE 27:447).