![]() ![]() ![]() But intuitively we know it's not ok to do that, even though lives will be saved. ![]() Does the fact that there's a murderer after your friend make it ok to take someone else's house? Hell, if I sold my neighbour's house and gave the proceeds to Oxfam that money could probably save hundreds of lives. Even something of immense value, like saving a life, doesn't weigh up to what is lost when you interfere with the free operation of someone's will.īut how does this leave us with our intuitive answer to this thought experiment? The Kantian philosopher Barbara Herman tries to explain it in a more intuitive way by imagining that there is something very valuable at stake here - say, someone's house. ![]() For Kant, the free will is like a secular version of this. There's a bible verse that asks (I'm probably misquoting) what it would profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul. If something has value then it can be exchanged for something of the same or greater value, but the dignity of the will means it is above all this. But for Kant, the will is priceless - it has "dignity", which means it is above all value. Because when you tell a lie in a situation like this you're interfering with the free will of another person - their will is trying to achieve a certain result, and you're feeding them false information in the hopes that it'll stymie this process. In fact, for a Kantian even trying to weigh these two things up is a mistake, as the wrong represented by telling a lie isn't the sort of thing that can be traded or weighed up against another. But for a Kantian, all this tells you is that your intuition heavily misjudges the wrong represented by telling a lie. The reason this example is such a bugbear for Kantians is that when faced with this situation you intuitively weigh up the wrong represented by telling a lie with the harm you prevent by stopping your friend being murdered, and the result is so heavily in favour of telling the lie that it seems ridiculous to even consider the alternative. Lecturers love to spring this one on new philosophers because it sounds so outlandish, but Kant's position here actually fits in pretty well with the rest of his ideas. ![]()
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