The lies in movies explained by Kant’s truths
THE ABLE OF THE HAHHA – IMMANUEL KANT
The scenario that Immanuel Kant raises in ‘On an alleged right to lie for altruistic reasons’ is more or less like this:
"Are you at home. Your friend arrives at the door of your house and tells you that someone who wants to kill him is chasing him. You tell your friend to hide in a closet. Shortly after, a man who carries an ax knocks on your door and demands to know where your friend is, so he can kill him. You lie to the murderer, telling the killer who wields the ax that your friend is not at home. The murderer leaves, in search of your friend elsewhere."
In the film, the Sandlin family in The Purge offers a man a hiding place when a group of murderers pursues him. But unlike Kant’s murderer, The murderers of The Purge do not leave. They enter the house, killing the father and allowing Sandlin’s homicidal neighbors to enter the house. In this way, it is shown that bad things will happen to you and your family when you do not give a man to someone who wants to kill him. The scenario of the ax murderer, as described in ‘on an alleged right to lie for altruistic reasons’ by Immanuel Kant, instructs us about moral hazards and in the real world of lying.
According to Kant, lying is morally inadmissible. And not only small white lies, all lies are included. Kant’s ethics is deontological, that is, for Kant, moral principles are absolute and universal. We act, not because we want our actions to produce a particular result, but because we are morally obliged to act, regardless of what we want to happen. And because Kant’s ethics is based on moral duty, there are no exceptions to moral rules and we do not consider the consequences.
The important thing is to know that Immanuel Kant’s ethics includes a set of moral principles called categorical imperative. The categorical imperative consists of a handful of formulations. But we will only need to focus on the first formulation. The formulation of the Universal Law.
The first formulation establishes:
“It acts only according to that maxim for which you can, at the same time, that it becomes a universal law."
That means that, before doing any act, we should ask ourselves: would it do so to make everyone else do this?
When we apply Kant’s first formulation to lie, it becomes clear that the act of lying is not morally permissible according to the categorical imperative. The problem with lying or being misleading is that lying ultimately undermines the purpose of our moral principle.
On the stage of the ax murderer, Kant tells us that if lying is universal law, the ax murderer will know that you are lying when you tell him that your friend is not hidden in your home, and because he knows that you are lying, he will not be trusted inYou and because it doesn’t trust you, you can decide to wait for your friend and kill him when your friend feels that it is sure to leave.
Lying, for Kant, is corrosive for the foundations of society.
- “If everyone lies, we have no reason to believe that someone is telling the truth."
- “And when you think someone does not tell the truth, you can’t trust him."
- “And trusting others is one of the foundations of civilized society."
The part of the categorical imperative that is applicable to The Purge is the part of why Kant tells us that we should not lie. We must not lie because evaluating the right or wrong of an act requires that we assign moral guilt;That is, a part of determining what is right or wrong, well or bad, is to find out who is moral blame. When we lie to save someone, Kant tells us, our good motives (even if they are intentional) can facilitate another moral act. And if we facilitate a moral error, Kant says that we have part of the moral guilt of what happens. In The Purge, the act of saving a man (we assume a moral act, if not legally incorrect), leads to the death of another person.
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