Lying Is Always Wrong Case Study

Lying is against Deontologist school of thought because it is irrational when following the categorical imperative and it hijacks autonomous decision making. The maxim followed is: “Lying is always wrong”. We must consider what this means for an argument - when is it attractive to lie, but we still must refrain?

It is attractive to lie when we feel like we are trying to help the situation by skirting around the truth. The situation where this is best expressed it brought up by Kant in his case of the Inquiring Murderer. Here it is suggested that, even though you may be trying to protect a friend by lying to their assailant, you should still tell the murderer the truth. Why is this so challenging to our instincts? Perhaps it is because we feel

Certainly, lying does inaugurate you into a state of total control over another person, more so than misleading does. However, in both cases you are exercising control over the free will of another - something paramountly impermissible under Deontologist school out thought. It is just as wrong to mislead someone in my opinion because you still are undermining their access to information which would allow them to make a fully informed decision. It is considered permissible to mislead under Deontology because a person’s autonomy is not fully infringed upon; they still are able to make choices despite not having the whole truth in a matter. This is useful in some situations but it also evolves into a difficult to follow maxim - “It is okay to mislead someone because they still have some choice”. When someone lies to another, they offhandedly make the person's decision for them. For example, if someone lied to you and told you that a store was closed when it really wasn’t, they made the choice for you about whether or not you should go to the store. You wouldn’t go out to check if it was open because they very clearly told you that the business was closed. Where it becomes messy is, where is the line between misleading and lying? Where does the boundary exist between morally permissible and impermissible. In my opinion, it is far too easy to blur the distinction between the two and it becomes far to easy to change the maxim to “lying is permissible when trying to gain something”. Conflict can easily be avoided by choosing not to lie or mislead in the first