Criticisms of Kantian Ethics: Rigorism and Moral Dilemmas

Kant's ethics has faced no criticism more persistent than the charge of rigorism: the claim that his insistence on exceptionless moral rules, applied without regard for context or consequence, produces conclusions that strike most people as plainly monstrous. The clearest test case is Kant's own late essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy" (Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen, 1797), written in direct response to the French-Swiss writer Benjamin Constant, who had argued that the duty of truthfulness must admit exceptions, using the scenario of a murderer who arrives at your door demanding to know whether a friend, hiding inside your house, is present. Kant's response is startling: he maintains that one has a strict, unconditional duty not to lie even to the murderer, on the grounds that truthfulness is a duty owed to humanity as such, that lying, even for benevolent motives, always wrongs humanity in one's own person, and that the consequences of telling the truth, however dire, remain the moral responsibility of the murderer rather than of the truthful speaker.