On political responsibility in post-revolutionary times: Kant and Constant's debate on lying
| Author | Geneviève Rousselière |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115588100 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(2) 214–232
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885115588100
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Article
On political responsibility
in post-revolutionary times:
Kant and Constant’s debate
on lying
Genevie
`ve Rousselie
`re
The University of Chicago, USA
Abstract
In ‘‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,’’ Kant holds the seemingly untenable
position that lying is always prohibited, even if the lie is addressed to a murderer in an
attempt to save the life of an innocent man. This article argues that Kant’s position on
lying should be placed back in its original context, namely a response to Benjamin
Constant about the responsibility of individual agents toward political principles in
post-revolutionary times. I show that Constant’s theory of political responsibility,
which sanctions the lie, is not based on expediency, but on principled realism, whereas
Kant endorses a position that I describe as ‘political juridicism.’ This analysis enables
us to uncover two plausible Republican theories of political responsibility in post-
revolutionary times behind an apparently strictly ethical debate.
Keywords
Kant, Constant, responsibility, lying, revolution, Right
Imagine that a friend pursued by a murderer takes refuge in your house. The
murderer knocks at your door and asks where your friend is. What would you
say? In On Political Reactions (PR), a 1796 pamphlet, Benjamin Constant (1988a)
attributes to an anonymous ‘‘German philosopher’’ the view that we should always
tell the truth, even if this means sacrificing the life of our friend. He opposes this
stark position to what he expects is his reader’s intuitive stance, namely, that we
should lie to save our friend. Having an absolute duty not to lie would make society
impossible, Constant maintains, because it would make us unable to make judg-
ments concerning the specific circumstances in which we apply principles.
Corresponding author:
Genevie
`ve Rousselie
`re, The University of Chicago, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, 5845 S. Ellis Avenue,
Gates-Blake 432, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: rousseliere@uchicago.edu
Instead, we have the responsibility to address the specific situation at hand in all its
complexity. Lying is therefore the responsible attitude.
This striking thought experiment, imagined in the immediate aftermath of the
Terror in France, brings many conundrums of post-revolutionary politics to the
fore in an everyday experience endemic to troubled times. The experience of free-
dom in post-revolutionary France was disorienting. Revolutions are invariably
followed by reactionary periods, in which counter-insurgencies intensify social
unrest. Individuals who fought for revolutionary principles in 1789 wondered if
they owed their allegiance to a fledgling government that made compromises in
order to institute itself. In PR, Constant wrote to support the cause of the
Directory, the freshly settled government aiming to establish liberal constitutional
principles, against both Jacobin and reactionary tendencies. It offered a guide for
French citizens perplexed by the difficulty of remaining faithful to revolutionary
principles in the aftermath of the Terror.
Karl Friedrich Cramer, a fervent supporter of the French Revolution who pub-
lished Rousseau and Sieye
`s in Germany, translated Constant’s text in a journal
named Frankreich the following year. He pressed Kant to respond on the ground
that he was the not-so-mysterious ‘‘German philosopher’’ mentioned by Constant,
and certainly hoping Kant would take position on post-revolutionary politics.
Kant was then supposed to be also a supporter of the Revolution, yet had kept
mostly silent on the question, to the great despair of his radical followers (Maliks,
2012). Accepting Constant’s description of the case in all its details, Kant (1996a)
responded a few months later, with an article entitled ‘‘On a Supposed Right to Lie
from Philanthropy’’ (SRL). Yes, the philosopher sternly declares, you should tell
the murderer where your friend hides. The death of your friend as a consequence of
your true statement would be regrettable, Kant argues, but a lie would be much
worse – nothing less than the vitiation of the source of law itself (SRL 612; 8:426).
Kant’s short text on lying took on a destiny of its own, by being separated from
its political context. As an isolated text, Kant’s response proved both opaque and
puzzling to its readers. In particular, Kant scholars (Korsgaard, 1986; Paton, 1953;
Schapiro, 2006; Varden, 2010; Wood, 2008) have wondered repeatedly why Kant
would espouse such a position, when he argues elsewhere in his works that we can
lie in self-defence (Kant, 1963: 228; VE 27:448). Why does he require the truthful
agent to be an instrument of evil when it could be avoided? Kant’s infamous pos-
ition on the case of the murderer generated many controversies. Yet one point of
consensus emerges. There is something remarkably odd about Kant’s position in
the case of the murderer, even from the point of view of Kant’s theory itself. Why
Kant would choose a rigorist position that his own ethical theory could prove
partial or wrong does not seem to find an answer within the frame of what I call
an ‘‘ethical reading’’, i.e. a reading supposing that this text asks what is the right
ethical response to the murderer’s inquiry.
As an appendix to Kant’s text, Constant’s position on lying is either ignored or
dismissed as ‘‘expedient,’’ suggesting that for Constant what matters is whether an
action is advantageous to the liar, and not whether it is just. The charge of expe-
diency hides the obvious question: why would Constant endorse such a view when
Rousselie
`re 215
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