Society's Adaptation of Kantian Ethics

            I’m sure most of you remember my rather long-winded struggle in class on Tuesday to come to grips with Kant’s essay “On the Supposed Right to Lie for Philanthropic Reasons.” In the example given by Constant, I cannot in good conscience say that I would not lie to protect my friend in the closet. Even after the class discussions, I cannot in good conscience say that I would tell the truth if it were a complete stranger in my closet, or even if it were someone that I actively dislike hiding in my closet. I thought about trying to argue Kant’s point using his own ethics (something about how the lie told to the murderer at the door was not necessarily immoral in the Kantian sense since Kant advocates advancing the means of others only if those means are morally permissible, which murder is certainly not), but I didn’t think I’d be too successful with that method either. People much smarter and more well-versed in philosophy than me have written pages and pages on the subject. Instead, I’m going to attempt to answer Kant with Hegel. I’ll start by quoting from Karissa’s earlier post, “Universal and Unusable,” where she asks us, “How is one to conduct him/herself as based on a universal law or as one would in a “merely possible kingdom of ends” when he/she is in a completely singular situation in a flawed, messy world?”.  I would say, quite frankly, that we can’t. Humans just are not pure rational beings, as much as some of us may like to be. Emotions, feelings, and the like all come into play for the majority of us when weighing a moral dilemma such as the murderer at the door. While Kant tells us that we must be truthful to the murderer, I think that every normal reader today instinctually finds that action to be immoral. Instead, I think that, whether we realize it or not, we all synthesize these opposing theses about lying and other moral quandaries every time we face a moral dilemma. After all, if one could just apply a moral law without thought to every situation, it would hardly be considered a dilemma. For instance, in Constant’s example, we have Kant’s thesis:

Lying is never morally permissible. 

Naturally, the antithesis to that would be:

Lying is always morally permissible.

The synthesis, then, would read:

Lying is sometimes morally permissible (e.g. to protect a loved one’s life).

This type of synthesis can be and is applied to numerous other moral absolutes the world over, such as killing (Killing is always acceptable + Killing is never acceptable = Killing is sometimes acceptable, such as in a case of self-defense).  That is not to say that there cannot be a universal moral code, just that it cannot be as absolute as Kant’s and still be practically applicable to our “flawed, messy world.” That said, I am no closer to discovering that universal code than I was in August. Any ideas on whether it can or cannot exist? If it can exist, does it have to be absolute, or can there be qualifications? For example, in our society, killing an innocent person is deemed “murder” but killing a person who is about to kill you is deemed “self-defense”. In either case, killing as occurred, but the situation is different. However, is it still universal in that killing an innocent person is always deemed wrong? Do those specifications destroy the universality of the laws?