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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8271128" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Indeed.Under a really rigidly deontological approach, a lie does harm, both to the speaker and to the listener. The speaker is self-harming by being irrational: a lie is told in order to control others via communication, but by the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, this means the speaker wants all people to always lie forever. That would either make communication impossible, or would prevent actually controlling what someone else thinks (because they would know you were lying); it is thus trying to achieve something logically impossible. Intentionally seeking the logically impossible reflects either a damaged mind, or self-sabotage, which is a form of self-harm.The speaker is harming the listener by way of the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: they are treating the listener as a means to some end, rather than an end in themselves. It does not matter how noble, kind, generous, etc. the end you seek is: by the Categorical Imperative, it is ALWAYS wrong to treat another person as a means, period, end of discussion.(This, incidentally, is the "real" reason why it is supposed to be morally wrong for a German citizen in WWII to lie to a Nazi about the Jews hiding in their basement: it's because you would be using that Nazi as a means, even though the goal of that using-a-person-as-a-means is "to save the life of another person." We just instinctively balk at the notion that it is wrong to "use a person as a means to save the life of another person" in this way, a consequentialist suspicion of hardcore deontology. Like how Foot's trolley problem isn't meant to derive any specific answer--it's simply meant to show that we have an intuitive virtue-ethics-derived suspicion of hardcore consequentialism: that it is somehow inherently bad, somehow inherently an error, to actively cause the death of one person in order to prevent the death of a larger number of people.)</blockquote>

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