Axe Murderer

## I *Kant* believe this is an article

This isn't the fourteen-year-old on your bus who won't quit spraying Lynx, rather, the example of the Axe Murderer is often used to highlight how the Deontological approach can be at odds with our intuitions and common-sense and so, how it causes issues for the theory.

## Go on then, explain:

So, you're at home. Having stayed up until 3 to watch the new series of Game of Thrones, your head feels like mush and you want to process everything you've just seen in bed. However, before you can get all tucked in, a desperate series of knocks ring out from your door.

You slide downstairs in your slippers, hot chocolate spilling on the carpet as you rush to answer your curiosity. It's your best friend, Andy, his arm hangs limp by his side and with a ghostly expression, he stumbles inside, tripping over words in a rush to get them out before it's too late, he begs for you to hide him. You hurry him inside and he begins a frantic search for shelter. Not a minute later, you hear the door go again. Three. Deliberate. Beats. They pass a chill through you and into the room. As your shaking hands reach for the handle, you see Andy slump behind the sofa, with a look of terrified defeat, his head rocking as he passes out of sight.

The doorway swings slowly open to reveal a shadow and as the light hits the spectre's face, you see the lines of cruelty, then the blood dripping from the wicked edge of it's axe. It's voice flows out like frost into a nest and with each word, you see the malice grow in the dark pits of his eyes. From the corner of your vision, you can see your friend's bone-white knuckles gripping the wall behind in terror. *"Would you kindly tell me where Andy is?"*

"Sure", you reply. "Check behind the sofa".

## Wait, what?

   Well, you're just being a good Deontologist. With the Catagorical Imperative, telling a lie is a 100% no-go, even if you have a high probability to believe that doing so would cause someone else extreme harm. Luckily for us, this objection was raised in Kant's lifetime, so we got to hear him respond with basically "yeah, tell on them, it's what you should be doing".

Huh?

Kant says that if you are telling the truth, therefore you have the best moral intentions; seeing as you are only responsible for your own moral actions, not those of the axe murderer, you need not concern yourself with his actions, as they are on him. Obviously you might be a tad upset if you find the mush that was your friend behind sofa, not least because you have to clean it up, but according to Kant, you've have done the best thing. He also says that if you lied, telling Mr. Axe man something like "He's not here, friend, I saw him sprinting northwards about five minutes ago" and then Andy was actually escaping out the back, heading North, then ran into the murderer and was horribly murderised, that would be on you and your conscience.

## So he refused to see that as an issue?

Pretty much, though that doesn't mean that there aren't deontological ways around it. You can't maximise telling a lie without running into logical inconsistency as if everyone was lying all the time, there'd be no truth to break by lying. Nor can you try and get around it by saying that you should only lie when your friend, who has an injured arm and an illogical fear of sparrows (they're too small to be dangerous) turns up at your door at precisely 03:07, as Kant would say that that is not your true maxim, you've just bloated it with specifics till there are no obvious inconsistencies and it appears fine if everyone were to do it.

However, it does appear possible to suggest that telling a lie to save a life could be maximisable as there are no inconsistencies, it does appear to be your actual maxim and it would not happen frequently enough to damage the concept of truth-telling, so you can remain a Deontologist and save your friend.