Truth, Duty and Deontology

Of the various ethical rules we try to teach children, perhaps the most complicated is around truth telling.

We tell kids it’s important to tell the truth, maybe we even tell them they should never tell a lie. But as adults, most of us lie all the time. Some of us parents even get our kids to help with those lies. 

If we had a penny for every time a parent tried to fob their kids off as three when actually they’ve just turned four so they don’t have to pay for entry to a museum or a theme park!  

And that’s not to mention the lies we tell to kids. “That’s the greatest artwork I’ve ever seen!” we declare, as we stick yet another crayon sketching on the fridge. “You must be the strongest girl alive!”, we tell our niece after they pick up a full water bottle.  

These lies are fun, self-esteem building and well-intended. But they are lies, and for deontologists, that makes them a problem.

Better to tell a harsh truth than to tell a lie – after all, we have a duty to tell the truth. Truth-telling promotes people’s agency, helps them make more accurate decisions and treats them with respect. Or so Immanuel Kant tells us.  

Let’s break this down a little further though. In the first episode of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, Ansari’s character Dev is about to tuck into a delicious parm sandwich whilst catching up with some friends. Just before they hoe in, his friend’s kids come in, having made their own sandwiches to share. 

Their mum happily obliges. She chooses the peanut butter, lettuce and ketchup sandwich over the mouth-wateringly good feast in front of her. The kids turn to Dev, offering him a specially-made sandwich for him. He looks at the parm, back at the hand-made monstrosity and tells the kids their sandwich looks disgusting and he won’t eat it, before tucking into the good stuff.  

Is Dev a jerk or not? According to deontology, it would have been worse for him to lie than to break their little hearts.  

One answer is that Dev did the wrong thing because, whilst he should have told the truth, he could have done so more compassionately (many deontologists believe we have a duty to treat people with compassion). 

But even then, some would say this misses the point too. They’d argue that a half-decent person would accept the sandwich, even if they didn’t eat it. They might argue that the truth doesn’t add any value here – it just hurts. As Tyrion said in our last unboxing, maybe ethics requires us to lie every now and then.  

Another possible answer is that Dev did the wrong thing because whilst he told the truth, he didn’t tell the truth because he was motivated by a sense of moral duty. He did it so he could eat his preferred sandwich. 

Deontologists – Kantian deontologists especially – think that it’s not enough to do our duty, we have to choose to do it for no other reason except that it’s our duty. We don’t do what’s right because it’ll make people happy, get a good result or make us feel good. We do it simply because righteousness matters.  

And here lies one of the most common critiques of deontology: that the things it wants to have motivate us aren’t things we want the people around us to be motivated by. 

Bernard Williams famously asked if any of us, while drowning, would want our spouse to think “my spouse is drowning, and I have a duty to save them”. Wouldn’t we prefer they just thought “my spouse is drowning!” and jumped in?