Immanuel Kant

 I was meaning to follow up on my post of earlier this week about, furnaces, Davy Crockett, and Immanuel Kant, but I don't think Kant would be much of a hit with the dawgs.  Well frankly I don't know much about Immanuel Kant myself, that thing about not lying even if it means leading the thugs to your friend, is pretty much it.  

Well there is this thing about higher laws like not lying and Thou shalt not kill for instance.  But of course the Israelis who Moses handed down the laws to were killing people all the time, and it's not like they were being punished for it, I believe God was quite pleased with it, even helping out the Israelis from time to time.  Of course at the time God was Jehovah and pretty much the personal god of the Israelis, so people outside that sphere I don't think it mattered that much.

There was adultery.  You would think that that was one you could not fudge, but wasn't there some guy who got permission to sleep with the maid because his wife was barren?  I don't know if that was a good thing or if he got punished for it, I'll leave it to the biblical scholar among us.

And wasn't there a guy who got in trouble for spilling his seed?  Yoicks.  But that's not a Commandment per se, and I don't think he got in big trouble for it.

But I have drifted.  I was speaking about lying.  There is an experiment where the guy one is in a room with a very young kid and he shows him a piece of candy which he will give to the kid in just a minute but first he has to step out a bit, and he puts the candy in a box and leaves the room.  Guy two steps in and says, "Boy am I hungry. is there any candy in the room that I can eat?"  and the kid opens the box and shows him the candy.

The thing is a kid at that early stage of life has not learned that different people have different view points on things, and basically he believes that everybody knows everything that is going on and therefore guy two knows the candy is in the box, so it would be pointless to say it wasn't.

But eventually the kid figures out that everybody does not know everything that happens.  For instance when he filches from Mom's box of chocolate, he knows that she was in the basement washing clothes,so she couldn't possibly know he did it.  All he has to do to get away with it is to tell a lie.  What a wonderful world this is turning out to be.  However lying is like kissing ass, it's not enough to do it, you have to do it well.  That's why we have all those kids on that funny video show, where the kid's face is smeared with chocolate telling Mom he was nowhere near that box of chocolates, or that his teddy bear ate them.

Another study on lying that I remember is that guy one tells the kid to do him a favor, and tell a little lie to guy two about something.  The kids are then rated on how good a liar they are, and it turns out the kids who are the best liars are also the leaders in their little group of kids.

Since there was a debate last night some might suspect that I am going to bring up our lying president.  Well I guess I just have, but what I wanted to say was that he lies a lot, but he is not a good liar.  Bill Clinton, now there was a superb liar.

I know the title indicated that I would be talking about Immanuel Kant, but you know what?  I lied.