top of page
Spring 2025 Conference
3 May 2025

We are honored to have Professor Jens Timmermann from the University of St. Andrews as our speaker at Simpliciter's Spring 2025 conference. His presentation "Kant’s Two Supposed Rights" will discuss Immanuel Kant’s responses to what his opponents claim to be the right to lie and the right to take the life of another.

F2B0B64D-7B66-49D6-A5AB-A3FC95C967B7_1_201_a.jpeg
Immanuel_Kant._Aquatint_silhouette._Wellcome_V0003180.jpg

In 1797, Kant argues against two ‘supposed rights’, i.e. against claims that his opponents – in his mind erroneously – regard as rights. The more prominent one of the two is the supposed right to lie, which he discusses in response to Benjamin Constant’s provocation in On Political Reactions. A householder is not permitted to lie to a would-be murderer who enquires whether his victim is hiding in his house. If he cannot dodge the question, he has to give a truthful reply and thereby disclose the victim’s presumed location. The less prominent case is the supposed right to “take the life of another who has done nothing to harm me, when I am in danger of losing my own life” (MM VI 235.15–17) as discussed in the Doctrine of Right. The two arguments have much in common, beyond the fact that Kant presented them to the reading public in the same year. In both cases, he is defending exceptionless prohibitions; in both cases, he is arguing against representatives of the Natural Law tradition; and in both cases, his argument is exceptionally obscure. In this lecture, I will do my best to shed light on both pseudo-rights.

Abstract
bottom of page