Harvard University: Michael Sandel's "A Lesson in Lying"
Watch this lecture until 22:29. While you watch, consider this question: can Kant possibly be right that it is never permissible to lie? At first, Kant's idea that duty and autonomy are compatible seems very counter-intuitive. In this lecture, Sandel helps us make some sense of this view, and he applies it to the example of lying. Ordinarily, we might think that lying is morally impermissible most of the time, unless it would help us avert some worse harm. Kant famously denies this commonsense view, asserting that even if we were sure that some great harm was to result from our failing to tell a lie at the right moment, the lie would still be immoral, since it would mean that we failed to respect the moral law that springs from our rationality.