This chapter fully develops the concept of moral imagination through a discussion of Bayer CropScience. A historic review of the concept of moral imagination is explored and with particular reference to Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and John Dewey, leading to the more recent work of Martha Nussbaum. A technology of how to apply moral imagination is developed drawing extensively on Adam Smith’s figure of an “impartial spectator” and Immanuel Kant’s approach to practical reasoning as evident in the recent work of Mark Johnson. We consider the scope and applicability of moral imagination in practice through the work of Amartya Sen.

Volkswagen (VW) was founded in Germany in 1937 under the Nazi regime by the labor unions with the help of Ferdinand Porsche, the inventor of the Beetle (the people’s car). Tasked with making a car that was affordable for all consumers, VW’s flagship car, the compact and iconic Beetle, first rolled off the manufacturing floor in 1945, and by 1949, half of all passenger cars produced in West Germany were built by VW. By 2014, VW was one of the biggest firms in the world. It had factories in thirty-one countries, employing almost 600,000 people worldwide. In 2014, it sold 10.2 million vehicles, with a total profit of over 11 billion euros.

This chapter focuses on the figures of Antonio Genovesi, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith. It begins by exploring the similarities and differences in their biographies and historical-intellectual contexts. Next, it examines the influence of Genovesi’s and Smith’s philosophies on Kant. Lastly, it provides a critical and selective review of the secondary literature regarding these authors’ perspectives on the morality of commercial life.

What Fichte found most inspiring in Kant’s critical philosophy was its Copernican focus on the transcendental conditions of conscious thought, its doctrine of the autonomy of reason, and, most especially, its fundamental commitment to freedom of the will. Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies of right are especially close in form and content. Both works treat the philosophy of right as a separate subject that is independent of ethical philosophy, and both ground their theories in a fundamental right of freedom from interference. We see, right at the outset, the importance of freedom in modern moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. We begin, however, with Fichte’s ethics. Fichte’s ethics of autonomy or, as he usually prefers to say, “self-sufficiency” or “independence,” departs from Kant’s in several important ways. The most important structurally is that whereas autonomy is at the heart of grounding what Kant takes to be the fundamentally formal character of the moral law. Fichte holds, against “all of the authors who have treated ethics merely formally,” that self-sufficiency or independence is a “material” kind of freedom. Fichte’s ethics sets autonomous self-determination as a fundamental moral end, and is ultimately consequentialist.

The other philosopher writing in Kant’s wake who figures prominently in the origins of “continental” philosophy is Hegel. Although many of the seeds of Hegel’s thought were planted by Fichte, Hegel’s works ultimately had far greater direct impact. Hegel was not, however, an ethical or moral philosopher like Fichte. T. H. Irwin plausibly claims, indeed, that Hegel actually denies that moral philosophy is “a distinct discipline.” But Hegel had a massive influence on the history of ethics even so, including on “modern moral philosophy.” Partly this was as a critic, not just of moral philosophy, but also of the modern conception of morality itself. Hegel argues that what he and other moderns call “morality” (Moralität) is a formal abstraction that is incapable of “truth” or “reality.” Moral philosophers who focus on oughts and obligation mistake, in his view, an abstract moment of practical thought for something realizable; they fasten on a desiccated abstraction rather than the “living good” that is embodied in actual modern (liberal) customs and institutions, what Hegel calls “ethical life.” Hegel’s critique of morality begins a tradition that runs through Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and through Anscombe and Bernard Williams in the twentieth.

This chapter proposes that thought experiments are a cognitive apparatus and situates this view among contemporary accounts of thought experiment. I set forward the project of the book, which is to (1) propose a new account of thought experiments as a method and (2) trace the historical foundations of the term and concept of “thought experiment” from Kant through Ørsted to Kierkegaard. I define “cognition” [Erkenntnis] for Kant as a synthesis of concepts with intuitions and propose that Kierkegaard, like Kant and Ørsted, views thought experiments as useful for achieving cognitions. I introduce the term Tanke-experiment in Kierkegaard and suggest why it has been little emphasized by Kierkegaard scholars and remains widely unacknowledged in contemporary descriptions of the history of thought experiment.

In his 1797 essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Love of Humanity”, Immanuel Kant argues that, when only a confident lie might save a friend, one must, if asked, reply truthfully and thus betray his hiding place to the person who wants to kill him. This is the first monograph that explores Kant’s essay in detail. Jens Timmermann examines the historical background of the piece (Kant was provoked by Benjamin Constant and his translator, Carl Friedrich Cramer), the history of the example (which is also discussed by, amongst others, Augustine, Johann David Michaelis and Johann Gottlieb Fichte), the peculiarities of Constant’s version of the case and Kant’s core argument against Constant: that lying, or a right to lie, would undermine contractual rights and spell disaster for human society.

Kant varies Constant’s example to the effect that a lie, not a truthful reply, will by accident help the murderer to find and kill his victim. He argues that the liar can be held legally accountable for violating the formal duty of truthfulness in that case, whereas a lie that does no harm is not punishable as such. This chapter explains the theory of imputation of actions and their consequences that underpins these judgements, along with the notion of moral luck (coincidence, accident) and the distinction between ‘harm’ and ‘wrong’.

It is impossible to understand Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie” without a sense of how Kant’s theory of truth and truthfulness developed over time; and it is impossible to trace the development of Kant’s thought without a clear sense of the conceptual framework that he took as his starting point. This chapter examines the early modern debate with its distinction between morally objectionable lies (mendacia) and morally innocent falsified assertions (falsiloquia) and then presents Kant’s thoughts on the topic in his lectures and in his major writings on moral philosophy. He endorses the distinction between unobjectionable and objectionable falsehoods in the early lectures; in his later publications, he rejects it.

The final chapter addresses the question of what Kant should have said in reply to Constant’s challenge. The objections of his readers and interpreters should be taken seriously as expressions of ordinary moral consciousness; and it is true that moral restrictions can leave us feel helpless in the face of evil. But these considerations would not have been sufficient to change Kant’s mind. So, should his rigorous opposition to untruthfulness count against his moral philosophy? It is argued that Kant’s absolutism is less problematic than it seems, partly because most – if not all – realistic reconstructions of Constant’s case leave us with more promising practical options than lying, partly because Kant’s moral theory contains certain resources that mitigate his absolutism, for example, his conception of the Highest Good. The question of whether his ethical prohibition of lying as a violation of a duty to self is justified is left unanswered.

The story of Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie” is shrouded in mystery. Benjamin Constant’s essay “On Political Reactions” saddles an anonymous “German philosopher” with the view that lying is always wrong, even when a lie might be needed to save a friend’s life; and to date, Kant had not defended that view in print. Kant’s name was is mentioned only by Carl Friedrich Cramer in his German translation of Constant’s essay. So why did Cramer target Kant? And why did Kant play along, admitting he had defended absolutism in print when he had not? To complicate things further, Cramer mentions another German moralist, Johann David Michaelis, who endorses a view that is very similar to Kant’s, which is also examined in this chapter.

In his reply to Constant, Kant makes extensive use of the distinction between form and matter. He argues that the duty of truthfulness is a ‘formal’ duty; and that the wrong done by lying is ‘formal’, rather than ‘material’. The erroneous view that falsified statements count as lies, that is, are objectionable, only if some ‘material’ damage is done to the legitimate interests of individuals is attributed to so-called jurists. This chapter examines the role these notions play in the essay on the ‘supposed right’ and introduces several important distinctions. In particular, can we make sense of the idea that some wrongs are inflicted not on individuals but on ‘humanity’? It also reveals the identity of the ‘jurists’ and explains why they are relevant for the argument of the essay.

This chapter scrutinises the framework within which Kant decides to conduct his argument against Constant. Constant argues that the would-be murderer has forfeited his right to be told the truth. Kant argues that the duty to be truthful does not depend on that kind of right; that Constant fails to distinguish between truth and truthfulness with sufficient care; and that one should distinguish the question of whether lying is permissible (licence to lie) in emergencies from the question of whether lying is ever morally required (obligation to lie). In the 1797 essay, Kant addresses the second question through the first. If there is never a licence to lie, there can be no obligation to do so.

The longest chapter of the book is dedicated to Kant’s core argument against Constant. Kant’s essay contains three formulations of the same idea: that lying, or a right to lie, would undermine the possibility of contracts, and of the duties and rights that contracts generate. Kant is convinced that this would be disastrous for humankind. That is why he claims, against Constant, that lying – not an unconditional duty of truthfulness – would be the downfall of society. The chapter discusses the enigmatic notion of a ‘source’ of right or rights (which should not, it is argued, be equated with the social or original contract); and it subjects two slightly different reconstructions of the core argument to philosophical scrutiny, concluding that both are untenable. It seems that, in 1797, Kant revived Michaelis’s argument, which he had appropriated and then abandoned earlier in his philosophical development. This negative result does not, however, lessen Kant’s absolutism because the ethical duty of truthfulness is still in place.

Truthfulness is, so to speak, Kant’s go-to duty. He invokes it in a wide range of philosophical settings, such as his discussion of free will in the Critique of Pure Reason, in his argument for a pure moral theory in the Groundwork, in the detailed moral philosophy of the Metaphysics of Morals and in his late lectures on education. Even though its scope and its theoretical foundation vary, the duty not to lie remains Kant’s prime example of a strict and unequivocal obligation. By way of introduction, this chapter first provides a survey of some important passages in which Kant invokes or argues for the duty of truthfulness before turning to the textbook example that is the bone of contention between him and Benjamin Constant and presenting some reactions provoked by the main thesis of Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie”: that there is an unconditional, absolute duty to be truthful even in emergencies.

Lacan attempts to bring the psychoanalytic insights of Sigmund Freud into the philosophy of German Idealism, specifically that of Kant and Hegel. Unlike Freud, Lacan was schooled in the history of philosophy, and this allowed him to trace the implications of introducing the unconscious into the theory of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel. Throughout his career, Lacan insists on the subject as what sticks out from its social context thanks to the existence of the unconscious. The unconscious marks the subject’s failure to fit within its social world, and Lacan makes this failure to fit the basis for his philosophy. Although Lacan sees himself as a psychoanalyst rather than a philosopher, we must recognize the significance of his philosophical contribution.