Immanuel Kant, an influential theologian in the late 1700s, developed many theories relating to human nature and morality, most focusing on deontological, or absolute, ethics – ethics that focused on a moral act, rather than the consequences that followed it.
Kant’s most important belief was that humans had many duties, one of the most important of those duties being not to lie. He then went on to say that, as it is our duty to always tell the truth, we should not falter on that, no matter what. Be believed that faltering in your duty was morally wrong, no matter what. He used an example of a murderer chasing their victim. If the victim had passed you and the murderer stopped to ask you where their victim had gone, you would be obliged to tell them the location of their victim – because then you would be doing your duty, even if harm were to come to the victim.

Though an extreme example, Kant used this to explain the relationship between humans. He believed that if humans were to lie all the time, nothing anyone said would hold any value and no written documents would ever be a trustworthy source of information because no-one would be able to trust anyone else. This would ensure the fall of human beings, because a society built upon distrust would never thrive. So, to Kant, honesty was one of the most important parts of a human’s duty that could never be compromised in any situation for fear of destroying the human race.

This absolute dedication to reliability of the truth all relates to Kant’s development of the absolutist theory that became the categorical imperative. This theory focuses on creating a universal law, applicable to everyone, whose sole purpose centres around reason rather than personal feelings. The categorical imperative is a concept in which the question is not ‘how do I feel about this specific incident?’ or ‘what is the best thing to do in