Most people agree that lying is wrong. But could you actually live your life without lying to anyone about anything?
They don’t know it yet, but the students in Ethics 101 are about to find out.
Jesse Summers sets up his classroom differently than most philosophy professors. Instead of facing the front of the classroom, students face each other, sitting in small groups around tables spaced throughout the room.
Right now, these groups are busy discussing a famous scenario about whether lying is morally permissible — Immanuel Kant’s “Murderer at the Door.”
As summarized by Summers, this scenario is: “You’re in your house. Your friend comes to the door and knocks. Your friend says, ‘Someone is looking to murder me. I’m going to hide in your house.’ You let your friend inside. Then there’s another knock on your door. The murderer is at the door and says, ‘I’m looking for your friend. Is your friend here?’”
The answer seems obvious, right? “No.”
But that conflicts with Kant’s ethical theory, which takes a strong position when it comes to lying: don’t do it. But should we really take lying off the table in all cases, even when someone’s life is at stake?
The students are still debating this when Summers calls them out of their small groups and opens the discussion to the entire class. What do they think about lying to the murderer at the door?
“If it’s life and death, all bets are off,” is the first student’s response.
“The only reason you wouldn’t lie would be a norm against lying,” another says, referring to an earlier discussion on ethical norms.
“Good!” Summers says. “If your view is, the norm is ‘Don’t lie,’ and norms should be followed, you tell the truth.”
“Murderers aren’t entitled to the same norms as others,” someone else says.
“Kant uses this case as a way to establish how committed he is to saying you should always tell the truth,” Summers explains. “I think he’s trolling a little bit. But his point is that you respect other people’s rational autonomy. You don’t assume the person is going to do bad things. You assume the person is capable of being reasoned with, and in virtue of that, you don’t deceive them. But Kant doesn’t say you have to let them in the house,” he adds.
“What’s going to stop them from trying to break open the door?” one student wonders.
“Morality, presumably,” Summers says, trolling a little bit.
“The only way a universalized principle works is if everyone subscribes to it,” another student says, seeming a little frustrated. “You can’t have some Kantians and some Utilitarians.”
“How honest should I be, then?” Summers asks. “Should I tell the truth all the time, no matter what? Or do we have norms in place to establish the limits of when I should tell the truth?”
“Honesty can be really self-serving,” a student says. “I’m not convinced it’s a norm at all in certain cases.”
Summers seems very interested in this response, but the class is out of time, and he has to prep the students for their next meeting.
“Here’s your assignment,” he says. “Not starting at the end of this class — starting in a few hours, you are going to commit — ”
“No…!” someone gasps.
“— to not deceiving and lying to other people for one week,” Summers finishes. “Don’t short-circuit them, don’t manipulate them. Be honest with them. And keep track of the times when you fail to do it.”
“I’m playing poker Wednesday,” a student says. “Can I lie in poker?”
Summers doesn’t answer yes or no. “This is the assignment,” he says.
“…I’m going to lose money,” the student says mournfully.
“They think they’re just killing time waiting for me to get to the real material,” Summers says of the students’ small group discussions. But he thinks these discussions serve an important function.
“They settle into these groups and end up with these classroom relationships because they talk to the same people in class every time,” he says.
Like every other college instructor in the world, Summers has been thinking about teaching in the age of generative AI. “When we went to Zoom during the pandemic, I thought, ‘What is truly important?’” he says. “Now with Generative AI, I’m like, ‘What are we doing in the classroom?’”
Summers isn’t opposed to incorporating AI into his teaching; in fact, he recently gave students the option to use it to teach themselves the basics of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He said the results were so promising, he’d do so again.
But if ChatGPT can step in and teach students the basics of Aristotle, what should the role of an ethics professor be?
People used to come to universities because “that’s where the books were,” Summers says. Now, “You don’t need to be here for the books, so why do we need to be here?”
Right now, for Summers, the answer is simple: to connect with other people. “You get to have this conversation with the professor and other students about what you’re doing.”
In other words, what the students are learning isn’t just “What does Kant or Bentham or Aristotle say about ethics?” It’s “Isn’t it fun to talk about ethics with other people?”
“It’s so fun,” Summers says with complete sincerity.
“We know a good bit about each other because we talk about our lives a lot,” Ryan Si says about his Ethics 101 group.
Si is a sophomore studying political science, economics, and philosophy. In high school, he participated in Lincoln Douglas debates — competitions where teams of students use philosophy to argue for or against resolutions. But he decided to take Ethics 101 because it was about ethics in “everyday cases.”
“A lot of the readings we do aren’t really dense theory,” he says. “We can take the ideas from the text and just kind of run with it…and obviously, when you’re talking in discussion, people don’t tend to bring in super abstract ideas. They bring in their own experiences.”
In addition to readings, practical assignments, like “no lying for a week,” are topics for discussions. Some of these practical assignments aren’t practical at all, like the one to “waste time” for an hour (“I assume some version of scrolling is not how you’d like to waste time,” is Summers’ only caveat).
On the day I visited, he opened the class by asking the students to discuss whether or not superheroes are “assholes” because they regularly flout norms that the rest of us follow.
“Professor Summers does a great job of setting up the conversation, and then opening it up for people to bring up real-life examples,” says Elizabeth Romage, a junior studying public policy and psychology. She is also pursuing an Ethics certificate.
During open discussions, when Summers is talking to one student, asking follow-up questions that encourage them to dig a little further in their thinking, he intentionally moves to the opposite side of the room. This prompts the student to talk louder so that everyone else in the room can hear them, and anyone can join the discussion at any point.
“I think, honestly, Professor Summers runs the class in a way where it just works,” Romage says. “He’s very open. He’s very inclusive. He makes the students laugh…He’s outlining that it’s a safe space where we’re learning from each other.”
“I think that Professor Summers is very non-judgmental when people share ideas,” Si says. “I struggle with this a little bit because I did debate in high school, so my first reaction is, ‘Why is it wrong?’ I think his approach is the antithesis of the way that I used to approach ideas. He’s like, ‘Why do you think that?’ or ‘Does this tie to something that somebody else said?’ And I think that’s what makes it very welcoming.”
Do students have opportunities to participate in these kinds of discussions elsewhere at Duke? Romage says there are some, but “I don’t think they know where to find them a lot of the time.”
“That’s why I think the class is awesome,” she says, “having it built into your schedule and knowing that you do have that space.”
“Opening yourself up to questions, to comments, to being challenged, and then learning from it all — that is a great skill, and I think Ethics 101 is an awesome place to practice that,” she says.
“I think the topic area is very interesting,” Si says of the class. “I think it’s applicable to every single person. And I think no matter who you are, if you take the class, you’re going to get something out of it.”
What has Si gotten out of Ethics 101?
Si says that he uses ethical theories from class as “thought tools” for how to approach specific situations.
“Like, I have this ethical dilemma,” he says. “What theory is calling to me? And how can I use that to reason what is moral?”
But sometimes that might mean setting a certain ethical theory aside — like Kant’s directive not to lie.
“I did my very best — like, I swear I tried,” Si says of the “no lying for a week” assignment. “But then there came an instance where one of my friends was really going through a tough time. They were feeling a little bit lost — like, ‘Why am I in college? Why am I this major?’ Like, everything.
“A lot of my words ended up sounding like, ‘Don’t worry — things will work out, even if it’s hard to see right now.’ I can’t know if that’s true — if everything’s going to be all right or not. So I guess that was a deception. In that instance, I thought that a different ethical theory other than a very, very strict ‘no lie’ theory was more important.”
Reflecting on this, Si says that some ethical theories don’t consider human relationships enough.
“They don’t shine a big light on relationships for something that’s so important for people,” he says. “A lot of studies have indicated that the relationships that you have with people are the most important indicator of how your life turns out and how happy you are.”
Si says that he started to see how relationships fit into ethics when he started reading Aristotle on friendship. And he also brings ethics into his own relationships — in discussions with friends who enjoy talking about philosophy as much as he does.
“The more I learn, the more I can bring to these conversations, and the more I can teach them, and they teach me back as well,” he says. “I think that’s a very rewarding way to pursue ethics. It’s a very nerdy way to bond, but it is a good way to bond.”
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