Würdewidrig und Grund des Bösen? Kant zur „inneren Lüge“

Abstract Recent scholarship on Kant often asserts that he was keenly aware of the problem of self-deception and considered it to be systematically necessary, for example, as a means of illuminating the possibility of acting against the moral law. It is also suggested that Kant’s preferred term for self-deception is the ,inner lie‘. However, this paper argues that, while Kant’s notion of the ,inner lie‘ does indeed identify a fundamental problem in moral philosophy, it bears little relation to common intuitions and interpretations of self-deception, or to diverse and often conflicting scholarly readings of Kant’s conception of it. Furthermore, this paper explains why Kant can legitimately attribute systematic significance to the ,inner lie‘ when clarifying the possibility of violating one’s duty, and why he considers the phenomenon to entail a profound ,Wegwerfung‘ (rejection) of human dignity.