Title: Kant risk a lie!

Abstract: Immanuel Kant says, “lying is the chief sin against others, alongside robbery, murder and stuproviolatio”. Kant never risks robbery, murder, or rape. But Kant does risk telling intentionally deceptive falsehoods. Instead of being a man a few words, Kant is a man of three million words. Equally revealing is the scale of Augustine’s corpus: He wrote five million words before he died in 403 at age 75. Augustine was surpassed by Thomas Aquinas: eight million words before reporting a divine revelation to stop writing, a few months before his death in 1274 at age 48. Each of these three proponents of `Never lie’ take some steps to lower the risk of lying. But their precautions are at the same scale as those who have an average aversion to lying. Accordingly, all of those famed for their absolute opposition to lying drastically overstate the degree to which they oppose lying.