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Image Source: "Immanuel Kant (painted portrait)" by unspecified /History/Carnegie/kant/portrait.html. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia
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The Inquiring Murderer story goes like this. Imagine that an innocent person (maybe
someone you love) is fleeing from a murderer. He tells you exactly where he will hide. Then
the murderer comes to your door and asks you if you know the location of his intended
victim. You do know.
The question raised by this scenario is this: Would it be immoral to lie to this murderer by
telling him that you dont know where the victim is?
To fully clarify the situation being discussed, we have to make a few assumptions:
(1) The inquiring murderer is no threat to you personally; he will not attack you if he
finds out you lied to him.
(2) If you dont lie, the murderer will most probably find and kill the intended victim.
(3) If you do lie, the murderer will most probably not find the intended victim.
Constant argued that in a scenario like this, it would not be immoral to lie to the inquiring
murderer. It may even be immoralnot to lie.

Contemporary students of Kant are scholars influenced by Kants philosophy who are
alive now, or who were alive in the recent past. ChristineKorsgaard is one very
distinguished living Kantian.

To say that something has intrinsic value means that it has value just because of its
existence, and that its value does not depend on any other good things.
Dignity is the quality of being worthy of respect.

The premise at line 1 is a claim about psychology. Kant argues that cruelty to animals will
harden the heartthat is, it will make us less averse to cruelty in general. This, in
turn, will dispose us to be cruel toward all living beingsincluding rational,
autonomous beings.
The premise at line 2 is based on the Principle of Humanity. If you are cruel to a rational,
autonomous being, you obviously fail to respect that being. Kant adds that even doing
something that makes you more likely to be cruel toward rational, autonomous beings
is a way of disrespecting them.
The conclusion at line 3 follows logically from the two premises.

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Discrimination most generally refers to the making of disctinctions. Discrimination in

general is not necessarily immoral. When a professor discriminates between students to
whom she gives better or worse grades, the students who get the best grades may well
deserve it, because they performed better on the tests and assignments.
However, some forms of discrimination are immoral. For example: imagine a manager who
hires a man instead of a woman for a job, just because he does not like the idea of working
with a woman. The managers decision seems immoral, since the gender of the rejected
candidate is irrelevant to her ability to do the job.
Indeed, the wrongness of this managers decision can be explained more deeply from a
Kantian perspective. Think of the Principle of Universalizability. What would happen if
everyone in the world decided to hire men over women, just because they dont like the
idea of working with women? In such a world, this decision would endanger something
essential to ones will. For instance, there would be many cases in which the person best
qualified for a job happens to be a woman, but this person would not be hired. If society
systematically excludes women from the labor market, it would not be able to capitalize on
the talents of women, and the overall effect of this could be catastrophic. The mostqualified doctor or politician, who happens to be a woman, may be able to save lives and
promote the common good in ways that a less-qualified male would fail to do.

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Evidence of discrimination in the workplace:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-blackunemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01race.html

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Relevant links:

On the IAT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RSVz6VEybk

On the relationship between implicit biases and job discrimination:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL9__gD88xk

http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/sep/05/insider-tipsrecruiter-avoid-unconscious-bias

http://www.nso.edu/sites/www.nso.edu/files/files/docs/AURADiversityBrochureNov2013.pdf

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