Jordan Peterson and the Murderer at the Door

In his "Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Atheists" Jubilee episode, Dr. Peterson was confronted with a classic challenge to Kantian ethics. His response was...odd.

In an essay here in 2023, I noted that, “When [Jordan] Peterson is asked point blank about his religious beliefs, he tends to say strange things.”

Many people have noticed the same thing in the three weeks since the Jubilee YouToube channel posted their “Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Atheists” video. It was originally billed as “1 Christian vs. 20 Atheists (ft. Jordan Peterson)” but Jubilee changed the title a few hours after posting it, presumably because Peterson refused to directly answer questions from the 20 atheists that would have shed light on the appropriateness of the original title. Questions like, for example, “Are you a Christian?”

As of this moment, that video has 6.2 million views. The vast majority of commentary it’s generated seems to be focused on Peterson’s evasiveness about whether or in what sense he even believes in God, never mind the specific doctrines of Christianity. I said what I had to say about all of that in the 2023 essay, though, so I’ll (mostly) skip over Peterson the theologian today. Instead, I want to talk about Peterson the moral philosopher.

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The Jubilee episode is divided into sections where the atheists take turns challenging Peterson on various specific claims he’s made, like, “Atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they're rejecting” and “Everybody worships something, including atheists, even though they might not know it.”

The exchange I’m interested in comes during the discussion of his claim that, “Morality and purpose can't be found within science.” Unlike the rest of his claims, this one is true (though not for the reason Peterson thinks it is). As David Hume pointed out, there’s a logical gap between “is” and “ought.” Factual claims of any kind, whether about the entities studied by the natural sciences or about supernatural deities, can’t entail anything whatsoever about what people should do or what makes our lives valuable. That’s just a separate issue. Fact-premises can play a role in arguments for value-conclusions, but they can never make it all the way to that finish line without the assistance of value-premises.

In any case, an atheist named Parker gets his turn to chat with Peterson during this segment. Parker starts out strong, saying that “you don’t have to say that” morality “comes from science to be an atheist.” Atheism is a position on the existence of God, not a position on the nature of morality. This in turn leads to Parker explaining his own position on God and making the classic mistake of trying to get Peterson to explain his position. This, of course, leads to the two of them splashing around in exactly the kind of waters Peterson retreats to whenever he’s in danger of having to commit himself on this subject.

Parker: So do you believe in the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good notion of God?

Peterson: What do you mean by “believe”?

Parker: You think it to be true.

Peterson: That's a circular definition. What do you mean “believe”?

Parker: How is that circular?

Peterson: Because you added no content to the answer by substituting the word “true” for “believe.”

Parker: I said “think it to be true”….

Etc.

Again:

Go read the 2023 essay for more on the way that just this one particular subject tends to render Peterson hopelessly confused about what words like “believe” and “true” mean. The interesting part comes next.

Peterson switches gears, saying that you only truly believe something if you’d “stake your life” on it. That makes it sound like he’s conflating belief with absolute certainty, which would be bad enough, but it gets much weirder.

Parker: What do you mean by that?

Peterson: You live for it and you die for it! That's what I mean by that. It isn't something that you say. It isn't something that's associated with logical consistency. It's not declarative. It's not propositional. It's not a figment of your imagination. It's the presupposition of your attention and your action…

There are so many layers of confusion here it’s hard to know how seriously to take any of it. What, for example, could it even mean to say that beliefs don’t have anything to do with logical consistency? Is that his way of saying that there’s nothing irrational or bad about having logically inconsistent beliefs? Or is he saying that it’s impossible for beliefs to be logically inconsistent with each other? Or…?

In any case, Parker (probably wisely) ignores most of these claims and just hones in on the bit about how Peterson doesn’t think you really believe something if you wouldn’t die for it.

Parker: Like, I could believe it is the case that this pen exists but if someone threatened my life, right, I would lie in order to be able to save my life…I think you would do that too.

Peterson: Don’t be so sure!

Parker: You wouldn't lie to save your life?

Peterson: How much do you know about me? I didn't lie to save my career. I didn't lie to save my clinical practice.

This is, of course, Peterson taking refuge in his culture-war fixations. (“Didn’t lie” is his hysterical way of talking about things like his refusal to use preferred pronouns.) Putting all of that aside, though, this line of questioning leads Parker to ask Peterson if he thinks lying is always wrong. That’s where things get interesting.

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There have certainly been thinkers less confused than Jordan Peterson who’ve thought that lying was always wrong, even when the consequences of telling the truth would be disastrous. The philosopher most closely associated with that position is Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative comes in a few different formulations. The Formula of Universal Law says that you should only act on maxims that you could will to be universal laws. The Formula of Humanity says that you should never treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, as a mere means to an end rather than an end in itself. There are other formulations, but we can just stick with those two.

Kant insists that these aren’t two substantively different principles but two ways of expressing the same moral standard. There’s a lot of debate about how to understand that claim and whether it’s true. Whatever you make of all that, though, either can ground a prohibition against lying.

Generally speaking, when we lie to people, we want them to believe our lies. Otherwise, what would be the point? You lie to your girlfriend about what happened at the party because if she knows the truth she’ll get mad at you. You lie to your creditors about your financial resources so they’ll lend you more money. Etc. But if everyone lied in these situations, no one would believe the lies, and none of these purposes would be served by lying. So, it’s impossible to (coherently) will what you’re doing in these situations to be universalized. And more interestingly (if also more fuzzily), lying crosses Kant’s line between using someone as a mean to your ends and reducing them to the level of a mere means to those ends. Telling someone the truth and urging them to do what you want anyway is still using them as a means to achieve your goals, but it takes them seriously as more than that.

Crucially, Kant thinks the moral law should be followed for its own sake, not because it’s a nice thing to do or because it will necessarily have good consequences. His moral framework allows no room for suspending the Categorical Imperative from time to time to avoid bad outcomes.

During Kant’s lifetime, French philosopher Benjamin Constant made an obvious objection to Kantian absolutism. Imagine that a murderer comes to your door, demanding to know if you know the whereabouts of his intended victim (and you do). Could it really be morally wrong to lie to him to prevent a murder?

In a notorious reply called “On the Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns,” Kant bites the bullet. Yes, it’s always wrong to lie. Even to the murder at the door. The fact that the murderer is planning to violate the moral law in a different way is irrelevant to your duty not to violate the moral law by lying to him.

Plenty of latter-day Kantians have found this response embarrassing, with some even going so far as to suggest that we shouldn’t take it very seriously since “Kant wrote his lying essay late in life, and the essay is indicative of his cranky mood and declining intellectual capacities.” Even if we put aside the essay, though, it’s very hard to see how a moral right to lie to the murderer at the door can be reconciled with the basic principles of Kantian morality.

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In the decades since World War II, discussions about the murderer at the door have often updated the villain of the thought experiment to being a Nazi at the door, asking about hiding Jews. I think the first time I ever heard this case being discussed, that’s how it was presented. And in the years since Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglorious Basterds came out in 2009, I’ve probably shown the opening scene at the farmhouse to introductory ethics classes a couple of dozen times, since it’s such a perfect dramatization of the point.

Sometimes students struggling to come up with a defense of the universal wrongness of lying in the face of “murderer at the door”-type examples will say that, as long as you aren’t lying, it can be morally acceptable to say something misleading but technically true in order to throw the murderer off the scent. There are two problems with this. The first is that it isn’t clear to me that the Categorical Imperative allows intentionally misleading people. And even putting that aside, the bigger problem is that saying misleading but technically true things only works if the murderer is an idiot. One of the things that makes the Nazi Jew-hunter in Inglorious Basterds, Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz), such a compelling and entertaining and creepy villain is that he’s very smart. The second you started constructing coy, technically true sentences like, “Well, I can’t be sure where the Jews are,” he’d just take that as, “Yes, I’m hiding some Jews,” and he’d have his men shoot you and ransack the farmhouse. The French farmer’s only hope of saving the family hiding under the floorboards in that scene would be to lie elaborately and convincingly and charismatically. And the problem for Kantian ethics is that it seems so obvious that the farmer has not only a moral right but a moral obligation to try. Anything else would be monstrous.

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The opening of Parker’s exchange with Peterson on this is worth quoting at length:

Parker: Can there ever be a circumstance logically that lying could save someone?

Peterson: Yeah, and if you're steeped in sin you're likely to live in circumstances like that!

Parker: I'll give you an example. If you're in, like, Nazi Germany and it is the case that there's, like, Jewish people in your attic…

Peterson: I know that example.

Parker: …and you're trying to protect them, would you lie to the Nazis?

Peterson: I would have done everything I bloody well could so I wouldn't be in that situation to begin with!

Parker: Would you lie?

Peterson: It’s a hypothetical, and it’s not answerable.

Parker: You can’t answer hypotheticals?

Peterson (visibly bristling): No, I can't answer a hypothetical like that…

Parker: Why?

Peterson: Because it's…

(Pause)

Peterson: Look. Don't play games.

Parker: I'm not playing games.

Peterson: Yes, you are!

Parker: I'm just saying…

Peterson: If you present me with an intractable moral choice that's stripped of context, and you back me into a corner, you're playing games. I just told you I would do everything that I could to make sure that I'm never in that situation. By the time you've got there you've made so many mistakes that there's nothing you can do that isn't a sin.

Parker: Being born in Nazi Germany and trying to protect people that you care about [is a sin]? Like, there could be a Jewish friend that you have and you want to protect them…

Peterson: I think you should just give up on that line of questioning.

Peterson’s initial response is just him failing the Breakfast Question. (Y’know: “How would you feel right now if you hadn’t had breakfast this morning?” “But I did have breakfast this morning!”) He tries to dignify the evasion a little by claiming that the hypothetical is “stripped of context,” but he doesn’t even give us a hint about how different ways of filling out the context might change his answer.

And what context is supposed to be missing? Plenty of real people in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s did face pretty much exactly this choice. Sure, most of them were probably never asked point blank “are there Jews hiding in your house?” (You’re really in trouble if things actually get to that point!) But there was surely no way of pulling off hiding Jews for any substantial period of time without telling many lies to many people. The same goes for white people involved in the Underground Railroad in the antebellum U.S., etc. “Imagine you were in exactly the same situation as all those people” seems like all the context anyone could ask for in order to answer, “Would you think you had a moral right (or even obligation) to lie like they all did?”

Any normal boring person would say “yes, of course, what all those people did was heroic.” If Peterson disagrees, that’s interesting! And it does kinda sound like he disagrees. (We’ll get back to that.) But the next part of the exchange is too amazing not to quote.

Peterson: I think you should just give up on that line of questioning.

Parker: Give up on trying to clarify your position?

Peterson: I did clarify…

Parker: Are you uncomfortable with me asking this question? It's just a basic hypothetical. Like, I could ask you?

Peterson (bristling with indignation): It’s just a basic hypothetical?

Parker: Like, I could ask you…

Peterson: Just a basic hypothetical? Where where you put Jews lives at stake in Nazi Germany? That’s just a basic hypothetical?

Peterson’s odd but real charisma has always had a lot to do with his ability to go from zero to furiously angry (or from zero to weeping) in sixty seconds. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of many things he has stylistically in common with classical tent-revival preachers. I’m pretty sure he just sees the shape of something he can wax indignant about here, without even quite knowing himself what specifically is supposed to be objectionable. But it is fun to take his indignation seriously.

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Indulge me in that for a moment.

Here’s the question:

What would Dr. Peterson have to believe for his indignation to make sense?

Does he think constructing a hypothetical situation actually puts the lives of real people in jeopardy? Presumably not! It’s just barely possible he thinks we have moral obligations to fictional characters in thought experiments not to put them in disturbing situations. This is, after all, a guy with a long history of insisting that, for example, there’s some sense in which dragons are real, so I wouldn’t be too quick to rule out his believing in some weird metaphysical in-between zone where not-quite-real things experience some sort of being and can be harmed by us imagining the wrong things about them.

Putting these exotic possibilities aside, though…maybe Peterson just believes it’s disrespectful to the victims of past atrocities to casually bring up their suffering in the course of clarifying people’s positions on related issues? But, if so, I have a hard time reconciling that with his habit of ranting about bread lines and gulags every time anyone suggests that we should strive toward a society with less economic inequality.

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Eventually, through sheer persistence, Parker gets Peterson to (sort of) answer the question. Here’s the answer:

Parker: You're not answering this hypothetical because you know it shows that you clearly would lie to save someone’s life.

Peterson: I’m answering it. In a way you don’t find acceptable.

Parker: Obviously! Because I care about truth.

Peterson: I wouldn’t be in that scenario!

Parker: Obviously, right, logically, because that's already happened. Like, that's in the past. You don't have a time travel device. We're bringing this logical hypothetical up to show you that in some circumstances that do happen within the real world you would lie to save people's lives so your definition of truth isn't actually how we're typically using it so, what you're trying to do is, you're trying to muddy the waters when I ask you like "Do you believe this do you think this to be true?" So you don't actually have to answer the questions….

Peterson: I can imagine that I was in a situation where the best I could do, as a consequence of my previous mistakes, was to tell the least amount of lie I could manage.

Parker: Ok…

Peterson: But that would likely indicate that I had made all sorts of catastrophic errors on my way there!

Pressing his advantage, Parker makes a heroic effort to relate this back to the original subject and show Peterson that he’s being inconsistent. (To be fair to Peterson, this means Parker is disregarding Peterson’s claim earlier in their conversation that truth has “nothing to do with” consistency.)

Parker: OK, so you would lie to save someone’s life. And you do believe it to be true in that circumstance, even though you, like, lied in that scenario.

Peterson: Not without the context that I put it in.

Parker: You were not willing to die for it. You were not willing to let other people die for it, so that’s not what you see to be true then. Seemingly?

Peterson: you're doing exactly what I said you were doing at the beginning of the conversation! You're generating an impossible restricted hypothetical with no precursors to back me into a corner.

Parker: How is it impossible? Is there something contradictory about it?

At this point, Peterson is saved by the bell. A buzzer goes off, and it’s the next atheist’s turn to talk to him.

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Parker is obviously correct that Peterson doesn’t really believe that it’s impossible to believe something without being willing to die for it, and that saying he did was just a way of avoiding giving a direct answer to the direct questions about God and Christianity. But again, to whatever extent we can separate them, I’m interested in thinking here about Peterson the moral philosopher, not Peterson the theologian. What exactly is Peterson saying about the murderer/Nazi at the door scenario?

It sounds like he’s (just) pulling back from going Full Kantian by saying that there are cases where lying just a little might be less bad than not lying at all. But he won’t concede that there can be cases of completely morally blameless (and indeed outright admirable) lying.

But…why not?

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Peterson’s suggestion seems to be that the approximate structure of any situation in which lying would be the least-bad option would be like cases where someone willfully makes two incompatible promises so whatever they do involves breaking at least one of them. In situations like that, we can argue about which promise it would be worse to break and thus figure out which course of action is the least bad, but either way their promise-breaking is downstream of doing something they shouldn’t have done (make both promises).

But, of course, that’s not at all the sort of thing that would be going on in the case of a gentile in Nazi-occupied Europe hiding a Jewish family in the attic or under the floorboards. If you are, for example, a random citizen of the Netherlands (or even a random citizen of Germany), presumably you in particular didn’t commit a “sin” that led to Hitler ruling over your country and SS officers swarming around searching for hiding Jews. Should we read all of Peterson’s references to “sin” and “mistakes” as a matter of the individual seemingly righteous gentiles in these countries partaking of some sort of collective sin or mistake by their entire nation? If so, that’s hard to reconcile with Peterson’s constant homilies on the glories of individuality, individualism, and individual self-authorship.

Alternatively, we could read him as holding something like Catholic philosopher Peter Geach’s view. As I understand him, Geach doesn’t deny that we can construct logically coherent hypotheticals where moral duties collide in the way Parker assumes in his exchange with Peterson. He just denies that God would let such a situation arise.

In his book God and the Soul, Geach writes:

If God is rational, he does not command the impossible; if God governs all events by his providence, he can see to it that circumstances in which a man is inculpably faced by a choice between forbidden acts do not occur. Of course such circumstances (with the clause ‘and there is no way out’ written into their description) are consistently describable; but God’s providence could ensure that they do not in fact arise.

If we assume this is Peterson’s background assumption, the word “inculpably” could be a clue about his (and Geach’s) view. At first glance, Geach seems to be mistaken in a very basic and very bizarre ways about what kinds of situations have demonstrably come up in the real world. But he could have a way of squaring his claim with the evidence. Perhaps God did let some gentiles land in situations where they had to either lie or let Jews be dragged off to Dachau, but He doesn’t let that happen to anyone who hasn’t done something to deserve the punishment of facing a moral dilemma.

Perhaps all the people in Nazi-occupied Europe we’d normally celebrate as heroes were, as Peterson says, “steeped in sin.” Hiding Jews? Part of an underground resistance cell? Spying for the allies? Any of those options involves telling many, many lies to cover up what you’re doing. And no one could be “inculpably” faced with a situation where they had to violate one moral duty to fulfill others.

If we assume that Peterson holds this Geach-ish view, that might explain his insistence that he himself would never be in that situation. He thinks he isn’t sinful enough for such a trial to be visited upon him.

If that is his view, it’s the kind of thing it would be interesting to hear Peterson say explicitly, in so many words. Then again, it could only be his view if he actually believed “in the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good notion of God.” And to answer that question, we’d have to know what it means to, like, believe things, which is apparently a big mystery.