“I am to make a deceitful promise in circumstances in which my situation is such that I am in real need of money and I know that I will never be able to pay it back in order to further my own personal advantage.” Kant claims that the universalization of this maxim results in a contradiction. What does Kant mean?

Hello. You forgot the answer options. The options are:

a) Kant means that a world where everyone makes deceitful promises would be a bad one.  b) Kant means that we cannot imagine a world where everyone makes deceitful promises, because the practice of promising presupposes trust and no one would trust anyone in a world where everyone makes deceitful promises.  c) Kant means that it is pointless to make a deceitful promise.  d) Kant means that it is impossible to conceive of a world in which all promises are offered with the intention of being broken, because a promise will only be accepted if all promises are kept. So, if one promise is broken, none will be accepted.  e) Kant means that on pains of irrationality we must never keep our promises.

b) Kant means that we cannot imagine a world where everyone makes deceitful promises, because the practice of promising presupposes trust and no one would trust anyone in a world where everyone makes deceitful promises.

Explanation:

With the above excerpt, Kant seeks to show how irrational a world where everyone makes misleading promises would be. This is because if in this world all people make deceptive promises, trust between people will be exterminated and no one will trust anyone. In this way, lying (related to deceptive promises) will be a law of nature. This will transform the world into an unbalanced environment, where deceitful promises would destroy themselves.

In short, we can say that Kant means that we cannot imagine a world in which everyone makes false promises, because the practice of promising presupposes trust and no one would trust anyone in a world in which everyone makes false promises.

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the right answer is a