From the Right to Lie to the Responsible State: Reinterpreting Kant’s ‘Inquiring Murderer’ as a Theory of Responsible State

Kant’s essay On a Supposed Right to Lie has long been ridiculed as a failure of moral intuition, often summarized as a rigid command to "tell the truth even if it kills your friend." This paper challenges that traditional reading, arguing that the text is not a manual for personal virtue but a foundational blueprint for Public Right (Recht). By analyzing the distinction between 'prohibition' and 'non-right,' this study demonstrates that Kant’s primary concern was the allocation of responsibility (Imputation). Ultimately, this paper proposes a new definition of the modern state: Law is not merely the ethical minimum, but the specific domain where the State has institutionally assumed the responsibility for judgment and enforcement, thereby liberating the individual from the infinite weight of consequences—provided they remain within the law.