Abstract
The paper tries to defend the Augustinian and Kantian position on the moral problem of lying against the popular opinion that this position must be rejected as an inhuman rigorism. The first part argues that Augustine and Kant do not intend to condemn entirely any kind of lying in any single case, which would be the task of judgment . Rather, they strive for a clarification of lying as a fundamental moral concept of language. Those concepts are not morally neutral, as consequentialist positions hold, but function rather as a kind of conceptual measure or compass for moral judgment. That means that single lies can be excusable or an inevitable evil. But under no circumstance do we have a right or even an obligation to lie. The second part shows how the moral prohibition against lying as a linguistic act can be argued for as Augustine and Kant do by reflection on the anthropological meaning of language for human existence. For this purpose, following the phenomenological tradition three meanings of language are distinguished: 1. language as object, 2. language as practice, 3. language as Sinnhorizont