Deontology

Deontology
The

normative ethical position that judges the

morality of an action based on the action's
adherence to a rule or set of rules.
It is sometimes described as "duty" or "obligation" or
"rule" -based ethics, because rules "bind you to
your duty".
Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to
consequentialism and pragmatic ethics.
The term "deontological" was first used by C. D.
Broad in his book, Five Types of Ethical Theory in
1930.

Some Deontological philosophies:

Kantianism

/ Kantian ethics by Immanuel Kant

Moral Absolutism
Divine Command Theory
Contemporary Deontology

Kantianism
Immanuel Kant's theory of ethics is considered
deontological for several reasons.
Kant argues that to act in the morally right way,
people must act from duty.
Kant argued that it was not the consequences of
actions that make them right or wrong but the
motives of the person who carries out the action.
The Argument is that the highest good must be
both good in itself and good without
qualification.

Kantianism

The addition of that never makes a situation ethically

worse.
Things that are usually thought to be good, such as
intelligence, perseverance and pleasure, fail to be
either intrinsically good or good without qualification.

Eg. Pleasure appears to not be good without

qualification, because when people take pleasure in
watching someone suffer, this seems to make the
situation ethically worse. He concludes that there is only
one thing that is truly good: GOODWILL
Nothing in the worldindeed nothing even beyond the worldcan possibly
be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a
good will.

Kantianism
Consequences of an act of will cannot be used to
determine that the person has a good will:
Good

consequences could arise by accident.

Bad consequences could arise from an action that
was well-motivated.
A person has a good will when one acts out of
respect for the moral law.
Respect is a concept of a worth which thwarts selflove.

Kantianism
Kant's two significant formulations of the
categorical imperative are:
Act

only according to that maxim by which you

can also will that it would become a universal
law.
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity,
whether in your own person or in the person of
any other, never simply as a means, but always at
the same time as an end.

Moral absolutism
Some

deontologists are moral absolutists,

believing that certain actions are absolutely right
or wrong, regardless of the intentions /
consequences.
Immanuel Kant argued that the only absolutely
good thing is a good will.
Non-absolutist W. D. Ross: Consequences of an
action such as lying may sometimes make lying
the right thing to do.
Jonathan & Mark use the term "protected values"
when referring to values
governed by
deontological rules.

Divine command theory

The divine command theory is a cluster of related theories
that state that an action is right if God has decreed that it is
right.

Eighteenth-century Calvinists held that moral obligations

arise from God's commands.
It is a form of deontology
The rightness of any action depends upon that action
being performed because it is a duty, not because of
any good consequences arising from that action.
If God commands people not to work on Sabbath, then
people act rightly
If they do it because they are lazy, then their action is not
truly "right", even though the actual physical action is the
same.

Contemporary Deontology
One may harm in order to save more: If and only if the harm is an effect
or an aspect of the greater good itself.
Principle of Permissible Harm (Frances Kamm's):
It would be impermissible to kill one person to harvest his organs in order to
save the lives of five others.
Yet, we think it is morally permissible to divert a runaway trolley that would
otherwise kill five innocent and immobile people onto a side track where
one innocent and immobile person will be killed.
The moral difference between these cases expresses a constraint
identifying when we may not act to bring about good ends.
Contemporary deontologists: Thomas Nagel, Thomas Scanlon, Roger Scruton and
Frances Kamm.