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Deontology 1

"Deontology" comes from the greek "Dei" - meaning "one must"

It's talking about what you must do

So deontology is "backward looking" - looks at underlying rules and principles of actions

Deontology is rules and principles. Its the rule underlying the action, not the actor (that would be virtue ethics)

The consequences of an action in deontology are less important. It's the kind of action that matters.

You can split actions into ones you should/shouldn't/may perform.

And it's rights and duties that help determine what an action should be split into.

Actions can become:

  • Obligatory
  • Forbidden/Impermissible
  • Permissible
  • Supererogatory - Praiseworthy but not obligatory

So a duty is what we ought to do. The action is the doing. The intention is the reason you acted.

The intention is the core of moral agency in deontology, as you can always be held responsible for them. Because you're focusing on actions/intentions, many deontologists accept the acts/omissions distinction + doctrine of double effect.

As deontology is talking about duty, it allows you to have relationships that consequentialism doesn't (family/society/etc), you're able to focus on other things than simply maximising the good. So most deontology theories rcognise "moral constraints", "special relationships", "moral permissions".

Where does the duty come from? This is a big souce of differences in deontological theories.

  • "Divine Command" - rules given by God
  • "Natural Law" - rules from functions that things have in nature
  • "Intuitionism" - rules from reflecting on our responses to particular cases
  • "Social Contract" - Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, Scanlon
  • "Abstract Reason" - Kant

Another big divide is what the duties are, and are they "absolute", or "defeasible"

Kant

Immanuel Kant is the exponent of "absolutist deontology"

The principle in absolutist is once you have your rules, you follow them absolutely. "Goodness is unconditional"

Bullet points for Kant:

  • Universalisable Maxims
  • Hypothetical vs Categorical Imperatives
  • Treating people as ends in themselves
  • Practical Rationality

Practical Rationality

"a critical thought on what to do in any situation". Reason should allow is to work out what we should and should not do. Practical rationality generates our imperatives, our reasons to do certain things.

Hypothetical and Categorical Imperatives

Hypothetical

A command that applies if you have a certain goal

In order to get x you should do y

Categorical

A command that applies unconditionally

You should do y

For Kant, all categorical imperatives are based from THE Categorical Imperative

The Categorical Imperative:

Version 1 (CI1)

"Act only on the maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law"

(A maxim is a principle, it's the intention behind the act)

(Willing here requires the 'good will')

So the categorical imperative depends on the intention

If the maxim is not universalisable, then the action is prohibited

Testing a maxim

Test One: Contradiction in conception

This means, would universalising this princple, break the situation which allows it to happen.

Test Two: Contradiction in will

Did I really mean this?

Duties

Kant feels the thing implying worth on your actions would be your duty.

Duties can be: - Imperfect - You've a duty to do it in general, not any particular occasion - Perfect - You've a duty to do it only for certain people

Perfect duties are ones with corresponding "rights". Rights don't exist in consequentialism. You have a right not to be attacked, I have a duty not to attack you.

Imperfect duties are where there's no corresponding rights.

These imperfect/perfect duties tie into how maxims fail.

If a maxim fails due to a contradiction in conception, it's because of a Perfect Duty

If a maxim fails because of a contradiction in will it's because of an Imperfect Duty

Version 2 (CI 2)

"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, the same time as an end"

Humans have their own rational selves, that create their own ends, have a type of value that demands respect.

People can be treated as a means, but never as a "mere means". You need to respect thie aims and their values

Kant's Positives

  • Recognises the seperateness of persons - allowing some sense of justice
  • Doesn't require any calculation, everything's based on the categorical imperative (unlike the calculations of consequentialism)
  • Recognises the improtance of Human Dignity

Kant's Negatives

  • How to universalise a maxim
  • Problems with absolutism
  • Human Nature - Kant is a rationalist who devalues inclination, if you're acting from inclination you aren't expressing human dignity.

People respond to this by giving up the universilisation test. Use contractualism insted(Rawls, Scanlon) or intuitionism (Ross)

People use defeasible (pro tanto, prima facie), instead of absolute duties

Deontology 2

WD Ross

How do we fix the problems of Kant?

WD ROSS and his ethics of "pluralist deontology" - rather than one fundemental idea (the categorical imperative), maybe there should be multiple ideas

WD Ross thinks there are competing moral duties: not harming, doing good, fidelity, self improvement, justice, etc.

These are self evident if you think about good treatment to others. These "prima facie" moral duties are mini absolutes

"Prima facie" - at first glance - on the face of it, its the first thing that seems evident.

But there might be occasions where these duties don't apply.

"Pro tanto" - these duties always apply, but when competing you can pick which one applies that most

Prima facie and protanto are used interchangeably, but not exactly the same, but it doesn't matter too much

So a value can have valence (whether it's good or bad), and a weight (how good or bad, allowing you to compare against it)

Problems with Ross

Are prima facie duties really prima facie? or are they just our cultural background and what's taught to us? intuition might not be that reliable

does the appeal to judging different competing prima facie arguments, allow us to have our actual duty too intdeterminate. so multiple different people might weight this up with multiple differnt ways

Rawls

Rawls was a contractualist. Basically there's an unwritten contract between members of a society, to work towards a moral consensus (ill be good to you, and youll be good to me). there's some self interest going on here

What rawls did was determine how we should decide what's ethical.

He thought principles of justice are rules that people would choose in the "original position". All deciders of a position, do not know what position that they would be in, in a potential society. So ultimately in this "veil of ignorance", they would pick a position acceptable to all.

Problems with Rawls, is that it focuses more on socio-economic structure, not really as much on individual behaviours in current societies.

Another problem, is can we really put people in an original position, so you can't imagine what's going to be

Scanlon

Was a different contractualist "what we owe to each other"

It's probably more important to agree what's wrong rather than what's right.

It dependents on the circumstances.

It's a variety of different social contracts we could create. We know somthing is wrong, if there's no rational reasonable justification that can be put in place to defend it.

So what kind of principles, do people who are similarly motivated, not be able to reasonably reject.

A problem with scanlon, is "wrongness" is determined by being something that cannot reasonably be justified. But surely wrongness shouldnt depend on how good people are at creating an arguement.

So that doesn't give us a single right.

Second problem is it's very hard to find thing that someone couldnt rationally justify. If you leave it just to justifications, you can justify anything.

Principlism (Beauchamp and Childress)

These are the 4 principles - Autonomy - Beneficence - Non-maleficence - Justice (to be fair)

They claim that this is not a moral theory, more a set of "mid-level principles"

A common morality, (the hodgepog of general rules and duties), the ones that are most relevant to medical ethics.

Being a common morality, of mid levels, means hopefully can be shared by people with diffferent philosophical views. But has a limited value in addressing difficult questions, and different people can determine different results. It is widely used

They had the idea of specification, to specify waht they meant by each principle. An ethical dilemma may be shown to only apply by one principle.

They also described "balancing", where conflict remains, assess the importance of each principle in each specific case

But similar problems to Ross, it's very broad and doesn't give specific action guidance. There's so much room to interpret each specific case. Are they just a checklist of useful values.

Are these vague principles? Are these principles common across all cultures? Are they really common though? Or do different cultures have different ideas of what autonomy or non-maleficence are?

And balancing and specification can be very contentious, which principle do you prioritise? and what do you do if two people have different ideas of the priorities.

Does their american values put too high an emphasis on autonomy?

Rule Consequentialism

This brings consequentialism and deontology together.

Right action is defined by rules that general adoption would maximise the good.

These rules might have constraints, or duties of special relationships

It's not too demanding, and generally avoid horrible consequences

The problem with multiple exceptions put in place for a rule, the more you put in, the closer it gets back to just plain act consequentialism

And what do you do in rule consequentialism when you think you are following a rule, when you think this time it wont provide the best situation

Act/omission Distinction

Is there a fundamental difference between acting to do something wrong, and failing to act to do something right?

Why are they different? There are different duties: strict and weak, there's a strict duty against killing, but only a weak duty to help strangers

Double Effect

Is the other loophole in deontology. Something would normally be forbidden to bring about intentionally, but would be permissible if unintended but forseen outcome.

  1. The act itself must be good, or at least morally neutral
  2. You must intend, only the good thing (the bad thing may be foreseen, and tolerated, but it must not be intended)
  3. The bad effect must not be the means to the good effect
  4. The good effect must outweigh the bad effect

The problem is that in the DDE, how do you know the agent's intentions? And we have mixed intentions a lot!