Chapter Six
6.2.2 Deontology
Utilitarianism, it can be acceptable to do that which burdens or harms some, in order to benefit many others. As the character Spock from Star Trek once said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” Committed Utilitarians regard this as a strength of the theory (and rightly so). But this can sometimes mean that an unjust act could be compensated for by other consequences which produce enough benefit to outweigh the harm. Those who believe in any of the more rule-oriented moral views, such as the Ten Commandments or similar religious moral teachings, cannot logically accept that claim. On the rule-oriented view, no amount of utility could compensate and outweigh the harm caused by punishing an innocent person, for instance.
would ever trust anything anybody says, so when you tell your lie your listener would know perfectly well that it’s a lie. And that defeats the purpose of telling the lie in the first place. As another example, you might think it convenient to throw fast-food wrappings out your car window. But if everyone did that all the time, there would be huge pile-ups of litter on roadsides everywhere, as well as traffic hazards from flying garbage, and a terrible smell. Civic authorities would have to bring in workers and equipment to constantly clean it up, thus making the disposal of food waste less convenient for everyone. So, it is wrong to do it. Kant’s idea is that reason cannot consent to an action which, if it were a law for everyone, would make it impossible to do the action. Kant formulated a second, more pragmatic version of his moral principle, called the Practical Imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in yourself or in another, as an end in itself, never as a means to an end.” In this second formulation of the theory, Kant named an object of special concern, ‘humanity’, as a thing which deserves the utmost respect at all times. ‘Humanity’, here, means that which Kant thought made human beings special: our capacity for reason and free will. Kant thought that reason and freedom were intertwined with each other, and he thought they were so important that anything which exploits, reduces, interferes with, or subverts them is always wrong. He was not simply saying that one should complain or retaliate when someone tries to take your freedom away. Rather, it is a matter of respecting reason and freedom wherever you find it, ‘whether in yourself or in another’. A choice is always morally wrong if it exploits someone’s else’s freedom, or uses another person as a means to an end, presumably a selfish end. For example, you might think that buying a pack of chips in a shop uses the shopkeeper as a means to an end, but the shopkeeper is (presumably) freely exchanging his merchandise for your money. So there’s no moral problem. But exploiting the shopkeeper’s generosity to get a pack of chips for nothing is using his freedom as a means to an end, and thus intrinsically wrong. The 19th century Scottish philosopher William
6.2.2 Deontology Main authors: Immanuel Kant (1724-1778), W.D. Ross (1877-1971) Statement of the theory: The right thing to do is that which is in accord with one’s moral duty as determined by reason. The rightness of wrongness of the action is intrinsic to the action itself. Discussion: Duty-based or rule-based statements of ethics has been around for centuries, but the philosopher who did the most to lay out the logical structure of such statements was Immanuel Kant. As he saw it, the right thing to do has nothing to do with consequences and outcomes. It is the choice you make, the action in itself, which matters. And to be moral, the action has to be in accord with moral laws. So to figure out whether a choice you are about to make is in accord with moral law, he proposed a procedure called the Categorical Imperative: “Act on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it shall be a universal law.” Basically, the idea is to ask, what if this course of action was a moral law for everyone? Would it still be possible to do it? If some course of action became self-defeating if everyone did it, then you shouldn’t do it. For example, if you were considering telling a lie to someone, even an innocent and harmless one, then you should consider what would happen if everyone told lies, all the time. The result would be that no one
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