© Michael Lacewing

Modern deontology

Deontologists believe that what is right or wrong is a matter of duty. We have moral duties to do things which it is right to do and moral duties not to do things which it is wrong to do. In contrast to consequentialists, deontologists deny that these duties are fixed (just) by the consequences of actions. Rather, it is something about any particular action that makes it right or wrong in itself. Different theories of deontology give different answers to what this might be, although all the most prominent theories connect duty and the discovery of our duties to reason. Natural law theorists argued that it is our duty to do what God commands, and that we can discover this through reasoning about the natural world and human nature. Kant argued that we can determine – in both the senses of ‘fix’ and ‘discover’ – our duties using his test of the Categorical Imperative, which is an exercise in ‘pure practical reason’. In this handout, I shall explore some more recent views.

A quick note on ‘rights’. Many theories of rights are deontological. Because rights entail duties, but not all duties entail rights, rights cover, and can be understood in terms of, a subset of duties. And so most of what is said below can equally be said about theories of rights as about theories of duties.

INTUITIONISMIntuitionists believe that we have to use our moral intuition to tell what makes an action right or wrong. Intuitionist deontologists differ from other intuitionists in maintaining that the reasons for or against doing an action can be quite various, and do not need to relate only to the consequences of the action or to a notion of a ‘good life’. W. D. Ross argued that it was self-evident that certain types of actions, which he named prima facie duties (The Right and the Good, 29), were right. He listed seven classes of prima facie duties: duties of fidelity (such as keeping a promise), duties of reparation (when we have done something wrong), duties of gratitude, duties of justice, duties of beneficence (helping others), duties of self-improvement, and duties of non-maleficence (not harming others). This list can’t be reduced to a single type of duty, such as maximizing happiness. But as a result, these duties can sometimes conflict with each other, and one may override the other. That is why Ross called them ‘prima facie duties’ – they are duties ‘at first sight’. In cases of conflict, one will give way and no longer be a duty in that situation. Ross argued that there are no hard and fast rules about this; we have to use our judgment in the situation in which we find ourselves.

Most philosophers believe that making and understanding self-evident judgments is an aspect of reasoning. A self-evident judgement has no other evidence or proof but its own plausibility. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone can immediately see that it is true. ‘Self-evident’ is not the same as ‘obvious’. Our ability to make these judgements needs to develop first,

and we need to consider the question very carefully. But if we do, we will see that the judgement is true. The difficulty with ‘self-evident’ judgements is that people disagree about whether they are true or not. Another famous intuitionist, G. E. Moore, thought it was self-evident that pleasure is good and that maximizing the good is right. Ross, on the other hand, thought it was self-evident that there are times when it is wrong to maximize pleasure. He argued that it was self-evident that certain dutiful actions, such as fulfilling a promise, are right. The problem is, because the judgements are supposed to be self-evident, we cannot give any further reasons for believing them.

But this doesn’t mean we can reject the idea of self-evidence. Suppose we could give reasons for thinking that pleasure is good, for example because it forms part of a flourishing life for human beings, or that keeping promises is a duty, for example because it respects human choice and dignity. Is it self-evident that being part of a flourishing life makes something good or that respecting human choice and dignity is right? If not, we need to give a further reason for this judgement. And we can ask the same question of any further reason we give. And so on, forever. It seems that if judgements about what is good are not self-evident, then judgements about what counts as a reason for thinking something is good must be. Self-evidence, then, is a general problem in metaethics.

Intuitionists such as Ross are similar to other deontologists in two ways. First, he maintains that our duties – what it is right to do – can’t be reduced to promoting something good, e.g. happiness; second, he believes that discovering our duties is a matter of reason. Ross and other intuitionists differ from other deontologists by arguing, first, that moral reason has an ‘intuitionist’ form; and second, that our duties can’t be reduced to a single overarching system or reason, such as the Categorical Imperative.

CONTRACTARIANISMContractarians believe that we can give an overarching form to moral reasons: morality derives, in some way, from what people would agree to if making a contract with each about how to behave. Different theorists give different accounts of what the conditions for making the contract should be, and of how morality derives from this contract. Here are two famous contemporary examples.

John Rawls’ theory, in A Theory of Justice, is only a theory of justice, which does not cover all of morality. We can use his ideas, however, to get a general idea of how contractarianism might develop a theory of at least our most important duties. I shall adopt his ideas to this end as I present them. If we were agreeing to a system of rules to live by, what rules would we agree to? If we can find principles that everyone can agree to, then, Rawls argues, those principles will be just; and we may ask what else might moral duties consist in? Kant argued that moral rules must be universalizable; Rawls is arguing that they should receive universal agreement. But to obtain this agreement fairly, we must assume that we are to agree on these principles

without knowing what our position in society will be. In this way, any possible bias we might have towards principles that favoured ourselves, e.g. our sex, race, or wealth, will be eliminated. Given that everyone is to agree to these rules, but people also have different ideas about what is good in life, we shouldn’t know this either.

Rawls calls this position of choice the ‘original position’; and in it, people are prevented from considering what their personal, actual position in society and views might be by a ‘veil of ignorance’. Of course, Rawls is not supposing that anyone has ever made decisions on this basis. The original position is simply a hypothetical thought experiment that seeks to ‘make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of justice, and therefore on these principles themselves’ (A Theory of Justice, 18). The principles (of justice, of morality) we agree upon will then be – by definition – the right rules of morality. How much of morality we can derive in this way is unclear. But at least for those areas in which it works, an act is morally right if it accords with those ‘principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality’ (12).

Rawls restrictions on the ‘original position’ are very controversial, and many philosophers have argued that it is not an appropriate model for how we should reach the rules by which we should live. For example, it is too individualistic and its conception of reason presupposes that we are self-interested. A more recent contractarian theory avoids these difficulties by not describing such constraints on reasoning.

Thomas Scanlon argues that ‘[A]n act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people…who were moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject’ (What We Owe to Each Other, 4). To evaluate an act, then, we must first be willing to find principles of behaviour which no one else can reasonably reject if they are also looking for such principles and are willing to be guided by ‘reasonable rejection’. If an act is permitted by a principle that could be reasonably rejected by such people, then it is wrong. If principles that permit the act can’t be reasonably rejected, then the act is not wrong. Scanlon’s theory, then, turns on the idea of ‘reasonable rejection’.

To answer this question, Scanlon develops an intuitionist theory of moral reasoning. The exhortation to ‘be reasonable’ is normally a request to recognize as a reason some consideration that is being overlooked. And so ‘judgments about what it is or is not reasonable to do or think are relative to a specified body of information and a specified range of reasons, both of which may be less than complete’ (32). A certain general aim is always presupposed, and a claim made about what reasons there are, given this aim. ‘Much of our practical thinking is concerned with figuring out which considerations are relevant to a given decision, that is to say, with

interpreting, adjusting, and modifying [a] more general framework of principles of reasoning.’ (53) For example, if I am considering whether to play to win, one consideration that will often be a reason to do so is that I enjoy winning. But this will simply not be a reason if I am playing against my 4-year old son. ‘The process here is first to clarify what sort of reason [a certain kind of consideration] is supposed to be and then to see whether the initial reaction to take this as a reason stands the test of reflection” (66). If this seems unsatisfactorily vague, Scanlon argues, as we saw moral realists do (see ‘Moral realism’), that, despite the difficulties with the idea of a ‘reason’, we clearly need it – because we need it in uncontroversial areas like science.

DEONTOLOGY IN PRACTICAL ETHICSDeontologists sometimes argue for the plausibility of their normative theory on the basis of how it deals with practical issues. Our intuitions over abortion or euthanasia, e.g. on the distinction between active and passive killing, say, simply don’t fit a consequentialist (or virtue ethics) framework. Here we can see how another famous ‘principle’, the ‘doctrine of double effect’ gives support to deontology.

In essence, the doctrine claims that there is an important moral distinction between a harmful effect occurring as a side effect of pursuing a good end and causing the harm as a means to the good end. Sometimes this is expressed as the view that it is permitted to cause a harmful effect we do not intend, but is an inevitable result of doing something good (if the good thing sufficiently outweighs the bad), but it is wrong to intend the harmful effect, even if we intend it only in order to achieve the good result. An example in the debate on euthanasia is that it is alright for a doctor to inject a large dose of morphine into a patient to relieve their pain, knowing that it will make them die sooner, but it is wrong to give that injection, intending to kill them (even if their death is seen as the means to relieving their pain). A famous case for the philosophical literature is that it is alright to divert a runaway train from a track on which there are five people onto a track on which there is one with the intention of saving the five people. However, it would be wrong to do so with the intention of killing the one; and it would wrong to throw someone in front of the train to stop it in order to save the five. If these examples, and therefore the distinction, are persuasive, then this supports deontology (at least over consequentialism), since the simplest way of understanding the distinction is in terms of what types of acts we may or may not do.