The Law Tells Us What We Can Do; Ethics Tells Us

Well-nigh duty-based ethics

Duty-based or Deontological ethics

Deontological (duty-based) ethics are concerned with what people do, not with the consequences of their actions.

• Do the right thing.
• Exercise it because it's the right thing to practise.
• Don't do wrong things.
• Avert them because they are wrong.

Under this grade of ethics you can't justify an activeness past showing that it produced good consequences, which is why it'southward sometimes called 'non-Consequentialist'.

The word 'deontological' comes from the Greek word deon, which means 'duty'.

Duty-based ethics are usually what people are talking well-nigh when they refer to 'the principle of the affair'.

Duty-based ideals teaches that some acts are right or incorrect because of the sorts of things they are, and people have a duty to act accordingly, regardless of the adept or bad consequences that may be produced.

Some kinds of action are incorrect or right in themselves, regardless of the consequences.

Deontologists live in a universe of moral rules, such as:

• It is wrong to kill innocent people
• Information technology is incorrect to steal
• It is wrong to tell lies
• It is right to go on promises

Someone who follows Duty-based ethics should do the right thing, fifty-fifty if that produces more than harm (or less practiced) than doing the incorrect thing:

People accept a duty to do the right thing, even if it produces a bad result.

So, for example, the philosopher Kant thought that it would be wrong to tell a lie in guild to save a friend from a murderer.

If nosotros compare Deontologists with Consequentialists we tin run into that Consequentialists begin by because what things are skilful, and identify 'right' deportment as the ones that produce the maximum of those practiced things.

Deontologists appear to exercise information technology the other way around; they showtime consider what actions are 'right' and proceed from there. (Actually this is what they exercise in practice, merely it isn't really the starting point of deontological thinking.)

Then a person is doing something adept if they are doing a morally right action.

Good and bad points

Proficient points of duty-based ethics

• emphasises the value of every human existence
  • Duty-based ethical systems tend to focus on giving equal respect to all human beings.
  • This provides a ground for man rights - information technology forces due regard to exist given to the interests of a single person fifty-fifty when those are at odds with the interests of a larger group.
• says some acts are always incorrect
  • Kantian duty-based ideals says that some things should never be washed, no matter what skilful consequences they produce. This seems to reflect the way some man beings think.
  • Rossian duty-based ethics modified this to allow various duties to be balanced, which, information technology could be argued, is an even better fit to the style we think.
• provides 'certainty'
  • Consequentialist ethical theories bring a caste of uncertainty to ethical decision-making, in that no-one tin exist sure about what consequences will issue from a detail action, because the future is unpredictable.
  • Duty-based ethics don't suffer from this problem because they are concerned with the activity itself - if an activity is a correct action, then a person should do it, if it'southward a incorrect action they shouldn't practise it - and providing there is a clear set of moral rules to follow and so a person faced with a moral choice should be able to take decisions with reasonable certainty.
  • Of course things aren't that clear cut. Sometimes consequentialist theories can provide a fair degree of certainty, if the consequences are easily predictable.
  • Furthermore, dominion-based consequentialism provides people with a ready of rules that enable them to take moral decisions based on the sort of act they are contemplating.
• deals with intentions and motives
  • Consequentialist theories don't pay direct attention to whether an deed is carried out with good or bad intentions; nearly people call back these are highly relevant to moral judgements.
  • Duty-based ethics can include intention in at least 2 ways...
  • If a person didn't intend to do a item incorrect act - it was an accident maybe - then from a deontological point of view we might think that they hadn't done anything deserving of criticism. This seems to fit with ordinary thinking almost ethical issues.
  • Ethical rules can be framed narrowly so as to include intention.

Bad points of duty-based ethics

• absolutist
  • Duty-based ethics sets absolute rules. The just way of dealing with cases that don't seem to fit is to build a list of exceptions to the rule.
• allows acts that make the world a less adept place
  • Because duty-based ethics is not interested in the results information technology can pb to courses of action that produce a reduction in the overall happiness of the globe.
  • Most people would find this didn't fit with their overall idea of ideals:

...it is hard to believe that it could ever be a duty deliberately to produce less good when we could produce more than...

A C Ewing, The Definition of Good, 1947

• hard to reconcile conflicting duties
  • Duty-based ideals doesn't deal well with the cases where duties are in conflict.

Kantian duty-based ethics

Kantian duty-based ethics

Immanuel Kant ©

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was arguably i of the greatest philosophers of all time.

Kant idea that it was possible to develop a consistent moral organization by using reason.

If people were to call up about this seriously and in a philosophically rigorous manner, Kant taught, they would realise that at that place were some moral laws that all rational beings had to obey simply because they were rational beings, and this would utilize to any rational beings in any universe that might ever be:

The supreme principle of morality would have an extremely wide scope: one that extended not only to all rational human beings but to any other rational beings who might exist - for instance, God, angels, and intelligent extraterrestrials.

Samuel J. Kerstein, Kant'south Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality, 2002

Kant taught (rather optimistically) that every rational human being could work this out for themselves and so did not need to depend on God or their community or anything else to observe what was right and what was wrong. Nor did they demand to wait at the consequences of an act, or who was doing the activeness.

Although he expressed himself in a philosophical and quite difficult way, Kant believed that he was putting forward something that would help people deal with the moral dilemmas of everyday life, and provide all of u.s.a. with a useful guide to interim rightly.

What is practiced?

Although Kantian ideals are usually spoken of in terms of duty and doing the right thing, Kant himself thought that what was expert was an essential part of ideals.

Kant asked if there was annihilation that everybody could rationally agree was ever skilful. The only matter that he thought satisfied this test was a proficient will:

Information technology is impossible to conceive anything in the world, or even out of information technology, which tin can exist taken as skillful without limitation, salvage only a proficient will.

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

All Kant means is that a good will alone must be good in whatever context it may be found.

It is non good in one context and bad in another.
It is non good as a means to one end and bad as a means to another.
It is not proficient if somebody happens to want it and bad if he doesn't.
Its goodness is non conditioned past its relation to a context or to an terminate or to a want.

H J Paton, The Categorical Imperative, 1948 (layout by BBC)

Other things that we might remember of every bit good are non always proficient, as it's possible to imagine a context in which they might seem to exist morally undesirable.

Kant and so pondered what this meant for human deport. He concluded that only an activity done for 'a good will' was a right action, regardless of the consequences.

Merely what sort of action would this be? Kant taught that an action could only count as the activeness of a practiced will if it satisfied the exam of the Categorical Imperative.

Kant's Chiselled Imperative

The Categorical Imperative

Immanuel Kant ©

Kant's version of duty-based ethics was based on something that he called 'the categorical imperative' which he intended to be the ground of all other rules (a 'chiselled imperative' is a dominion that is true in all circumstances.)

The categorical imperative comes in two versions which each emphasise different aspects of the categorical imperative. Kant is clear that each of these versions is merely a dissimilar mode of expressing the same rule; they are not different rules.

Moral rules must be universalisable

The beginning 1 emphasises the need for moral rules to exist universalisable.

Always act in such a fashion that you can as well will that the maxim of your activeness should become a universal constabulary.

To put this more but:

Always human action in such a style that y'all would be willing for it to get a general constabulary that everyone else should practice the same in the same situation.

This means at least two things:

• if you aren't willing for the ethical dominion you claim to exist following to be practical equally to anybody - including you - then that rule is not a valid moral rule. I can't claim that something is a valid moral dominion and brand an exception to it for myself and my family and friends.

So, for example, if I wonder whether I should pause a promise, I can exam whether this is right by asking myself whether I would want in that location to be a universal rule that says 'it's OK to suspension promises'.

Since I don't want there to be a rule that lets people break promises they make to me, I tin conclude that information technology would be wrong for me to break the promise I have made.

• if the ethical rule you claim to be following cannot logically be fabricated a universal rule, so information technology is not a valid moral rule.

So, for example, if I were thinking philosophically I might realise that a universal rule that 'it's OK to break promises in order to become i's own way', would hateful that no-one would always believe another person's promise and then all promises would lose their value. Since the existence of promises in order requires the acceptance of their value, the exercise of promising would effectively terminate to exist. It would no longer be possible to 'break' a promise, let alone go one'south own fashion by doing so.

Moral rules must respect human beings

Kant thought that all human beings should be treated as complimentary and equal members of a shared moral community, and the second version of the chiselled imperative reflects this past emphasising the importance of treating people properly. It likewise acknowledges the relevance of intention in morality.

Act and then that you care for humanity, both in your own person and in that of another, e'er as an stop and never merely as a means.

...human being and, in general, every rational beingness exists every bit an end in himself and non but as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. In all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, he must always exist regarded at the same time as an end...

Immanuel Kant, The Categorical Imperative

Kant is maxim that people should always be treated every bit valuable - as an stop in themselves - and should non just exist used in order to accomplish something else. They should not be tricked, manipulated or bullied into doing things.

This resonates strongly with disapproving comments such every bit "he's just using her", and it underpins the idea that "the end can never justify the ways".

Here are iii examples of treating people as means and not ends:

• treating a person as if they were an inanimate object
• coercing a person to get what you want
• deceiving a person to get what you desire

Kant doesn't want to say that people tin't be used at all; it may be fine to use a person equally long as they are also being treated as an stop in themselves.

The importance of duty

Practise the right thing for the right reason, because it is the right thing to practice.

Kant thought that the simply good reason for doing the right thing was because of duty - if yous had some other reason (perhaps y'all didn't commit murder considering you were too scared, not because it was your duty not to) so that yous would not accept acted in a morally good way.

Only having another reason as well as duty doesn't stop an activity from beingness right, so long as duty was the 'operational reason' for our action.

If nosotros do something because nosotros know it's our duty, and if duty is the key element in our conclusion to act, then nosotros have acted rightly, fifty-fifty if we wanted to do the act or were too scared not to exercise information technology, or any.

Rossian duty-based ethics

Rossian duty-based ethics

Kantian ethics seems pretty uncompromising and not really suited to the untidiness of many moral choices that people accept to make.

The 20th Century philosopher W. D. Ross [Sir David Ross] (1877-1971) suggested that it would be helpful to look at two kinds of duty:

• Prima facie duties
• Bodily duties

Prima facie duties

• are cocky-axiomatic and obvious duties (prima facie is a Latin expression meaning 'on first appearances' or 'by first instance')
• can be known to be right if a person thinks about them and understands them:

when we accept reached sufficient mental maturity and accept given sufficient attention to the proposition information technology is axiomatic without any demand of proof, or of prove across itself

W D Ross, The Correct and the Skillful, 1930

• should exist promoted, "all things considered"
• tin be outweighed by other prima facie duties.

Actual duties

This is the duty people are left with after they take weighed upwardly all the conflicting prima facie duties that use in a detail case:

the ground of the bodily rightness of the deed is that, of all acts possible in the circumstances, it is that whose prima facie rightness in the respects in which it is prima facie correct nearly outweighs its prima facie wrongness in whatever respects in which it is prima facie incorrect.

West D Ross, The Right and The Good, 1930

Ross listed 7 prima facie duties:

• Allegiance
• Reparation
• Gratitude
• Justice
• Beneficence
• Cocky-improvement
• Non-maleficence (fugitive actions that do impairment)

Calling these 'duties' may be a bit misleading, equally they are non so much duties as "features that give us genuine (non merely credible) moral reason to do sure actions".

Ross afterward described prima facie duties equally "responsibilities to ourselves and to others" and he went on to say that "what we should do (our duty proper [our actual duty]) is determined by the residue of these responsibilities."

Problems with the Rossian approach

Ross'southward idea yet leaves some problems:

• How can we tell which prima facie duties are involved in a particular case?
• How tin can we compare and rank them in social club to arrive at a residue which will guide us as to our actual duty?

Ross thought that people could solve those bug by relying on their intuitions.

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Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/duty_1.shtml

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