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Summary Notes on Deontology
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In depth notes on the definition and application of deontology
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Lecture 1Monday, 08 April 2024 10:51
Deontology - Ethics of Duty
Deontological Ethics
• Comes from the Greek word: Deon - meaning obligation or duty
• An approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves as
opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions
• The duty-based approach to morality. The morally right thing to do is whatever it is your
duty to do - irrelevant of consequences. It grounds morality on 'acting from duty' and
'acting on the right motive of duty' "acting with good will"
• Holds that at least some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their consequences as
the acts are only performed for "Duty for duty's sake"
• The highest good is 'the good will". To act from a good will is to act from duty. Thus it is
the intention or motive behind an action that make an action good (not its consequences)
Right actions are performed for the sake of duty
• Thus motive and duty play an important role in evaluating the rightness or wrongness of
actions for a Deontologist. They provide full moral worth of the action
Emmanual Kant and Deontological Ethics
• Deontology is an ethical theory that uses moral law or rules (not set down by legislation)
to distinguish right from wrong
• Deontology is often associated with the German Philosopher Emmanuel Kant
• He believed that ethical actions follow universal moral laws (not from Ubuntu's common
moral position or Mill's utilitarian legislated rules which give common code of morals)
• Kantian deontology maintains that man as a rational being, makes the moral law
universal
• Moral law or rule (self-legislated from autonomous and free will) refers to conduct
derived from an objective right and wrong
Kant on "Good will" as highest good
• Emmanuel Kant's theory of ethics is considered deontological for several different
reasons:
1. Kant argues that to act in the morally right way, people must act according to duty
(deon)
2. Kant argued that it is not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong but
the motives of the person that carries out the action
• Kant's argument that to act in the morally right way, one must act from duty, begins with
an argument that the highest good must be both good in itself and good without
qualification
• Good in itself - Intrinsically good
• Good without qualification - When the addition of that thing never makes a situation
ethically worse
• E.g. Pleasure fails to be either intrinsically good or good without qualification because
when people take pleasure in watching someone suffering, this seems to make the
situation ethically worse
• He concludes that there is only one thing that is truly good: a good will. The will is what
drives our actions and grounds the intention of our act. To act from "good will" means to
act out of a sense of moral obligation or "duty"
• Kant then argues that the consequences of an act of willing cannot be used to determine
that the person has good will
• Kant's reason: Good consequences could arise by accident from an action that was
motivated by a desire to cause harm to an innocent person, and bad consequences could
arise from an action that was well-motivated
• Instead, he claims, a person has a good will when he or she ' acts out of respect for the
moral law' People 'act out of respect for the moral law' when they act in some way
because they have a duty to do so.
Week 5 Deontology Page 1
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