Deontological
& Kantian Ethics
This strain of
moral reflection that argues that moral treatment is appropriate to
humans because of their rationality has a long history. Its most popular
recent incarnation is associated with the moral thinking of the
philosopher Immanuel Kant. His view is of a type called
“deontological” because it aims to show how there can be moral
requirements that do not depend on whether the actions required produce
good consequences.
Kant took it
be our special competence as rational beings to formulate general or
universal laws, which is what gave us moral knowledge. For any act that
we might contemplate doing, we can always ask whether we would be
willing to endorse a universal law that permitted or required that type
of action. Interestingly, such questioning is strikingly like applying
the Golden Rule to a prospective action. If I contemplate cheating my
neighbor, Kant would have me ask myself whether I would be willing to
live in a world in which people were all permitted to cheat one
another--which, of course, would mean that I too would be subject to
permissible cheating. With perhaps an excess of optimism, Kant concluded
that, not only would no one want to live in such a world, no one could
honestly will to live in one. If then, I proceed to cheat my neighbor, I
live out a kind of contradiction: I perform an action that I would not
allow generally, an action that I cannot endorse as a general rule.
Thus, I know at least in my heart of hearts that I am making a special
exception for myself that I would not grant others, and that I cannot
really justify for myself.
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Note that Kant
is not saying that I shouldn’t cheat my neighbor because doing
so might lead to my getting cheated myself. Kant is proposing a
test that one performs wholly in one’s mind. I ask myself if I
could will my intended action as a universal law. If I cannot,
then that action is wrong even if I was perfectly sure that I could do
it and suffer no bad consequences at all.
Image at left from BBC,
When are pictures of POWs propaganda? (discussing status of
detainees in camp X Ray compared to the American reaction to POWs
captured in Iraq being photographed) More info below
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Kant thought
that this competence of ours was more than merely a means to figure out
what is moral. Since he took it to derive from our reason alone
and not from our desires, he thought it represented our unique freedom
from natural forces. Human beings could guide their actions, could
decide which of their desires to act on, by reference to a standard
found in their reason and not thus itself the product of desire. Thus,
in our reason, Kant found freedom, freedom from the forces of nature,
freedom from the pushes and pulls of desires and aversions. Thus
his moral theory exalts human beings’ free rational wills, and teaches
us to treat all free rational beings as “ends-in-themselves,” that
is, as beings that cannot rightly be subjected to forces that their own
reason does not endorse. This in turn adds a new dimension to the
test described above. When I ask of a prospective action, would I
willing to live subject to a universal law permitting or requiring such
things, I am asking do I truly believe that all rational beings could
freely endorse the action I have in mind.
When I
contemplate cheating my neighbor, what I must ask is, “Could my action
be freely and rationally endorsed by my neighbor?” It is obvious
that it could not, since the very possibility of cheating my neighbor
requires bypassing her rational judgment about what I am doing. I
must depend on her ignorance of what I am doing in order to succeed in
cheating her. Likewise, robbing my neighbor requires bypassing or
overriding her freedom. I can only rob her by acting against her
will--if it were her will that I end up with the thing I rob, then she
would give it to me and it would not be robbery. Consequently,
morality of this Kantian variety is sometimes identified with respect,
respect for the freedom and rationality of one’s fellows. Evil
actions are actions with bypass or override or ignore the freedom and
rationality of others, and thus are disrespectful of those others’
most distinctive capacities. And such a moral view is
deontological in that it arrives at its judgments without considering
all the consequences of the acts under consideration. So, even if
cheating or robbing my neighbor might in some way help my nation or even
all of humanity, such acts are forbidden because they fail to respect my
neighbor.
In sum, for
Kant and those inspired by him, true morality is a matter of treating
human beings in ways that are appropriate to their nature of free and
rational beings. And this means in ways that treat them as
free and rational, in ways that they can freely and rationally accept.
When people complain, for example, of being treated like objects or like
tools, they are essentially saying that they have been treated in ways
that fail to respect their freedom and rationality. They have been
manipulated or pushed around, rather than appealed to for free and
rational acceptance. Since freedom and rationality are taken to be
the marks of personhood, a Kantian-type morality is sometimes
called a morality of respect for persons.
Contrary to
consequentialism, this kind of moral approach clearly rules out using
people as means to the happiness of others. For this reason, many of
those who have felt that utilitarianism is not a strong enough defender
of individual human rights, have turned to Kantian or Kantian-inspired
moral views. Nonetheless, though there is undoubtedly something
about Kantian-style morality that resonates with many people’s strong
feelings about the treatment proper to human beings, this kind of
approach has its problems as well. Unlike utilitarianism with its
emphasis on happiness or the satisfaction of desires, Kantian moral
theory doesn’t provide an easily-grasped notion of the good. The
idea that certain treatment is appropriate to free rational beings is a
more abstract kind of good than pleasure or satisfaction, nor is it easy
to prove that it is more important to respect human beings than to bring
about their happiness. And many philosophers have doubted whether
we really have a capacity to make rational evaluations independent of
our desires.
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Ethics Updates: Kant and
Deontology: includes Powerpoint presentation and
Real Media resources in addition to a variety of reading about Kant and
Deontological Systems.
Notes
on Deontology is a helpful introduction; it discusses the history of deontology,
and the methods of applying the philosophy
to decisions, particularly the universalizability of moral principles.
The
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on Duties
and Deontological Ethics.
| It is often mistakenly
said of Kant, that the full content of morality could be derived
from our pure reason without reference to the facts of the world.
Far from it. Reason supplies a test of morality, but it is our
desires that supply the subjects of the test. My reason cannot
itself tell me not to cheat my neighbor. Rather, observing in myself
the desire to cheat him, I can apply reason to this desire and ask
if I would be willing to live in a world where everyone was
permitted to act on such desires. It is the test that is universal
and derived from reason, but the test must be applied to the
observed facts of human life. |
Another helpful
site discusses the meaning of deontology and compares it to other theories such as
consequentialism.
There's an additional discussion
about the role of consequences of actions in the area of deontological
ethics and a brief essay outlining the deontological
objections to consequentialism.
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