Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 95 views

    Working Capital TOOLS

    Uploaded by

    Jelimae Lantaca
    - Duty Ethics, also known as deontological ethics, is an ethical theory that emphasizes duties and rules over the consequences of actions. It holds that some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their consequences. - Immanuel Kant is seen as developing one of the earliest and most influential versions of deontological ethics. He proposed the Categorical Imperative, which holds that moral rules and duties can be determined through reason alone. Central to Kant's view is that people should never be used merely as a means, but always treated as ends in themselves. - British philosopher David Ross argued that there are many prima facie duties that are self-evident, such as keeping promises, avoiding harm, and

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Working Capital TOOLS

    Uploaded by

    Jelimae Lantaca
    95 views11 pages
    - Duty Ethics, also known as deontological ethics, is an ethical theory that emphasizes duties and rules over the consequences of actions. It holds that some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their consequences. - Immanuel Kant is seen as developing one of the earliest and most influential versions of deontological ethics. He proposed the Categorical Imperative, which holds that moral rules and duties can be determined through reason alone. Central to Kant's view is that people should never be used merely as a means, but always treated as ends in themselves. - British philosopher David Ross argued that there are many prima facie duties that are self-evident, such as keeping promises, avoiding harm, and

    Original Description:

    Introduction

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    - Duty Ethics, also known as deontological ethics, is an ethical theory that emphasizes duties and rules over the consequences of actions. It holds that some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their consequences. - Immanuel Kant is seen as developing one of the earliest and most influential versions of deontological ethics. He proposed the Categorical Imperative, which holds that moral rules and duties can be determined through reason alone. Central to Kant's view is that people should never be used merely as a means, but always treated as ends in themselves. - British philosopher David Ross argued that there are many prima facie duties that are self-evident, such as keeping promises, avoiding harm, and

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    95 views11 pages

    Working Capital TOOLS

    Uploaded by

    Jelimae Lantaca
    - Duty Ethics, also known as deontological ethics, is an ethical theory that emphasizes duties and rules over the consequences of actions. It holds that some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their consequences. - Immanuel Kant is seen as developing one of the earliest and most influential versions of deontological ethics. He proposed the Categorical Imperative, which holds that moral rules and duties can be determined through reason alone. Central to Kant's view is that people should never be used merely as a means, but always treated as ends in themselves. - British philosopher David Ross argued that there are many prima facie duties that are self-evident, such as keeping promises, avoiding harm, and

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 11

    Chapter

    Duty Ethics

    What is Duty Ethics?

    Duty Ethics is a duty-based ethics that place special emphasis on the


    relationship between duty and the morality of human action. Duty-based Ethics
    based morality on specific and foundational principles of obligation. Duty Ethics is
    known as Deontological Ethics. It is sometimes called “Non-Consequentialist”.

    DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS

    Deontological Ethics is derived from the Greek word deon which means
    “duty” and logos as “science”. In Contemporary moral philosophy, it refers as one
    of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally
    required, forbidden, or permitted.

    In other words, Deontological Ethics falls within the domain of moral


    theories that guide and assess our choices of what we ought to do (deontic
    theories), in contrast to those that guide and assess what kind of person we are
    and should be (virtue theories).

    In deontological ethics an action is considered morally good because of


    some characteristic of the action itself, not because the product of the action is
    good. It holds that at least some acts are morally obligatory regardless of their
    consequences for human welfare.
    NON-CONSEQUETIALIST

    “Some kinds of action are wrong or right in themselves,


    regardless of the consequences.”

    Non-Consequentialist is those whose principles are obligatory, irrespective


    of the consequences that might follow from a certain action.

    For Example:

     Do the right thing.


     Do it because it's the right thing to do.
     Don't do wrong things.
     Avoid them because they are wrong.

    Under this form of ethics you can't justify an action by showing that
    it produced good consequences, which is why it's sometimes called 'Non-
    Consequentialist'.

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

    DEONTOLOGIST vs. CONSEQUENTILIST

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

    It is wrong to kill innocent people

    It is wrong to steal

    It is wrong to tell lies

    It is right to keep promises


    Deontologist is who follows Duty-based ethics should do the right thing,
    even if that produces more harm (or less good) than doing the wrong thing.

    While, Consequentialist determines right actions from good ends.

    If we compare Deontologists with Consequentialists we can see that


    Consequentialists begin by considering what things are good, and identify 'right'
    actions as the ones that produce the maximum of those good things.

    Deontologists appear to do it the other way around; they first consider


    what actions are 'right' and proceed from there.

    History of Deontological

    The first great philosopher to define deontological principles was Immanuel


    Kant, the 18th-century German founder of critical philosophy. Kant held that
    nothing is good without qualification except a good will, and a good will is one
    that wills to act in accord with the moral law and out of respect for that law
    rather than out of natural inclinations.

    He saw the moral law as a categorical imperative, an unconditional


    command, and believed that its content could be established by
    human reason alone. Thus, the supreme categorical imperative is: “Act only on
    that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a
    universal law.”

    Kant considered that formulation of the categorical imperative to be


    equivalent to: “So act that you treat humanity in your own person and in the
    person of everyone else always at the same time as an end and never merely as
    means.” The connection between those two formulations, however, has never
    been entirely clear.
    In any event, Kant’s critics questioned his view that all duties can be
    derived from a purely formal principle and argued that, in his preoccupation with
    rational consistency, he neglected the concrete content of moral obligation.

    That objection was faced in the 20th century by the British philosopher Sir
    David Ross, who held that numerous “prima facie duties,” rather than a single
    formal principle for deriving them, are themselves immediately self-evident.

    Ross distinguished those prima facie duties (such as promise keeping,


    reparation, gratitude, and justice) from actual duties, for “any possible act has
    many sides to it which are relevant to its rightness or wrongness”; and those
    facets have to be weighed before “forming a judgment on the totality of its
    nature” as an actual obligation in the given circumstances.

    Ross’s attempt to argue that intuition is a source of moral knowledge was,


    however, heavily criticized, and by the end of the 20th century, Kantian ways of
    thinking, especially the prohibition on using a person as a means rather than an
    end were again providing the basis for the deontological views that were most
    widely discussed among philosophers.

    At a popular level, the international emphasis on protecting human rights


    and thus on the duty not to violate them can also be seen as a triumph for
    deontological ethics.
     Kantian duty-based ethics

    Immanuel Kant was arguably one of the greatest philosophers of all


    time.

    Kant thought that it was possible to develop a consistent moral


    system by using reason.

    If people were to think about this seriously and in a philosophically


    rigorous manner, Kant taught, they would realise that there were some
    moral laws that all rational beings had to obey simply because they were
    rational beings, and this would apply to any rational beings in any
    universe that might ever exist.

    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 discover what was right and what
    was wrong. Nor did they need to look at the consequences of an act, or
    who was doing the action.

    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 us
    with a useful guide to acting rightly.
     What is Good?
    Although Kantian ethics are usually spoken of in terms of duty and
    doing the right thing, Kant himself thought that what was good was an
    essential part of ethics.

    Kant asked if there was anything that everybody could rationally


    agree was always good. The only thing that he thought satisfied this test
    was a good will:

    “It is impossible to conceive anything in the world, or even out of it,


    which can be taken as good without limitation, save only a good will”.

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

    Other things that we might think of as good are not always good, as
    it's possible to imagine a context in which they might seem to be morally
    undesirable.

    Kant then pondered what this meant for human conduct. He


    concluded that only an action done for 'a good will' was a right action,
    regardless of the consequences.

    But what sort of action would this be? Kant taught that an action
    could only count as the action of a good will if it satisfied the test of the
    Categorical Imperative.

     Kant's Categorical Imperative

    The Categorical Imperative

    Kant's version of duty-based ethics was based on something that he


    called 'the categorical imperative' which he intended to be the basis of all
    other rules. Categorical imperative is a rule that is true in all
    circumstances.
    The categorical imperative comes in two versions which each
    emphasize different aspects of the categorical imperative. Kant is clear that
    each of these versions is merely a different way of expressing the same
    rule; they are not different rules.

    Kant is saying that people should always be treated as valuable - as


    an end in themselves and should not just be used in order to achieve
    something else. They should not be tricked, manipulated or bullied into
    doing things.

    This resonates strongly with disapproving comments such as "he's


    just using her", and it underpins the idea that "the end can never justify the
    means".

    Here are three 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 want

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

    The importance of duty

    “Do the right thing for the right reason, because


    it is the right thing to do.”

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

    But having another reason as well as duty doesn't stop an action


    from being right, so long as duty was the ‘operational reason’ for our
    action.
    If we do something because we know it's our duty, and if duty is the
    key element in our decision to act, then we have acted rightly, even if we
    wanted to do the act or were too scared not to do it, or whatever.

     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 have to make.

    The 20th Century philosopher, William David Ross suggested that it


    would be helpful to look at two kinds of duty:

     Prima facie duties


     Actual duties
     Prima facie duties

    Prima Facie duties are self-evident and obvious duties. Prima facie is
    a Latin expression meaning 'on first appearances' or 'by first instance'. It
    can be known to be correct if a person thinks about them and understands
    them

     Actual duties

    Actual duties are the duty people are left with after they have
    weighed up all the conflicting prima facie duties that apply in a particular
    case. The ground of the actual rightness of the act 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 right most outweighs its prima facie
    wrongness in any respects in which it is prima facie wrong.

    Ross listed seven prima facie duties:


     Fidelity
     Reparation
     Gratitude
     Justice
     Beneficence
     Self-improvement
     Non-maleficence (avoiding actions that do harm)

    Calling these 'duties' may be a bit misleading, as they are not so


    much duties as "features that give us genuine (not merely apparent) moral
    reason to do certain actions".

    Ross later described prima facie duties as "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 balance of these
    responsibilities."

    Problems with the Rossian approach

    Ross's idea still leaves some problems:

     How can we tell which prima facie duties are involved in a particular case?

     How can we compare and rank them in order to arrive at a balance which
    will guide us as to our actual duty?

    Ross thought that people could solve those problems by relying on


    their intuitions.
    Test your memory. Identify if the statement is either under Kant’s duty-based
    ethics or Ross duty-based ethics.

    1. “Do the right thing for the right reason, because it is the right thing
    to do.”
    2. 'on first appearances’
    3. "responsibilities to ourselves and to others"
    4. Non-maleficence
    5. 'the categorical imperative'
    6. 'a good will'
    7. 'by first instance'
    8. Reparation
    9. Actual Duties
    10. “So act that you treat humanity in your own person and in the
    person of everyone else always at the same time as an end and
    never merely as means.”

    Test your memory. Fill in the blanks with the correct answer.

    Moral law as a , an unconditional command, and


    believed that its content could be established by alone. Thus, the
    supreme is: “ only on that through which you can
    at the same time will that it should become a .”

    If we compare with we can see that


    Consequentialists begin by considering what things are , and identify
    'right' actions as the ones that produce the of those good things.
    Test your ability. Answer the question briefly.

    1. What did Kant mean by “Some kinds of action are wrong or right in
    themselves, regardless of the consequences.” Explain.

    You might also like