Deontological Ethics – Comprehensive Notes (SEP, Alexander & Moore)

1. Deontology’s Foil: Consequentialism

Deontology is a normative theory about what we morally ought to do, distinct from aretaic (virtue) theories that concern what kind of persons we should be.
Deontologists contrast with consequentialists: consequences (states of affairs) are not the primary targets in deontology; instead, norms or duties constrain action.
Consequentialism basics:
- The Good (intrinsically valuable states of affairs) is prior to the Right; actions are right if they maximize the Good.
- Good can be monistic (single intrinsic value, e.g., pleasure, happiness, desire satisfaction) or pluralistic (multiplex goods, distribution matters).
- Some consequentialists posit rights or duties as part of the Good, yielding a so-called utilitarianism of rights.
Consequentialist responses addressed here:
- Satisficing: accept that achieving a certain level of the Good is mandatory, not necessarily maximum, to allow moral room for personal projects and relationships.
- Negative vs positive duties: some consequentialists hold that we have duties not to harm, and less clear positive duties to improve—this limits pure all-out optimization.
- Indirect consequentialism: focus on rules or character traits that, when followed, indirectly maximize the Good and avoid egregious violations of ordinary moral norms.
Criticisms driving deontological appeal:
- Overly demanding: no moral permissions or supererogation space; every act is either required or forbidden.
- Potentially over-permissive in other formulations: may require harmful actions if they bring about greater overall good (illustrative Transplant and Fat Man cases).
Transplant and Fat Man (examples used to illustrate consequences):
- Transplant: five patients die unless a healthy person is killed to provide organs; consequentialism may permit or require this under some circumstances.
- Fat Man: pushing a fat man to stop a trolley that would kill five may be permitted by some consequentialist calculations.
Important takeaway: consequentialism’s demandingness and permissiveness are common targets for deontological critiques; deontology emphasizes rights, duties, and norms over sheer aggregation of good consequences.

2. Deontological Theories

Core claim: some actions cannot be justified by their consequences; some norms must be obeyed regardless of outcomes.
Right over the Good: to do a right action is to conform to a moral norm; maximizing good is not the sole objective.
Non-consequentialist permissions: some actions are right even if they yield less good than alternatives, including actions one is not obligated to perform.
Strongly permitted actions include actions one is obligated to do but also actions one is not obligated to do; such actions can be morally permissible even if they don’t maximize good.
Three broad families (and a note about Kant): agent-centered, patient-centered, contractualist deontologies; Kant is central to debates but not the sole source.

2.1 Agent-Centered Deontological Theories

Core idea: agents have agent-relative permissions and obligations; reasons for action depend on the agent’s standing, not only on impersonal (agent-neutral) considerations.
Agent-relative reasons: objectives that count for the agent whose reason it is, not necessarily for others.
Examples: parents have special obligations to their own children; a parent may be permitted to save their own child even if it means not saving others.
Agency and its central role: morality is personal because it constrains and structures one’s own agency.
Three major strands about agency: 1) Intention-focused: the intended ends and intended means define agency; predicted beliefs, risks, and causal consequences are not the same as intentional aims.
- Intention to do evil is categorically forbidden; predicting or risking evil differs from intending it.
- Doctrine of double effect (DDE): prohibits intending evils even if they minimize future evils; permitting worse consequences only if evils were not intended and are outcomes, not aims.
  2) Action-focused: agency can be tied to actions themselves (volitions/willings) rather than inner states; the initiator’s agency depends on willing the action that causes an outcome.
  3) Combined view: agency requires both intending and causing (acting) to constitute relevant agency; this avoids overbreadth of either intention-only or action-only accounts.
Problems and debates within agent-centered theories:
- The appeal of agent-relative duties can seem narcissistic or egoistic; may clash with global moral concerns.
- The Doctrine of Double Effect and the various intention/foreseeing vs causing/omitting distinctions face criticisms of moral incoherence or indefinability.
- Avoision: manipulation through shifting motives or reformulating reasons to avoid prohibitions; concern that people can recast prohibited intentions as permissible beliefs.
- Control theory of agency: claims agency is invoked whenever choices could have made a difference; broadens obligations and risks making consequentialist justification illegitimate.
Convergences and tensions with consequentialism: agent-centered deontology often aims to preserve deontological constraints while accommodating some consequentialist intuitions, yet serious tensions remain in cases like moral catastrophes or extreme consequences.

2.2 Patient-Centered Deontological Theories

Rights-based, agent-neutral (in many formulations): the central commitments are to individuals’ rights and to not using persons as mere means to others’ ends.
The Means Principle (core right): a right against being used by others for their benefit without consent; this is distinct from rights such as the right not to be killed.
Left-libertarian and libertarian-influenced theorists (Nozick; Steiner; Vallentyne et al.) emphasize using others as mere means is prohibited; strong duties correlate with rights but are limited to the protection of bodies, labors, and talents.
How these theories handle classic cases (Trolley, Transplant, Fat Man) differently from agent-centered deontology:
- In Trolley, the switch to save five lives may be permissible because it does not require using a single body as a means; in Transplant and Fat Man, saving five requires using the one body as a means to the five, which is morally impermissible on strong patient-centered constraints.
- The patient-centered view can permit or prohibit actions based on whether the victim is used as a means, rather than on the agent’s mental state or act-selection.
Issues and limitations:
- The priority-right against using others tends to entail that many positive duties to aid others become conditional or constrained; positive duties may conflict with individual rights and thus require balancing with consequentialist norms.
- The paradox of deontology arises: if rights and duties are equally weighty, why not violate one right to prevent greater rights violations elsewhere?
- Some patient-centered accounts favor agent-neutrality in reasons-giving; others retain agent-relative implications to avoid collapse into pure consequentialism.
- Paradoxical implications motivate calls to reframe rights as giving agent-relative reasons to refrain from violating them, preserving agency-centered justification while avoiding some counterintuitive implications.

2.3 Contractualist Deontological Theories

Morally wrong acts are those that would be forbidden by principles chosen in a social contract or by principles no one could reasonably reject (Rawls; Gauthier; Scanlon).
Normative vs metaethical issues: there is debate whether contractualism provides a first-order normative account or a metaethical framework for deriving norms.
Varieties and challenges:
- Rawlsian and Scanlonian frameworks often appear more metaethical in emphasis, focusing on what can be justified to others rather than on substantive normative content.
- Harsanyi’s argument that a utilitarian contract might be chosen over Rawlsian principles shows that contractualism need not entail a single normative outcome.
Relationship to agent- vs patient-centered styles:
- Contractualist theories can align with patient-centered or agent-centered emphases depending on how consent, rights, and the structure of the contract are interpreted.
- The role of consent as a foundational norm raises questions about what counts as legitimate consent and whether consent alone can ground robust deontological duties.

2.4 Deontological Theories and Kant

Kant anchors deontology in the idea that the moral quality of acts rests on maxims and the will rather than on consequences.
Core Kantian claims:
- The only unqualifiedly good thing is a good will.
- Do not use others merely as means to an end; respect them as ends in themselves.
- Maxims should be universalizable; actions should be able to be willed as a universal law by all rational agents.
Kant’s influence spans all branches of deontology: agent-centered, patient-centered, and contractualist readings can be read as Kantian-inspired.

3. The Advantages and the Disadvantages of Deontological Theories

Advantages:
- Clear prohibitions against certain actions (eg, killing the innocent) even when good consequences could be achieved otherwise.
- Space for pursuing personal projects and relationships; avoids the demandingness of maximizing total good in all cases.
- Supports supererogation: acts that go beyond what is morally required.
- Explains why people have standing to complain when duties are breached; grounds duties to particular people rather than abstract states of affairs.
Disadvantages and challenges:
- Paradox of deontology (moral catastrophe scenarios): when following deontological norms yields disastrous overall outcomes, how to justify adherence?
- Conflicts among duties: Kantian absolutism claims no conflicts of duties, but many cases appear to generate genuine dilemmas; responses include specificationist, prima facie duties, and threshold deontology.
- Speciation vs conflict: highly fine-grained norms can resolve conflicts but risk collapsing into deontology that resembles consequentialism in practice; other approaches risk weakening deontological content.
- Threshold deontology faces issues locating thresholds and determining how reasoning proceeds after the threshold; sliding scales may mimic consequentialist reasoning.
- Avoision and manipulation: dangers of reframing prohibitions to avoid moral responsibilities; critics worry about how robust deontology is to such strategic maneuvering.

4. Deontology’s Relation(s) to Consequentialism Reconsidered

Mixed theories: combining deontology and consequentialism by assigning them to different jurisdictions or by creating a hierarchy of norms.
Nagel’s approach: agent-neutral consequences provide a default framework, while agent-relative duties constrain within certain domains; not fully exclusive and not fully combinable.
Exclusive jurisdiction approach: agent-relative norms govern where applicable; in areas where neither applies, consequentialist considerations may take over, with agent-relative norms side-constraining outcomes.

4.1 Pure Deontology: No concessions to Consequentialism

The project of expanding agent-relative reasons to cover all morality while preserving deontology’s advantages is challenging; would require extremely detailed specificationist norms with extensive priority rules, exceptions, and content.

4.2 Pure Consequentialism: No concessions to Deontology

Indirect or two-level consequentialism attempts to capture deontological advantages via consequentialist foundations; but often collapses into rule consequentialism, standard rule-worship, or nonpublicizability issues.
The practical question remains whether indirect consequentialism can preserve the intuitive nonconsequentialist advantages attributed to deontology.

5. Deontology and Uncertainty About Outcomes

Recent work explores how to evaluate actions under uncertainty about whether a deontological constraint will be violated.
Questions include: when may one, under uncertainty, detonate dynamite to avert a worse outcome; when should one take time to observe if that time cost could lead to worse consequences?
Key contributions discuss probabilities, expectations, and decision rules under moral uncertainty, including works by Aboodi, Borer, Enoch; Alexander; Lazar; Smith; Tarsney; Tenenbaum; Tomlin.

6. Deontological Theories and Metaethics

Deontological theories are normative; they need not commit to a single metaethical view about moral ontology or epistemology.
Metaethical options compatible with deontology include nonnatural realism, conventionalism, transcendentalism, and Divine command theories; some authors argue deontology can be grounded in naturalist realism.
Debates over metaethics influence how robust deontological theories can be in practice, given concerns about the nature of rights, duties, and norms.
The tension between deontology and some metaethical positions can affect the perceived solidity of deontological claims, especially for naturalists who prefer consequentialist tendencies.

Connections to Foundational Principles and Real-World Relevance

Deontological frameworks defend moral intuitions about rights, duties, and the special status of persons (means vs ends) with implications for medical ethics, law, and public policy.
Classic thought experiments (Trolley, Transplant, Fat Man, Loop Trolley) illustrate where deontological and consequentialist intuitions diverge, aiding exam preparation by clarifying normative commitments.
The debate between agent-centered and patient-centered theories highlights tensions between self-directed duties and universal or rights-based constraints, with practical consequences for bioethics, criminal law, and political philosophy.
Threshold and prima facie approaches demonstrate how deontologists try to handle moral catastrophes and conflicting duties, showing the dynamic nature of normative theory when faced with extreme cases.
The ongoing integration of deontology with consequentialism (mixed theories) reflects an important methodological stance: many philosophers favor theories that can accommodate both strong moral constraints and the practical needs of moral reasoning under uncertainty.

Notation and Key Terms (glossary)

Deontology: normative theory about duties and norms that guide action, rather than focusing solely on outcomes.
The Good: intrinsically valuable states of affairs in consequentialism.
The Right: duties and moral norms that constrain action in deontological theories.
Agent-centered deontology: duties and permissions that are relative to the agent (agent-relative).
Patient-centered deontology: rights-based approaches focusing on others as ends, not merely as means; care about not using others as means without consent.
Contractualist deontology: norms justified by principles that rational agents would agree to or could not reasonably reject in a social contract.
Kantian ethics: central contributions to deontology, including the universalizable maxims, the good will, and the prohibition on using persons as mere means.
Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE): forbids intending evils even when they produce better overall outcomes through the same action.
Doing/Allowing harm: moral distinctions involving active doing versus allowing harm to occur; linked to classical Catholic doctrine and debated in deontological ethics.
Loop Trolley / Transplant / Fat Man / Trolley: classic case studies used to illustrate consequentialist vs deontological intuitions.
Threshold deontology: a form of deontology that yields to consequentialism once a threshold of bad consequences is reached; includes simple and sliding-scale variants.
Prima facie duties: duties that are binding (at least prima facie) unless overridden by stronger moral reasons.
Specifying norms: the idea that deontological norms can be highly fine-grained with jurisdiction-prioritizing rules to resolve conflicts.
Protected reason: Raz’s idea that a norm can both provide positive reasons and exclude other reasons, helping to justify deontological norms in the face of competing considerations.

LaTeX-Formatted Numerical References (illustrative)

In Transplant, saving five lives by sacrificing one is often framed as maximizing net lives saved:
- 5 ext{ lives saved} - 1 ext{ life lost} = 4 ext{ net lives saved}
In Fat Man, saving five by sacrificing one can be represented similarly:
- 5 - 1 = 4 ext{ net lives saved}
Trolley-type scenarios frequently compare outcomes such as saving four lives versus sacrificing one to save five, emphasizing the conflict between deontological prohibitions and consequentialist justification.