2014/2015
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136th session
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volume cxv
proceedings of the aristotelian society Edited by
matthew soteriou (warwick)
issue no. i
W h a t ’s Wr o n g w i t h ‘ D e o n t o l o g y ’ ?
jens timmermann (st andrews)
draft paper & podcast
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proceedings of the aristotelian society 136th session
issue no. 1 volume cxv 2014 / 2015
what’s wrong with ‘deontology’?
jens timmermann university of st andrews
m o n d a y, 1 d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 17.30 - 19.15
the woburn suite senate house university of london malet street london wc1e 7hu united kingdom
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biography Jens Timmermann is Reader in Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He was trained as an ancient philosopher but now largely works on Kant’s ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law. Recent publications include a volume on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” (edited jointly with Andrews Reath), a German-English edition of Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” and an article on the possibility of moral conflict in Kantian ethics. He is currently interested in Kant’s account of irrational action, in his theory of sympathy and in the notorious essay on the “Alleged Right to Lie”. editorial note The following paper is a draft version that can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. The final paper will be published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Issue No. 1, Volume CXV (2015). Please visit the Society’s website for subscription information: www.aristoteliansociety. org.uk.
what’s wrong with ‘deontology’? jens timmermann
The way we carve up the terminological sphere matters. There are words, ordinary and philosophical, that we should do without because they are ill defined, ambiguous or confused. If we use them we will at best be saying little. At worst they will make us ask the wrong questions and leave the right ones unasked. I shall argue that ‘deontology’ is such a dangerous word.
i. usurped concepts IN A WELL-KNOWN PASSAGE in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant urges his readers to treat the words we use with suspicion. His warning does not concern the employment of empirical concepts, which is comparatively uncontroversial because they can be substantiated by experience. He is concerned about what he calls “usurped concepts”, concepts seized without warrant, such as “fortune” and “fate”, which “run about with almost universal indulgence”. Occasionally, however, the question arises whether they can be legitimately employed at all. Then “there is not a little embarrassment […] as one can cite no clear legal ground, either from experience or from reason, to manifest the entitlement to their use” (Critique of Pure Reason, A 84–5/B 117). Kant’s worry is, of course, that the pure concepts of the understanding are no better off than concepts like fortune or fate. Using the twelve categories is constitutive of experience. They cannot be justified experientially. That is why Kant feels the need to subject us to their transcendental deduction. But the problem of usurpation is even more widespread than these examples suggest. Arguably, terms such as ‘fate’, ‘fortune’ and ‘cause’ are at least sufficiently well defined to merit the question whether they are objectively real. If we are ill advised to blame fate for our troubles it is not because we have no clear idea what a fated event would be. Rather, we have no warrant to believe that there is such a thing as fate. Yet there are also words, ordinary and philosophical, that we would do well to do without on the grounds that they are ill defined, ambiguous or confused. If we use them we will at best be saying little. At worst they will make us ask the wrong questions and leave the right ones unasked. I shall argue that ‘deontology’ is such a dangerous word.1 1
As Robert Louden notes, “the basic categories used by writers to mark the conceptual
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ii. benthamite deontology ‘Deontology’ looks like a Greek word, but it is not. Jeremy Bentham invented it almost exactly two hundred years ago. He even wrote a treatise called Deontology, published posthumously in 1834, in which he discusses the virtues and vices of a good utilitarian agent. According to his modern editor, the word first appeared in Bentham’s manuscripts two decades earlier, in August 1814 (Goldworth 1983: xix–xx). It is a composite of the Greek word for what is ‘proper’ or ‘ought to be done’ (to deon) and the usual suffix denoting the doctrine, science or study of a thing.2 In its basic, literal sense ‘deontology’ is therefore “the science of duty” or “that branch of knowledge which deals with moral obligations”, in one word: “ethics”. This is how the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word to the present day, quoting Bentham and then William Gladstone, who later in the century equated deontology with a system of “that which ought to be, and to be done” (1868). We also learn that a medical dictionary defined ‘medical deontology’ as “the duties and rights of medical practitioners” (1883).3 There is no trace of a modern philosophical meaning because the OED2 (in print) and the OED3 (on line) reproduce the entry as it was in 1895. It is still to be updated.4 The original sense of the word is innocent enough as long as we bear in mind that it says nothing about the substance or the foundation of duty. Bentham proposed his utilitarian deontology, which now competes for attention with the deontologies of Kant, Ross, Scanlon and perhaps even terrain of their field profoundly affect readers’ understanding of what is important within the field” (Louden 1996: 571). While Louden carefully traces the genealogy of the word ‘deontology’, he never comes close to suggesting that we abandon the word and its cognates. But that is precisely what we should do. 2
The OED notes that Bentham also used the adjective ‘deontological’.
There are actually distinct shades of meaning even in Bentham. In his ‘genealogy’ of deontology Robert Louden distinguishes several senses in which Bentham used the word. There is, for instance, deontology in the narrower sense of “private ethics”, i.e. the discipline that deals with moral duties not backed up by legal sanctions, a meaning reflected in the citations of the OED; in the wider sense of “the several fields of ethics”, i.e. practical philosophy not limited to but including private ethics; and in the specific sense of “a utilitarian theory of obligation” (Louden 1996: 574–576). The latter kind of deontology is thus, by definition, consequentialist. 3
That is why Bentham’s original literal definition still dominates desktop dictionaries. According to the American Heritage Dictionary deontology is “the theory or study of moral obligation or commitment; ethics” (new college edition, 1969), according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary “the study of duty” (8th ed., 1990), according to the New Oxford American Dictionary “the study of the nature of duty and obligation” (3rd ed., 2010), and so forth. Nor do Collins, Chambers or Webster break with the precedent set by the OED. 4
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Aristotle. Any ethical system that contains concrete action prescriptions is deontological in this broad, literal original sense. Nowadays Bentham’s definition is, of course, virtually unknown outside lexicographical circles.5 When modern moral philosophers speak of ‘deontology’ they tend to have something different in mind: a style of ethical theory that is not teleological or consequentialist. iii. broad’s distinction between ‘teleological’ and ‘deontological’ theories It seems that the dictionary definition had been largely forgotten when C. D. Broad reintroduced ‘deontological’ in his Five Types of Ethical Theory in 1930. It is at that point that the word began to develop its distinctly modern flavour.6 Broad was unhappy with Sidgwick’s three ‘methods’ of ethics: intuitionism, egoistic hedonism and utilitarianism. The division seemed to him to conflate the epistemological issue of how we cognise what to do with another, broadly metaphysical question: whether actions are “intrinsically” right or wrong, or whether their status depends “on their conduciveness to certain ends” (Broad 1930: 206). The word used since the late nineteenth century to characterise resultsoriented theories like Utilitarianism was ‘teleology’, literally the study, system, doctrine etc. of ends.7 The paradigmatic teleological theory was utilitarianism, i.e. the theory that revolves around promoting universal happiness. Broad felt the need for another ‘ology’ to contrast it with such doctrines of good ends. He too turned to the Greek word closest in meaning to ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’. ‘Deontology’ had been reinvented. Accordingly, Broad proposes an initial division of ethical theories into two classes: deontological and teleological:8 Perhaps surprisingly, the literal sense of deontology as a doctrine or system of what ought to be done has not completely disappeared from academic philosophy; see e.g. Searle 2010. 5
Louden persuasively argues that modern usage can be traced back to Broad, cf. Louden 1996: 586. He credits Friedrich Paulsen with first applying the word ‘teleological’ to results-based theories of moral obligation in 1889, which served as the foil for deontology some four decades later (Louden 1996: 582–584). 6
I shall be using ‘teleology’ in this older sense, which appears to be synonymous with what has been called ‘consequentialism’ since 1958. Now there are more subtle versions of nonconsequentialist teleology as well as attempts to consequentialise non-consequentialist theories. Both tendencies may serve further to undermine the consequentialism/teleology– deontology split. But they need not concern us here. 7
Broad also distinguishes monistic and pluralistic varieties of both teleology and deontology, depending on whether they contain one or more moral ends or rules. Rules are not mentioned in the original definition but they are presumably meant to be implicit in expressions like “such and such a kind of action”, “such and such circumstances” etc. 8
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Deontological theories hold that there are ethical propositions of the form: “Such and such a kind of action would always be right (or wrong) in such and such circumstances, no matter what its consequences might be.” […] Teleological theories hold that the rightness or wrongness of an action is always determined by its tendency to produce certain consequences which are intrinsically good or bad. (Broad 1930: 206–7)
Broad’s distinction is both more subtle and less ambitious than contemporary textbook versions of the teleology–deontology divide.9 Several things are worth noting. First, Broad presents the deontology–teleology distinction as only one dimension of ethical theories according to which they are to be classified. He explicitly brackets epistemological concerns, and there is no suggestion that he would approve of the textbook attempt to use the distinction as the fundamental classificatory principle of ethical theories.10 Secondly, Broad’s definition stands apart from those of later generations of moral philosophers in that deontology is – up to a point – defined positively, in terms of the intrinsic rightness of actions. I say ‘up to a point’ because there remains the question of what makes an action intrinsically right. The label refers to first-order moral judgements, not to their grounds. Broad does not burden the distinction with these issues at this stage. But then, again, he is not claiming that the distinction should serve as the sole classificatory standard of ethical theories. Thirdly, Broad does not think that all or indeed many ethical theories fall squarely into the deontological or the teleological category, first appearances notwithstanding. At the end of his discussion Broad adds the following warning: We must remember, however, that purely deontological and purely teleological theories are rather ideal limits than real existents. Most actual theories are mixed, some being predominantly deontological and others predominantly teleological. (Broad 1930: 207–8)
Sidgwick’s approach, Broad says, is a case in question. It is difficult to – Kant, he says, was a monistic deontologist (Broad 1930: 207). Still, Broad’s classification does have its blind spots: By definition, a teleological theory has to rely on at least one end; but there may well be, as a limiting case, a version of Broadian deontology that dispenses with rules altogether, e.g. some form of intuitionist particularlism. Moreover, even by Broad’s own standards it is somewhat misleading to call Kant a ‘deontological monist’ because actions are never directly approved or rejected by the categorical imperative. Rather, applying the categorical imperative to maxims suggested by inclination generates a multiplicity of concrete rules that can be used to evaluate individual actions: Don’t throw away your life! Don’t make false promises! Develop your talents! Be a helpful person! etc. We shall return to the topic of Kant and deontology in § 9. 9
10
The book is not entitled ‘Two Types of Ethical Theory’.
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categorise not just because Sidgwick “cannot make up his mind between the egoistic and the non-egoistic forms of hedonism”, but also because he concedes that principles of just distribution have independent weight. Broad concludes that to this extent “Sidgwick’s theory must be counted as deontological” (Broad 1930: 208). Fourthly and finally, it is not clear whether Broad intends deontological rules to be inviolable, a feature often associated with deontological theories today. His definition of such a theory may seem to point in the direction of absolutism, but then again it may not. Does he want there to be absolute side-constraints that must never be violated, for the greater good or for any other reason? In partly deontological, partly teleological theory it may well be the case that deontological rules cannot be overridden by the prospect of producing some great good; but if there is more than one deontological rule in some pluralistic theory we may have to strike a balance between several deontological considerations, e.g. between pro tanto reasons to which those rules give rise. If so, the theory in question will not be absolutist.11 iv. frankena’s ethics
In the mid-twentieth century Broad’s terminology was taken up by many prominent ethicists, but the nuances of his distinction were largely lost. The distinction came to be seen as the first classificatory principle of ethical theories. Students – who later became lecturers and professors, only further to perpetuate the myth – dutifully memorised lecture notes declaring that there were two types of ethical theory,12 ‘teleology’13 and ‘deontology’, exemplified by Utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. One particularly influential textbook was William Frankena’s Ethics. This is how Frankena defines ‘deontology’: Deontological theories deny what teleological theories affirm. They deny that the right, the obligatory, and the morally good are wholly, whether directly or indirectly, a function of what is nonmorally good or of what promotes the greatest balance of good over evil for self, one’s society, or the world as a whole. They assert that there are other considerations that may make an action or rule right or obligatory besides the goodness or badness of its consequences – certain features of the act itself other than the value it brings into existence, for example, the fact that it keeps 11
We shall return to this important point in § 6 below.
Or worse still ‘two ethical theories’, resulting in nonsensical exam questions like: ‘According to consequentialism, euthanasia is permissible. What does deontology say?’ 12
13
Later, appropriating Elizabeth Anscombe’s term of insult: ‘consequentialism’.
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a promise, is just, or is commanded by God or by the state.“ (Frankena 1963, 15)
Crucially, Frankena’s account is purely negative. We learn what deontology is not, what it “denies”, that for assessing right and wrong it relies on considerations “other” than an action’s consequences. The definition is convoluted. It is incredibly vague – there are eight occurrences of the word “or” in about as many lines. Frankena does not inform us of any general characteristics that makes deontological theories what they are. There are said to be “certain features” that render an action right, but we are left wondering what exactly these features are. Instead of an account of the wrong-making features of deontology we are presented with a list of loose examples.14 This does not inspire confidence. v. negative definitions The word ‘deontology’ shares being defined in negative terms with many other words of equally debatable utility. Consider, for instance, the word ‘foreigner’. According to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, a foreigner is “a man who comes from another country” or “not a native”. We learn nothing about foreigners in and of themselves because both glosses are purely negative. Johnson tells us what a foreigner is not. This does not as such render the word useless. Take up the point of view of an official of a sovereign state – say, a government minister – and it makes perfect sense. If the Home Secretary were to announce that foreigners resident in the United Kingdom are to be given the vote in Westminster elections I would be delighted. I would not complain about her using a word that is ill defined. However, it is not difficult to imagine uses of the word ‘foreigner’ that are problematic. We rightly flinch when populist politicians blame ‘foreigners’ for violent crime or benefit fraud because it implicitly absolves citizens while casting a blanket suspicion on everyone else. On a less serious note, if a cultural geographer were to assert that there are exactly two kinds of human being on this planet, UK nationals and foreigners, we would laugh in his face.15 There is much more that divides citizens of The negative definition had become a commonplace by the time John Rawls came to write A Theory of Justice: “The last contrast that I shall mention now is that utilitarianism is a teleological theory whereas justice as fairness is not. By definition, then, the latter is a deontological theory, one that either does not specify the good independently from the right, or does not interpret the right as maximising the good.” (Rawls 1999: 26) 14
Similarly, it is perhaps forgivable for a Christian missionary to say that there are only believers in the one true god and ‘heathens’, defined by Dr Johnson negatively as “the nations unacquainted with the covenant of grace”. Whether we approve of the 15
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countries other than the UK than they can possibly have in common. That is why the distinction between natives and foreigners is often questionable at best.16 vi. varieties of non-consequentialist duty Let us investigate what happens when the truth of consequentialism is denied. The denial can be applied either to all duties within a system or merely to some of the things we ought do. As a result, there are already two radically different understandings of deontology, both recognisable to someone familiar with contemporary usage: (i) theories that revolve around the notion of what must or must not be done, say a set of duties whose content is determined non-teleologically, and (ii) theories that contain certain particularly stringent moral requirements that are not to be violated for the sake of the good they also enjoin or allow us to produce. Let us call the first understanding ‘global’, the second ‘local’. The global thesis relates to first-order prescriptions within an ethical theory; the local thesis concerns the internal relation among a theory’s moral requirements. Neither is tied to any particular epistemology or meta-ethical foundation. Moreover, neither the global nor the local thesis entails moral absolutism, often considered a defining feature of deontological theories.17 The global thesis is not likely to lead to absolutism. In fact, the most prominent specimen was devised for the express purpose of avoiding it: W. D. Ross’ theory of prima facie duties as put forth in The Right and the practice or not, it is after all a missionary’s task to convert unbelievers. But we would be astonished to see this dichotomy put forward by a professor of comparative religion. The distinction between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy is more dubious still, and not just because – as Bernard Williams was fond of saying – it involves a “quite bizarre conflation of the methodological and the topological, as though one classified cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese” (Williams 1995: 66). Rather, ‘continental’ philosophy was defined from the point of view of some prominent Anglophone philosophers in the mid-twentieth century as the kind of thinking they did not care to engage in, lumping together vastly different styles of thinking that may or may not have been practised in continental Europe at some point. It is rather a shame that certain philosophers and departments – particularly on the North American continent – embraced the term. Figurative uses of ‘foreigner’ are no exception. Dr Johnson quotes Joseph Addison’s list of the ingredients of punch. “Water”, Addison says, “is the only native of England made use of in punch”, “the lemons, the brandy, the sugar, and the nutmegs, are all foreigners”. Ingredient status aside, these ‘foreigners’ have nothing in common. 16
Jörg Schroth seeks to make a related point when he argues for the thesis that deontology should not be misconstrued along absolutist lines (Schroth 2011: 55). But it seems rather arbitrary to insist that one plausible and common meaning represents a misunderstanding if a word is defined in purely negative terms. 17
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Good (1930). Rossian deontology revolves around distinct duty types – fidelity, reparation, gratitude, non-maleficence, justice, beneficence and selfimprovement – but none of them are meant to be inviolable. The result is intuitionism verging in spirit on particularism, not a system of relentless, inflexible and unrestricted commands. Less obviously, there is no direct argumentative route from the local thesis to absolutism either.18 A theory that contains ‘deontological constraints’ that are not to be overridden for the sake of producing value is ‘locally’ absolutist only if there is either a single absolute side-constraint or if there are several constraints that can be relied upon not to conflict, e.g. because they are duties of omission. Neither can be taken for granted.19 Conflicts of deontological constraints might then be resolved by modelling side-constraints on Rossian prima facie. Absolutism would once again be avoided, despite the fact that some duties enjoy lexical priority over others. vii. the ‘right’ and the ‘good’ A common characterisation of the teleology–deontology distinction focuses on the relation between the ‘right’ and the ‘good’: teleology means that the ‘good’ takes precedence over the ‘right’. By contrast, deontology means that the ‘right’ enjoys priority over the ‘good’. This definition promises to be more useful than Frankena’s evasive negative definition. But our hopes will once again be disappointed. Teleology is still used as a foil. Defined as above, the notion of teleology (or consequentialism) makes perfect sense. The ‘right’ in question is the ‘right’ of instrumental reason. An action is right as a means to producing good. The good determines the right. So, what is deontology? In other words: what happens when the right enjoys priority vis-à-vis the good? At this point both the global and the local thesis re-emerge. Deontology according to the global thesis is taken to mean that one must do what is right – fulfil one’s duties – regardless of the good brought about (if value terms enter the picture at all). Deontology according to the local thesis is then the idea that the good, our own or that of others, may only be pursued within the constraints set by what is right. Note that the ‘right’ of the global thesis cannot even be the same as the ‘right’ of the local thesis. The first is the right in the general This can be gleaned from our discussion of whether Broad had inviolable rules in mind when he reintroduced ‘deontology’, see § 3 above. 18
On the problematic assumption shared by Kant and much of eighteenth-century legal thought that perfect duties, as duties of omission, cannot conflict with each other see Timmermann 2013: 45. 19
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sense of action that ought to be done; the second is the right in the specific sense of the just. Even as inverted teleology, deontology is not a distinct kind of ethics, let alone a single ethical theory. Ambiguities apart, what is most problematic about deontology as inverted teleology is that it once again encourages us to think of the right – rather than the good – as the primary category of ethical assessment. viii. questions unanswered and unaddressed We have already encountered two issues about which definitions of deontology are silent: Broad explicitly brackets moral epistemology; and these definitions do not tell us anything about what makes an action right or wrong, the one question teleology was meant to answer. Surely, any meaningful classification of theories of right action should take into account what makes actions right, not privilege a particular answer by putting one type of theory in one category and all the others in the second? But there are at least two further areas that deontology as negative or inverted teleology does not even touch. The first is the problem of motivation. As Marcia Baron notes, two of the most prominent cases of (alleged) deontology differ in this regard: Kant was an ‘internalist’. In his ethics, the moral law motivates in moral judgement, and action ought to be done for the sake of the law. By contrast, Ross was an ‘externalist’. For him, there was no natural link between judgement and motivation, and none was required (Baron 2011: 21 fn.). This highly significant theoretical difference is obscured if we label both Kant and Ross ‘deontologists’. The second is the issue of the normative foundation of right action. It is not the same as the question of what makes an action right. Let us assume that it is agreement by all rational agents that makes right actions right. There is then, at least according to some, still a question why this or that action agreed upon is morally obligatory. Once again, there are several options, and the character of one’s theory will depend on which one is preferred. That the action agreed is to be done might be a moral fact; it might be what God wants us to do; or it could be the result of a command that is ultimately self-imposed. Calling non-teleology ‘deontology’ decides none of these questions. ix. kantian deontology? Kant was unfamiliar with the word ‘deontology’ even in its older, more literal sense, which Bentham invented when he had been dead for a decade. But that is not the only reason why it is a mistake to consider his ethics
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deontology par excellence. (It may not even be a particularly good one.) Kant should not be tarred with the brush of deontology because that questionable simplification obscures the most distinctive features of his theory. As we saw above, like its teleological foil ‘deontology’ essentially concerns the notion of right and wrong action. It is not clear what determines rightness – except that it cannot be the action’s consequences – but rightness is plainly the basic category of ethical assessment. Thinking about Kant in deontological terms makes us think about his ethics as a theory of right action, when manifestly it is not. First, at the level of textual philology, the word ‘right’ (recht) is used only very rarely in the two foundational works, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785 and the Critique of Practical Reason of 1788.20 The notion of ‘right’ – doing the determinately right thing – acquires significance only in the ‘Doctrine of Right’, the first volume of the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797.21 Secondly, and relatedly, the phrase that in meaning and function comes closest to ‘right action’ in the Groundwork is ‘action in conformity with duty’ (pflichtmäßige Handlung). We act in conformity with duty if, for whatever reason, we do as the moral law bids. But, as his critics never tire of pointing out, Kant says that mere ‘legality’ is ethically irrelevant.22 An action must be done from or for the sake of duty to be morally good. It is the self-contained goodness of moral action that Kant is trying to understand in Section I. He is not interested in right action because the Groundwork is an exercise in the analysis of good willing (good maxims, good character). It turns out that, for finite beings like us, the principle of the good will is the categorical imperative.23 However, Kant’s theory appears to be a case of the ‘local’ thesis on
The closest passage in the Groundwork is the discussion of the lying promise in terms of the law-of-nature formulation of the categorical imperative. There the questions arises, not: is it to my benefit to make such a promise? but: “whether it is right” (ob es recht sei, IV 422.26). Note, however, that the context is that of a perfect duty to others, in fact: of a duty later dubbed a ‘juridical duty’ or ‘duty of right’. 20
21
The second volume of the book is, of course, the ‘Doctrine of Virtue’.
Consider the well-known case of the shopkeeper (Groundwork, IV 398). A prudent shopkeeper does the right thing: he sells his goods to everyone at the same price, even when he could get away with charging an inexperienced customer much more. Yet he is criticised by Kant for his lack of honesty (a virtue). The shopkeeper serves people honestly but he is not honest. His will is not good. 22
It is a common mistake to think that Kant offers just another theory of right action – that his ethics is a theory like utilitarianism, the categorical imperative replacing the greatest happiness principle. This leads to the phenomenon of assuming that some novel objection to one theory can also be levelled at the other (demandingness, the ‘paradox of deontology’ etc.). 23
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account of the primacy of perfect duty24 within ethics, if only we concede that perfect duties themselves do not conflict. Perfect duties (e.g. not to throw away one’s life, not to make fraudulent promises) enjoy lexical priority over wide duties (to develop one’s natural gifts, to do good etc.). Moreover, the injunction of the second variant formulation never to use persons merely as a means to any purpose, be it moral or non-moral, imposes ‘deontological constraints’ on the pursuit of the good. But it would be a mistake to think that the catchphrase ‘the right is prior to the good’ captures the nature of this relation. On closer inspection, there is the case that one type of moral goodness (of good action according to perfect duty) that restricts the field of another type of moral goodness (of good action according to imperfect duty, and the positive moral worth of the agent), and under certain circumstances the latter can produce a third type of goodness, which is non-moral (e.g. the merited happiness of a beneficiary). The latter is fully intended, but it is not driving the assessment of action and its principles, which is our primary concern. Both kinds of moral goodness are determined by the moral law. Accordingly, imperfect duty is directed towards an end, but imperfect duty is still not teleological because the end is determined by duty, not vice versa. It is our duty to promote the happiness of others, not because happiness is good – it may or may not be! – but because the moral law requires it. So what about the primacy of the moral law, asserted at length in Chapter 2 of the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason?25 Does the thesis that the value of unconditionally good action is determined by the law of pure practical reason render Kant’s ethics some kind of ‘global’ deontology? Once again, the answer is: perhaps, but not in any meaningful way. First the primacy of this law, it is only one aspect of a broader thesis that concerns any kind of objective value. Instrumentally good action is good because it conforms to laws of empirical practical reason just as morally good action is good because it conforms to the law of pure practical Of course, considered from a juridical point of view some of these strict duties are conventional duties of right. The prohibition of fraudulent promising is a case in question. 24
Those who wish to dissociate Kant’s ethics from ‘deontology’ usually have something like the priority of law in mind. Barbara Herman writes: “The price of accepting the deontological view of Kant (or the deontological view of anything) has been very high. Without a theory of value, the rationale for moral constraint is a mystery. […] Moral skepticism seems to be a reasonable response to morality presented in this way.” (Herman 1993: 210). Paul Guyer similarly complains that standard accounts provide no “basic explanation of how the moral law can motivate us by providing a reason for adherence to it in the first place” (Guyer 2000: 138), and that “the underlying motivation for adhering to the moral law” remains “a mystery” (143). I do not think Kant should be de-deontologised in this way (a story that will have to be told elsewhere). 25
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reason, and subjective well-being not endorsed by reason may be ‘valued’ by the agent but it is not, strictly speaking, good. Secondly, the general claim that moral goodness rests on some rational law does not obviously commit us to the thesis that it is defined by the principle of universal willing, i.e. the categorical imperative. Again, there is too little substance for the claim to serve as a distinguishing mark of Kant’s (or Kantian) ethics. Thirdly, even the thesis that action is made good if it proceeds from maxim that can be a universal law obscures what is most essential about Kant’s ethical system: that human beings are categorically bound to obey this law because they impose it upon themselves. If a buzzword is needed to characterise the Kantian system it is surely autonomy. x. what’s left of ‘deontology’? So, can ‘deontology’ and its cognates be put to any good use? Or should we expunge these words from our philosophical vocabulary? The second option may well be preferable. Our investigation has confirmed Marcia Baron’s suspicion that on “the only reasonably clear” understanding ‘deontological’ simply means ‘nonconsequentialist’ in contemporary usage (Baron 2011: 20). There is no need for any other word. We should say ‘non-consequentialist’ – and in some contexts ‘non-teleological’ – and thus avoid the misleading impression of determinacy and unity that ‘deontology’ tends to create.26 In particular, moral philosophers should stop using ‘deontology’ as a blanket term for a style of thought they disagree with. There may be good reasons to criticise the arguments of Ross and Kant; but that does not amount to rejecting ‘deontology’. Terminological restraint will help us appreciate the complexity of non-consequentialist options at different levels of ethical thinking: first order normative, epistemological, motivational, metaethical etc. The textbook dichotomy between two types of ethical theory must also be discarded. It lumps together wildly different theories; it excludes ‘mixed’ theories of the type envisaged by Broad; and it imposes upon non-consequentialist theories the consequentialist assumption that ‘right’ is the basic category of ethical evaluation. Introducing ‘virtue ethics’ as a third category does not help. If anything, it makes things worse because it obscures the fact that there are many things that top-of-the-range non-consequentialist ethicists will gladly agree on. Like Aristotle, Kantian One might be tempted to retain the notion ‘deontological’ side-constraints as it emerges from Broad’s original proposal. But as absolutism may or may not be intended, speaking of ‘absolutist’ or ‘non-consequentialist’ side-constraints respectively seems preferable even then. 26
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jens timmermann
what’s wrong with ‘deontology’?
draft paper
ethics is primarily about character (the ‘good will’), not about right or wrong action. Like Kant, Aristotle maintains that there are strict ethical requirements: there is no right way to go about adultery, theft or murder (NE 1107a8–12). Arguably, neither Aristotle nor Kant would advocate committing a crime for the sake of the deed’s alleged good overall consequences. Two revisionist possibilities remain. We could return to Bentham’s original meaning and reserve the word for the study of duty or for the system of obligation that results, but I suspect that few of us can be tempted to do so. We do not share the nineteenth century’s taste for Graecisms, and given the complicated history of the word it is difficult to see how a new ‘deontology’ could enhance ethics as a discipline. It does not help us say anything we cannot say well already. Alternatively, we might use ‘deontology’ to refer to a specific phenomenon in the history of moral philosophy: to a group of British ethicists who in the early twentieth century sought to distance themselves from teleological theories, particularly the ideal utilitarianism of G. E. Moore. That is a much more attractive proposal, particularly since, as we saw above, Broad reinvented the term during that era. But on this proposal, while Ross would be the figurehead of deontology, Kant would not be a deontologist at all27 – for many, surely, a step too far. The only sensible option, then, is to abandon Bentham’s word altogether. Two centuries of deontological confusion is enough.28 University of St Andrews Department of Philosophy Edgecliffe The Scores St Andrews Fife KY16 9AR
27
For Ross’ merciless criticism of the Groundwork see his commentary (Ross 1954).
Much of the work on this paper was done during my year as a Fellow of the Centre for Bioethics at the University of Münster (2012/13). I should like to thank my host, Bettina Schöne-Seifert, as well as Annette Dufner, Johann Ach, Michael Quante and Peter Schaber for critical comments on an earlier draft. I am also indebted to audiences at St Andrews, at the Delmenhorst deontology workshop in the autumn of 2013 (with thanks to the organiser, Thomas Gutmann, and to Thomas Schmidt), at the St Paul’s School Isaiah Berlin Society (with thanks to Rufus Duits) and at the Aristotelian Society. 28
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jens timmermann
what’s wrong with ‘deontology’?
draft paper
references Baron, M. 2011. “Virtue Ethics in Relation to Kantian Ethics”. In Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics. Ed. L. Jost and J. Wuerth. Cambridge: 8–37. Broad, C. D. 1930. Five Types of Ethical Theory. London. Frankena, W. 1963. Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Gaus, J. 2001. “What is Deontology?”. In Journal of Value Inquiry, 35, 27–42 and 179–193. Goldworth, A. 1983. “Editorial Introduction”. In “Deontology” together with “A Table of the Springs of Action” and “Article on Utilitarianism”. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Oxford. Guyer, P. 2000. “Kant’s Morality of Law and Morality of Freedom”. In Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: 129–171. Herman, B. 1993. “Leaving Deontology Behind”. In The Practice of Moral Judgment. Cambridge, Mass.: 208–40. Louden, R. B. 1996. “Toward a Genealogy of ‘Deontology’”. In Journal of the History of Philosophy 34: 571–92. Piper, A. 1982. “A Distinction Without a Difference”. In Midwest Studies in Philosophy VII: Social and Political Philosophy , 403-435. Rawls, J. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Second Edition. Cambridge, Mass. Ross, W. D. 1930. The Right and the Good. Oxford. –. 1954. Kant’s Ethical Theory: A Commentary on the “Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten”. Oxford. Schroth, J. 2009. “Deontologie und die moralische Relevanz der Handlungskonsequenzen”. In Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 63, 55–75. Searle, J. 2010. Making the Social World. Oxford. Timmermann, J. 2013. “Kantian Dilemmas? Moral Conflict in Kant’s Ethical Theory”. In Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 95, 36–64. Williams, B. 1995. Making Sense of Humanity. Cambridge.
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