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Deontological Ethics
Imagine that you are on a sinking ship. You and eight other passengers
manage to make it on to a lifeboat and begin heading to shore. The problem
is, the lifeboat only supports eight passengers, and including you, there
are nine passengers. You have to make a decision to either throw one
passenger overboard and save the other eight people, or let all nine people
drown. What do you do?
This type of question belongs to the study of moral philosophy, or
ethics. Even though most people will never find themselves in the situation
described above, they do encounter situations in which they have to choose
between two undesirable outcomes. For example, suppose you discovered
that your boss was committing tax fraud by not reporting a portion of your
company’s revenue to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). You know that this
is wrong, but you also know that if you try to stop it that you would be risking
your own job. Suppose that you are barely making ends meet as it is, and
that you have got three children to support. You have an obligation to take
care of your family, but you also have an obligation to be an honest person.
How do you know what is right?
Deontological (duty-based) ethics would probably say that you should tell the
authorities about the tax fraud, regardless of the consequences. That is
because a deontological argument says that a moral action is valuable in
itself, regardless of its result. Stated another way, deontological ethics claims
that the ends (the ultimate goal) do not justify the means (the way of getting
to that ultimate goal). Being honest is the right thing to do for its own sake,
regardless of the outcome.
Deontological rules come from an authority, and those rules are to be obeyed
without qualification or explanation. A classic example of a deontological
morality is the Ten Commandments. The Judeo-Christian world regards the
Ten Commandments as absolute moral law for no other reason than that God
commands it be so. On a smaller scale, parents often employ a deontological
argument with their children. When a child breaks a rule, the parent
admonishes them, the child protests by asking "why?" and the
parent responds “because I said so.” In this case, the parent is the authority
and the rules are the rules—they do not need to be explained.
Immanuel Kant called this kind of order a categorical imperative, or an order
that is given without reason or condition. Categorical imperatives can be
given by a wide range of external authority figures, such as God, a king, a
president, the government, a local religious leader, or even parents. People
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Deontological Ethics
obey a rule because it is the law, because it is the will of God, or because that
is what their mothers taught them.
Reference
Kant, Immanuel. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/ethicsbook/c3612.html
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