TELEOLOGICAL AND DEONTOLOGICAL THEORIES
MORALINQUIRYRonald F. White, Ph.D.Professor of PhilosophyCollege of Mount St. JosephThis book is a work in progress that is offered for free to anyoneinterested in moral philosophy. It has not been copyrighted. Please steal it,reproduce it, or distribute it, or any part of it, without the author’spermission. Thanks: ron white@mail.msj.edu
2MORAL INQUIRYTABLE OF CONTENTSINTRODUCTION .3CHAPTER I:MORAL THEORIES .11CHAPTER II:THE PRINCIPLES OF BENEFICENCEAND NONMALEFICENCE . .28CHAPTER III:THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY .36CHAPTER IV:THE LIBERTY PRINCIPLE . 43CHAPTER V:THE PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE 50CHAPTER VI:SOCIAL AND POLITICALPHILOSOPHY . 59CHAPTER VII:THE COMPOSITION OF THE MORALUNIVERSE .65CHAPTER VIII:UNIVERSAL MORALITY 69CHAPTER IX:A LIBERTARIAN GUIDE TO THE GOODLIFE . 71
MORAL INQUIRY3INTRODUCTIONFirst off, I will insist that our knowledge of moral behavior iscontingent upon a process called “human inquiry.” This process results in theforging of beliefs that are embraced by both individuals and communities ofindividuals. Here I‟ll defend a foundational philosophical distinction betweentwo broad areas: descriptive inquiry, that is, the process of forging beliefs thatapproximate the Truth; and prescriptive inquiry, the process of forging beliefsthat pertain to Value. I shall argue that these modes of inquiry are NOTincommensurable, but rather, relate to one another in enormously complexways. Although, the boundaries between Truth and Value are far from clear, ifthere is such a thing as “The Good,” our knowledge of it is contingent upon ourknowledge of “Truth.” However, I will also argue that both the descriptive andprescriptive modes of inquiry are, not only unclear, they are also inherentlyfallible, and open-ended, which explains why human beings often disagreewhat‟s true and good, and frequently change their individual and collectiveminds.All descriptive theories attempt to explain, predict, and/or controlnatural phenomena. This kind of theorizing involves the verb “is” and theevaluation of beliefs that are labeled either true or false. Unfortunately, there areseveral competing theories of Truth. Some philosophers argue that Truth is aone-to-one correspondence between our beliefs and some knowable externalreality. Others argue that Truth it at matter of internal consistency or coherencebetween old beliefs and new beliefs, or coherence between the beliefs ofindividuals and groups, and/or between groups. Some even argue that Truth iswhatever powerful people say it is: an extremely cynical philosophy that hasancient origins that is very difficult for philosophers to refute.Whatever Truth is, we do know that our beliefs about it have atendency to change over time. I used to believe in Santa Claus, the EasterBunny, and governmental efficiency. Scientists used to believe that the earth isthe center of the universe, and that bloodletting cures insanity. Based on theflow of history, it is safe to assume that most of what we believe to be true todaywill eventually be regarded as either imprecise or false. We also know thathuman beliefs concerning Truth vary between individuals, groups of individuals,and between cultures. Generally speaking, we deal with this cognitivedissonance by summarily dismissing beliefs that conflict with our own. Ourbeliefs are true, theirs are false.Human beings also believe that some human behavior is good andpraiseworthy, and that other behavior is bad and blameworthy. It is true thathuman beings murder each other, steal from each other, drive too fast, and fartin elevators. Under most circumstances, none of these behaviors are consideredto be good or praiseworthy, although there may be particular circumstanceswhen they might be. Farting is a perfectly natural phenomenon open todescriptive inquiry. It can be explained in terms of the laws of humanphysiology, (the production of nitrogenous waste) and the laws of physics: ourknowledge of both sets of laws change over time. Killing and stealing can alsobe explained in biological terms. But many philosophers argue that there is a
4MORAL INQUIRYdifference between inquiring into whether something is true and/or whether it isgood.If Truth involves a correspondence between our beliefs and reality, wemight argue that Goodness involves a correspondence between our prescriptivebeliefs and what is in fact, good. Unfortunately, moral philosophy is not thatsimple. In fact, it‟s not even clear that Truth involves correspondence, let alonevalue.My view is that the line of demarcation between the descriptive “is”and prescriptive “ought” is extremely ambiguous. Descriptive theories aim toexplain, predict, and control our behavior. These theories are either true or false.Prescriptive moral theories explain whether or not those beliefs correspond towhat‟s good or bad. For example, if you want to know whether or not I believethat capital punishment is morally good, or not you could begin by asking me.That‟s fine, assuming that I know what I believe and that I don‟t lie to you.Fortunately, beliefs are not only mental entities, they also influence ourbehavior. So if you want to know what I believe to be true or good, observe mybehavior over a period of time. You could listen to my lectures, or see if I‟veever signed petitions for or against capital punishment, etc.In my case, I‟m not exactly sure what I think about capital punishment.Over the years I‟ve changed my mind. I do know that if a member of my familyor a close friend was murdered, my behavior would be profoundly influenced byemotion. I‟d insist on retribution. In a moment of moral weakness, I might evenattempt to exact retribution on my own. I think it is “true” that in all times and inall places, human beings seek retribution for harms inflicted by others. It is also“true” that human beings often kill one another. Now whether these behaviorsare good or not is another question.Scientists today have begun to cultivate a line of scientific inquiry that Icall “descriptive psychology.” Some of these inquirers explain our moralbehavior by examining the structure of our brains. Then they suggest that thatthe brain module responsible for morality was shaped by millions of years ofevolution. Based on this line of inquiry, many philosophers argue that, overtime, as this line of descriptive inquiry unfolds, it will gradually replaceprescriptive inquiry. That is to say, prescriptive inquiry will someday beabsorbed by descriptive inquiry in the form of brain science. I don‟t believe it.Prescriptive moral inquiry is here to stay. Nevertheless, I think that descriptiveinquiry certainly elucidates prescriptive inquiry. To me, the only way to makesense of prescriptive inquiry is via descriptive inquiry: that is to say, we mustestablish how we, in fact, go about making value judgments. This is anempirically based activity in which we can all participate. All we have to do isobserve how we employ moral language in our everyday lives, and how wearrive at moral judgments. Descriptive ethics, therefore, involves the collectionof data that relates to moral behavior and the forging of our moral beliefs. It caninvolve biological inquiry, psychological inquiry, economics, sociologicalinquiry, and/or political inquiry. But in the final analysis, it turns out that there issomething left over that resembles universal morality.You may also notice that I am disinclined to spin a fine distinctionbetween “ethics” and “morality.” In fact, I shall use those terms as synonymous.The language that we employ within the moral domain is an essential ingredient
MORAL INQUIRY5for productive. Unfortunately, moral inquiry has always been complex,convoluted, and ambiguous. Thank God for philosophers! I‟ll at least try toidentify some of those messy borders.GOOD AND BAD HUMAN BEHAVIORAnother empirically-based observation evident to prescriptive inquiryis that it produces judgments containing an “ought.” Positive moral behavior isjudged to be “good” and therefore we “ought to do” those kinds of things.Negative behaviors that are “bad” and therefore we “ought to not do” thosethings. In a nutshell, morality consists in urging ourselves and others to do somethings and not to do other things; and, therefore, we may have either positiveduties, negative duties, or both. Moreover, we praise or blame each other, both,for doing good things and for not doing good things.There is also widespread agreement that throughout human history,morality involves rules of conduct. In general, we praise persons that obey therules and blame those that do not. But there is a lot of disagreement over specificmoral rules and how we go discovering which rules to follow under variouscircumstances. Many philosophers argue that moral rules are simply statementsof personal preference, while other philosophers say that moral beliefs aremerely expressions of tradition and convention. Let‟s just say that traditionally,prescriptive moral inquiry usually addresses the question of rules.Let‟s also agree that human beings make moral judgments, not onlyabout specific acts of human behavior, we also make judgments about thecharacter of the persons that perform these acts. This usually involves theanalysis of internal mental things like intent, reasons, motivation, andconscience. Let‟s examine both good behavior and good persons.When we say that a specific behavior is good, we are “prescribing” thatbehavior. Of course, we prescribe a lot of different kinds of behavior under awide variety of circumstances. In fact, I think there are basically four kinds ofbehavior in which we use the adjective “good:” moral behavior (right or wrong),conventional behavior (good or bad manners), prudential behavior(practical/impractical), and legal behavior (lawful or unlawful)? Usually weinvoke rules of conduct to frame these behaviors. But there are notoriouslyfuzzy boundaries here.First of all, moral behavior is usually classified as a subcategory ofnormative human behavior, which is to say that not all human normativebehavior involves morality. In our society unconventional behavior, such asbelching and/or farting at the dinner table is widely regarded as bad behavior. Sois eating with your mouth open, picking your nose, and scratching private partsin public, especially on television. Convention behavior is often dictated by aspecific line habitual behavior expressed as rules, which constitute a body ofcollective beliefs called tradition. Most traditional behavior varies betweencultures and within cultures. They also vary relative to time and place. Badmanners can evoke feelings of distaste or revulsion in others within thosecultural settings, but are not necessarily viewed as immoral. However,philosophers argue over whether there is something more to morality than rulesenforced by tradition and convention.
6MORAL INQUIRYThe category of legality refers to behaviors that are prescribed orproscribed by power-laden institutions through the enforcement of laws. If abehavior is illegal, it carries with it a sanction that is imposed by that institution.Legal sanctions can be imposed by a variety of institutions, including: politicalinstitutions (government), religious institutions (churches), and economicinstitutions (corporations). Lawmakers often pass laws that are unenforceable, orlaws that lack sanctions.Prudence is an old, and probably arcane, concept. As I use the term, itsignifies behavior that either advances individual or collective interests; or, atleast it does not undermine interests. Imprudent behavior may or may not violategood manners, conventionality, or the law. Generally speaking, overeating isneither illegal nor immoral, but if you do it often enough it is certainlyimprudent. And, unfortunately, in the United States overeating has becomeconventional behavior. In other contexts, overeating might be regarded as badmanners. Some argue that it is immoral to overeat if other human beings arehungry or starving. In most places it is not illegal to deliberately fart in a publicelevator, but it will almost certainly be regarded as bad manners. It might also beimprudent, if your boss is in the elevator with you at the time.Obviously, there is a lot of legal behavior that is immoral,nonconventional, and/or imprudent; and there is a lot of illegal behavior that isneither: immoral, non-conventional, nor imprudent. And of course, it is usuallyimprudent to violate standards of legality. But it is only imprudent if you getcaught breaking the law. Sometimes the government is incapable of detectingyour bad behavior, (weak monitoring) sometimes the sanction that it imposesdoes not threatening enough to deter your behavior (weak sanction), andsometimes government simply lacks the power to effectively enforce thesanction.Within our own cultural setting, it seems fairly easy to differentiatebetween the domains of morality, conventionality, legality, and prudence, but itis much more difficult to do it between cultures. All human cultures use legalityto enforce morality, conventionality, and prudence to varying degrees.Libertarians prefer to limit use of the legal code to enforce these alternativeforms of the good. We‟ll get back to that shortly.Although it is very difficult to distinguish between these normativecontexts, there are several common denominators. All of these domains tend toinvolve persons, behaviors, rules, and the assessment of praiseworthiness, andblameworthiness. Once we get beyond these rather obvious generalities, thingsget more complicated. If it is philosophically possible to draw a clear linebetween these categories, morality is usually distinguished on the basis of itsalleged universality. But prudential behavior can also approach universality.That‟s because prudence is often enforced by the laws of nature. (It‟s almostnever a good idea to step in front of a vehicle traveling 75 miles an hour!). Andmurder is universally regarded as illegal, even though all cultures admit variousexceptions. In some cultures, it is conventional to kill women that have beenraped.So the precise borders between morality, convention, legality, andprudence are far from clear. This ambiguity contributes to interminable debateover normative issues that transgress these vaguely defined borders. From a
MORAL INQUIRY7political standpoint, the most pressing issue is to what degree rules ofconventionality, rules of morality, and rules of prudence ought to be enforced bygovernment sanctions.Not only do we make moral judgments in regard to our behavior, wealso make judgments about the character of persons (or agents) that performgood or bad acts. We typically make these character judgments in reference toconformity to rules of morality, rules of convention, or rules of prudence. I willuse the term “good person” to signify a “moral person.” Many philosophersargue that a truly “good person” acts in conformity with moral rules, even whenconvention and prudence dictate otherwise. Others say that good persons aresimply conventional and/or prudent.We can also inquire as to how we can become good persons. Are wegood because we were taught to be good? Are we good because we inheritedgood genes? Can good persons become bad persons? Can bad persons becomegood persons? If so, are more efficient ways to morally rehabilitate bad persons?Is spanking children an efficient rehabilitative tool?So it is a universal empirical truth that human beings praise otherpersons for doing good things and we blame others for doing bad things; whichis to say that we hold others responsible for their actions. We tend to praise mostrule followers and blame most rule breakers. The assessment of praise andblame can be either forward looking or backward looking. Sometimes we praiseand blame others in order to influence their future behavior, and therefore, weuse those terms in the context of moral education and/or moral rehabilitation.When we assess praise and blame in a “backward looking” context, we aim atretribution; that is, to reward or punish others for their past behavior.The concept of retribution captures the essence of how persons act, andhow they ought to act, in response to both the good and the bad.MORAL RESPONSIBILITYThe question of "moral responsibility" plays a central role inretribution. Moral responsibility, therefore, is also central to our feelings andideas about justice. It involves the basic question of what kinds of persons arefair targets for moral praise and moral blame. Simply put, we praise or rewardpersons that do good things, and we blame persons that do bad things. But whatis it about the nature of persons that justifies our penchant for holding themresponsible for their behavior? Well, at least in the Western Liberal tradition weassess responsibility based on two main criteria: rationality and free will.We praise and blame persons that are capable of applying rules andreasoning about consequences before they act. The assessment of degrees ofrationality usually involves assessing mental processes such as logicalreasoning, forethought, learning from experience, processing information etc.Thus, mentality is a necessary condition for the assessment of moralresponsibility. But not all persons that possess mentality are morally responsible.We do not hold young children responsible for their behavior. But as they getolder we tend to hold them more responsible. Nor do we hold persons that have
8MORAL INQUIRYa "cognitive or defect" responsible for their actions. We generally do not holdanimals morally responsible for their behavior.We also praise and blame persons for acts of free will; that is, acts thatthey are capable of controlling. Basically, this means that we do not praise orblame persons for acts that are coerced by other persons or by theircircumstances. Personal coercion generally involves the use of threats andenticements enforced by others. Both threats and enticements come in variousdegrees. Major threat: "Rob that bank or I'll kill your family!" Minor threat:"Rob that bank or I'll take your shoes!" Major enticement: "Rob that bank andI'll give you 10 million dollars!" Minor enticement: "Rob that bank and I'll giveyou one dollar." Generally speaking, we hold moral agents responsible for badacts that were performed in exchange for enticements and we do not usuallypraise people that do good things in exchange for major enticements. In otherwords, responsible persons ought to be able to resist at least some threats and/orenticements. Philosophers argue over whether and/or to what degree threats andenticements undermine free will, and whether the concept of free will makessense.Not only do we hold individuals morally and legally responsible fortheir actions, we also hold groups of individuals legally and morally responsiblefor their actions. But the assessment of collective responsibility is much moredifficult. Here‟s why. First of all, our individual association with groups is notalways framed by rationality or free will. Sometimes we are coerced into joininggroups, and sometimes we associate ourselves with groups without reallyknowing everything that they do. Sometimes we associate ourselves with groupbased on tradition alone.Voluntary associations are those groups that we rationally and freelychoose to associate with in order to advance our. These associations are usuallyorganized hierarchies that involve leaders and followers. Generally speaking, wehold both leaders and followers responsible for their actions. But theresponsibility of followers is contingent upon what knew beforehand and thepresence of coercive influences. When we really know what an organizationdoes and when we freely choose to follow its leaders, we are usually heldresponsible both individually and collectively for what that organization does.Hence, responsibility is diminished commensurate to both knowledge andfreedom. Unfortunatel
the brain module responsible for morality was shaped by millions of years of evolution. Based on this line of inquiry, many philosophers argue that, over time, as this line of descriptive inquiry unfolds, it will gradually replace prescriptive inquiry. That is to say, prescriptive inquiry will someday be absorbed by descriptive inquiry in the form of brain science. I don‟t believe it .
Feb 17, 2019 · theory that rejects deontological constraints. Such an ethical theory is incompati-ble with a shareholder theory of business ethics. Section III argues that one of the most prominent deontological theories of ethics, namely Kantian ethics, is incom-patible with the non-worse
Teleological Ethics Ethical Principles are clear, but actions can be relative Seeks to maximize the good and minimize the evil The end justifies the means Can lead to rationalization . A couple of ethical theories Deontological Ethics Ethical Principles are
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 63-81 Learning Objectives 63 Key Terms 63 Role Theories 65 Motivational Theories 67 Learning Theories 69 Cognitive Theories 73 Symbolic Interaction Theories 75 Socio-Cultural Theories 77 Evolutionary Theories 78 Summary and review 80 review QueStionS 81 4. SELF AND IDENTITY 82-107
2 S o c i a l T h e o r i e s Theories can be used to study society—millions of people in a state, country, or even at the world level. When theories are used at this level they are referred to as macro-level theories, theories which best fit the study of massive numbers of people (typically Conflict and Functional theories).
1.1 This Book and Theories of Economics 1 1.1.1 Theories: Economic and Otherwise 4 1.1.2 Economic Theories in Disagreement 5 1.1.3 Are WAll e Economic Theorists? 6 1.2 Theories and Society 9 1.2.1 Changes in Europe and the Hum
These are equational theories that can be turned into convergent rewrite systems, modulo associativity and commutativity of certain binary operators. Many important theories for intruder deduction fall into this category, e.g., theories for exclusive-or [10,7], Abelian groups [10], and more generally, certain classes of monoidal theories [11].
that our initial survey of business communication theories was an adequate canvassing of essential business communication theories. We used the judges' ratings to classify the theories into four categories: notable, focused, major, and core. For categorizing the theories, we first averaged all raters' theory scores for each theory across all
6 Blueprint II: Improving mental health and well being for all New Zealanders – How things need to be 4. Executive Summary Blueprint II champions a bold new vision to improve the mental health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders. It is a ten year vision that encompasses all of government and provides guidance on what is required to meet
