Question

Deontology essentially states that there are certain moral absolutes that should never be violated (e.g., rules against killing, mutilating, stealing, and breaking promises.) To what extent do you agree with this idea? Are there certain do’s and don’ts to which human beings should always adhere and what are they? Why should they adhere to these moral principles and what are the reasons behind your views?

Answer 1

The normative theories are deontological theories. No particular stance on moral ontology or moral epistemology is presupposed by these. A deontologist may generally be a moral realist because either the natural moral properties are equal to natural properties or the non-natural moral properties are not themselves natural properties, even though they are non-reductive in relation to variety because of natural properties. Perhaps a deontologist may be an articulate, constructivist, transcendentalist, conventionalist, perhaps Divine command-theorist about the essence of morality. Similarly, a deontologist can say that by direct intuition we know the substance of deontological morality, by Kantian reflection on our normative situation, or by striking a reflective balance between our individual moral convictions and the theories we build to justify them (intuition theories).

Nevertheless, while deontological theories may be agnostic with respect to metaethics, some metaethical accounts seem less hospitable to deontology than others. The stock furniture of deontological normative ethics-privileges, responsibilities, permits, for example, fits uncomfortably into the metaethical universe corner of the realist or naturalist. Of this reason, many naturalists are consequentialists in their ethics because they are moral realists in their meta-ethics. Nonnatural realism, conventionalism, transcendentalism, and Divine order appear to be more hospitable deontological metaethical houses. For instance, the deontology paradox mentioned above can seem more tractable if morality is a matter of a Supreme Commander's personal orders to each of his human subordinates. If such rough relations remain, then flaws with those most hospitable metaethical accounts for deontology would weaken deontology as a normative theory of practice. Some deontologists have argued that these relations need not be preserved and that a naturalist-realistic meta-ethics should underpin a deontological ethics