Deontology

Objectives:
● Discuss the basic principles of deontology;
● Apply the concepts of agency and autonomy to one‘s moral
experience; and
● Evaluate actions using the universalizability test.

Introduction

During the flag ceremony of that Monday morning, January 24, 2017, the mayor of
Baguio City awarded a certificate from the City Government that commended Reggie
Cabututan for his ―extraordinary show of honesty in the performance of their duties or
practice of profession‖. Reggie is a taxi driver who just three days before the awarding, drove
his passenger, an Australian named Trent Shields, to his workplace. The foreigner, having
little sleep and was ill the previous day, left his suitcase inside the taxi cab after he reached
his destination. The suitcase contained a laptop, passport, and an expensive pair of
headphones, which Trent claimed amounted to around P260,000.

Consider closely the moment when Reggie found that Trent had left a suitcase in his
taxi cab: If he were to return the suitcase, there was no promise of an award from the City
Government of Baguio and no promise of a reward from the owner. What if he took the
suitcase and sold its contents? That could surely help him supplement his daily wages. Life as
a taxi driver in the Philippines is not easy. A little extra cash would go a long way to put food
on the table to pay tuition fees for his children.

Yet, Reggie returned the suitcase without the promise of a reward. Why? Perhaps, he
had previously returned lost luggage to passengers. Maybe, it was his first time to do so.
Maybe he received a reward before, or maybe he knows some fellow taxi drivers who did or
did not receive rewards from passengers after they returned lost luggage. However, the point
is that there is no promise of a reward. A reward in the first place, is not an entitlement. It is
freely given as an unrequired gift for one‘s service or effort. Otherwise, it would be a
payment, not a reward, if someone demanded it. Why did Reggie return the suitcase? For
now, let us suppose his main reason was simply because it was right to return lost property to
the rightful owner, no matter how tempting it is to keep it for oneself. It is possible that
Reggie‘s reason for returning the luggage was not because of any reward whether psychic or
physical? ―It is simply the right thing to do.‖ Reggie might have told himself.

What if Reggie did not return the suitcase, destroyed the lock, then took and sold its
valuable contents? What is wrong about keeping and benefiting from the valuables that
someone misplaced? ―It is his fault; he was mindless and careless,‖ Reggie could have
mused: ―He will learn to be mindful of his things from now on.‖ Yet, Reggie returned the
suitcase without the promise of a reward. As we previously said, perhaps, Reggie believed
that it was the right thing to do. Even if he felt that he could have benefitted from the sale of
the valuable items in the suitcase, he must have believed the principle that it is right to do the
right thing. Reggie could be holding on to this moral conviction as a principle of action.
LESSON 1: Duty and Agency

The moral theory that evaluates actions that are done because of duty is called
deontology. Deontology comes from the Greek word dean, which means ―being necessary‖.
Hence, deontology refers to the study of duty and obligation. The main proponent of
deontology is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He was a German Enlightenment philosopher
who wrote one of the most important works on moral philosophy, Groundwork towards a
Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In this work, Kant brings out the attention to the fact that we,
human beings, have the faculty called rational will, which is the capacity to act according to
principles that we determine for ourselves.

To consider the rational will is to point out the difference between animals and
persons. On one hand, animals are sentient organisms. Sentience, meaning an organism has
the ability to perceive and navigate its external environment. Insofar as dogs and carabaos are
sentient organisms, we do not see them bumping into trees and walls unless their senses are
weak. Animals constantly interact with their surroundings. This is also true to us humans; we
are also sentient. Thus, both animals and persons interact in and with the world, reacting to
external stimuli and internal impulses to survive and thrive.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German enlightenment

philosopher who is thought to herald the ―Copernican
Revolution in Philosophy.‖ What is meant by Copernican
Revolution? Nicolaus Copernicus was the 15th century
astronomer who proposed the heliocentric model of the universe
in his book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. This was the
major event in the history of ideas because it heralded a radical
paradigm shift in the way humans considered their place in the universe. Akin to Copernicus,
Kant developed revolutionary insights concerning the human mind and conditions for the
possibility of knowledge. In this chapter, the primary text of Kant, Groundwork towards a
Metaphysics of Morals, shows his contributions in moral philosophy. By itself, this text is
also revolutionary, insofar as Kant‘s ambition in the text is radical. He intends to develop
what he calls the ―supreme principle of morality‖. It is supposedly supreme because by
basing it on the faculty of reason, it becomes binding for all creatures that have that faculty.
(―Faculty here means inherent mental capacity.) This way, the binding force of obligation is
no longer relative but universal. It no longer depends on what a person‘s historical, cultural,
or religious circumstances are. For as long as that person has the faculty of reason, the moral
law is binding. Hence, Kant became a key thinker in moral reflection.

On other hand, people are also rational. Rationality consists of the mental faculty to
construct ideas and thoughts that are beyond our immediate surroundings. This is the capacity
for mental abstraction, which arises from the operations of the faculty of reason. Thus, we
have the ability to stop and think about what we are doing. We can remove ourselves
mentally from the immediacy of surroundings and reflect on our actions and how such
actions affect the world. We can imagine a different and better world, and create mental
images of how we interact with other people in that world.

We not only have the capacity to imagine and construct mental images, but we also
have the ability to act on— to enact and make real—those mental images. This ability to
enact our thoughts is the basis for rational will. The rational will refers to the faculty to
intervene in the world, to act in a manner that is consistent with our reason. As far as we
know, animals only act according to impulses, based on their natural instincts. Thus, animals
―act‖ with immediacy (from Latin: i + medius, or ―no middle‖) with nothing that intervenes
between the impulse and the action. They do not and cannot deliberate on their actions. In
fact, we may say that animals do not ―act‖. They only ―react‖ to their external surroundings
and internal impulses. In contrast, we humans have reason, which intervenes between
impulse and act. We have the ability to stop and think about what we are doing to evaluate
our actions according to principles. Simply stated, we are not only reacting to our
surroundings and internal impulses, but are also conceiving of ways to act according to
certain rational principles.
 LESSON 2: Autonomy

Kant claims that the property of the rational will is autonomy, which is the opposite of
heteronomy. These three Greek words are instructive: autos, heteros, and nomos, which
means "self," "other," and "law," respectively. Hence, when we combine autos and nomos,
we get autonomy; heteros and nomos to heteronomy. Crudely stated, autonomy means self-
law (or self- legislating) and heteronomy means other law.

Kant claims that there is a difference between rational will and animal impulse. He
emphasized that the choice can be determined by pure reason and is called free choice. That
ehic is determinable only by inclination (sensible, impulse, stimulus) would be animal choice
(arbitrium brutum). Human choice, in contrast, is a choice that may indeed be affected but not
determined by impulse.

Consider how political freedom in liberal theories is thought to be related to

legitimate political authority: A state is free when its citizens are bound only by laws in some
sense of their own making — created and put into effect, say, by vote or by elected
representatives. The laws of that state then express the will of the citizens who are bound by
them. The idea, then, is that the source of legitimate political authority is not external to its
citizens, but internal to them, internal to ―the will of the people.‖ It is because the body
politic created and enacted these laws for itself that it can be bound by them.

An autonomous state is thus one in which the authority of its laws is in the will of the
people in that state, rather than in the will of a people external to that state, as when one state
imposes laws on another during occupation or colonization.

In a similar fashion, we may think of a person as free when bound only by her own
will and not by the will of another. Her actions then express her own will and not the will of
someone or something else. The authority of the principles binding her will is then also not
external to her will. It comes from the fact that she willed them. So autonomy, when applied
to an individual, ensures that the source of the authority of the principles that bind her is in
her own will. Kant‘s view can be seen as the view that the moral law is just such a principle.
Hence, the ―moral legitimacy‖ of the CI is grounded in its being an expression of each
person‘s own rational will. It is because each person‘s own reason is the legislator and
executor of the moral law that it is authoritative for her.
 LESSON 3:
Universalizability

The faculty of reason can be the cause of autonomous action, we need to learn a
method or a specific procedure that will demonstrate autonomy of the will. But before
explaining this procedure, it will be helpful to first make a distinction about kinds of moral
theories, namely, substantive and formal moral theories.

A substantive moral theory immediately promulgates the specific actions that

comprise that theory. As such, it identifies the particular duties in a straightforward manner
that the adherents of the theory must follow. The set of Ten Commandments of the Judeo-
Christian tradition is an unambiguous example of a substantive moral theory.

In contrast, a formal moral theory does not supply the rules or commands
straightaway. Instead, a formal moral theory provides us the "form" or "framework" of the
moral theory. To provide the "form" of a moral theory is to supply a procedure and the
criteria for determining, on one's own, the rules and moral commands. To be exact, a formal
moral theory will not give us a list of rules or commands. Instead, it will give us a set of
instructions on how to make a list of duties or moral commands.

Kant endorses this formal kind of moral theory. The Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der
Sitten, which he wrote in 1785, embodies a formal moral theory in what he calls the
categorical imperative, which provides a procedural way of identifying the rightness or
wrongness of an action. Kant articulates the categorical imperative this way:

Act only according to such a maxim, by which you can at once will that it become a
universal law. (Ak 4:421)

FOUR KEY ELEMENTS OF CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

1. Action
2. Maxim
3. Will
4. Universal law
 In this context, a maxim consists of a ―rule‖ that we live in our day-to-day lives, but
it does not have the status of a law or moral command that binds us to act in a certain way.
Rather, maxims depict the patterns of our behaviour. Thus, maxims are akin to the "standard
operating procedures" in our lives.

In the formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant calls our attention to the kind of
maxims that we live by. He claims that new ought to act according to the maxim ―by which
you can at once will that it become a universal law‖. What does it mean to have a maxim that
can become a universal law? It means that the maxim must be universalizable, which is what
it means to ―will that it becomes a universal law.‖ This means nothing other than imagining
a world in which the maxim, or a personal rule, that I live by were adopted by everyone as
their own maxim. In this formulation, Kant is telling us to conceive of the maxim as if it is
obligated everyone to comply. This mental act of imagining a universalized maxim does not
mean we picture a world in which everyone actually followed the maxim. Instead, we merely
imagine the maxim as a law that everyone ought to follow. The proper way to imagine the
universalized maxim is by not asking, ―What if everyone did the maxim?

We reveal the rational permissibility of actions insofar as they cannot be rejected as

universalizable maxims. In contrast, those universalized maxims that are rejected are shown
to be impermissible, that is, they are irrational and thus, in Kant‘s mind, immoral. But what
does rational permissibility mean? Simply put, it refers to the intrinsic quality of an action
that is objectively and necessarily rational. Using the universalizability test, we can reveal the
objective necessity of an action as rational.

It is objectively necessary because the quality of the claim is universally and logically
valid, and we understand this to be always true as rational beings. Observe the difference
between the quality of objectively necessary claims with contingent claims, such as claims
about the world like ―The sky is blue‖, the truth of which depends on the actual situation in
the world.