Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

Differentiate the act between teleology and
deontology;
List down theorist who are considered the fathers of
these theories; and
Identify situations that where these philosophies show.

Content

Deontology
o Deontology is a theory that
suggests actions are good or bad
according to a clear set of rules.

o Its name comes from the Greek

word deon, meaning duty. Actions
that obey these rules are ethical,
while actions that do not, are not.
This ethical theory is most closely
associated with German
philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

o His work on personhood is an example of deontology in practice.

Kant believed the ability to use reason was what defined
a person.

o From an ethical perspective, personhood creates a range of rights

and obligations because every person has inherent dignity –
something that is fundamental to and is held in equal measure by
each and every person.
o This dignity creates an ethical ‘line in the sand’ that prevents us
from acting in certain ways either toward other people or toward
ourselves (because we have dignity as well). Most importantly,
Kant argues that we may never treat a person merely as a means
to an end (never just as a ‘resource’).

o Kant’s ethics isn’t the only example of deontology. Any system

involving a clear set of rules is a form of deontology, which is why
some people call it a “rule-based ethic”. The Ten
Commandments is an example, as is the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights.

o Most deontologists say there are two different kinds of ethical

duties, perfect duties and imperfect duties. A perfect duty is
inflexible. “Do not kill innocent people” is an example of a perfect
duty. You can’t obey it a little bit – either you kill innocent people
or you don’t. There’s no middle-ground.

o Imperfect duties do allow for some middle ground. “Learn about

the world around you” is an imperfect duty because we can all
spend different amounts of time on education and each be
fulfilling our obligation. How much we commit to imperfect duties
is up to us.
Our reason for doing the right thing (which Kant called a maxim)
is also important. We should do our duty for no other reason than
because it’s the right thing to do.

o Obeying the rules for self-interest, because it will lead to better

consequences or even because it makes us happy is not, for
deontologists, an ethical reason for acting. We should be
motivated by our respect for the moral law itself. Deontologists
require us to follow universal rules we give to ourselves. These rules
must be in accordance with reason – in particular, they must be
logically consistent and not give rise to contradictions.

o It is worth mentioning that deontology is often seen as being

strongly opposed to consequentialism. This is because in
emphasizing the intention to act in accordance with our duties,
deontology believes the consequences of our actions have no
ethical relevance at all. Political philosopher Michael Walzer gives
a soundbite version of this idea – “justice though the heavens fall”.
o The appeal of deontology lies in its consistency. By applying
ethical duties to all people in all situations the theory is readily
applied to most practical situations. By focusing on a person’s
intentions, it also places ethics entirely within our control – we can’t
always control or predict the outcomes of our actions, but we are
in complete control of our intentions.

o Others criticize deontology for being inflexible – by ignoring what

is at stake in terms of consequences, some say it misses a serious
element of ethical decision-making. De-emphasizing
consequences has other implications too – can it make us guilty
of ‘crimes of omission’? Kant, for example, argued it would be
unethical to lie about the location of our friend, even to a person
trying to murder them! For many, this seems intuitively false.

o One way of resolving this problem is through an idea

called threshold deontology, which argues we should always
obey the rules unless in an emergency situation, at which point we
should revert to a consequentialist approach.

Teleology
o Teleology, (from Greek telos,
“end,” and logos, “reason”),
explanation by reference to some
purpose, end, goal, or function.
Traditionally, it was also described
as final causality, in contrast with
explanation solely in terms of
efficient causes (the origin of a
change or a state of rest in
something).

o Human conduct, insofar as it is

rational, is generally explained with
reference to ends or goals pursued
or alleged to be pursued, and
humans have often understood the behavior of other things in
nature on the basis of that analogy, either as of themselves
pursuing ends or goals or as designed to fulfill a purpose
devised by a mind that transcends nature.

o The most-celebrated account of teleology was that given

by Aristotle when he declared that a full explanation of
anything must consider its final cause as well as its efficient,
 material, and formal causes (the latter two being the stuff out
of which a thing is made and the form or pattern of a thing,
respectively).

o With the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries,
interest was directed to mechanistic explanations of natural
phenomena, which appeal only to efficient causes; if
teleological explanations were used, they took the form not of
saying (as in Aristotelian teleology) that things develop toward
the realization of ends internal to their own natures but of
viewing biological organisms and their parts as complex
machines in which each smaller part is minutely adapted to
others and each performs a specific function that contributes
(e.g., in the case of the eye) to the function or purpose of the
whole (e.g., that of seeing).

o For the 18th-century Protestant Apologist William Paley and his

followers, the machinelike nature of biological organisms could
be explained only by positing a divine designer of all life.
Paley’s teleology thus became the basis of the modern version
of the teleological argument for the existence of God, also
called the argument from design.

o Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1790; Critique of

Judgment) dealt at length with teleology. While
acknowledging—and indeed exulting in—the wondrous
appointments of nature, Kant cautioned that teleology can
be, for human knowledge, only a regulative, or heuristic,
principle and not a constitutive one—i.e., a guide to the
conduct of inquiry rather than to the nature of reality.
Accordingly, teleological language in the biological sciences
is not to be taken literally; it is essentially a set of
useful metaphors.

o Despite apparently having made teleology conceptually

unnecessary to biology, however, evolutionary theory did not
result in the elimination of teleological language from the
biological sciences. Darwinists as much as believers in divine
design continued to speak of the function or purpose of the
eye, for example.

o Those who took the latter position, which was essentially that of
Kant, attempted from the early 20th century to systematically
eliminate teleological language from the biological sciences,
with mixed success. One such approach advocated simply
defining the notion of function in terms of Darwinian natural
selection. Those who held the former view recognized that
 some notion of function or teleology generally was uniquely
suitable to biology and not eliminable from it.
o Some theorists within this group argued that biological
teleology could not be explained entirely in terms of natural
selection because the former essentially involved references to
normative concepts such as the “good” (of an organism or its
parts), “benefit” (to an organism or its parts), or “harmony” (of
a biological system).

Utilitarianism,
o in normative ethics, a
tradition stemming from the
late 18th- and 19th-century
English philosophers and
economists Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart
Mill according to which an
action is right if it tends to
promote happiness and
wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of happiness—not just the
happiness of the performer of the action but also that of everyone
affected by it.

o Such a theory is in opposition to egoism, the view that a person

should pursue his own self-interest, even at the expense of others,
and to any ethical theory that regards some acts or types of acts
as right or wrong independently of their consequences
(see deontological ethics).

o Utilitarianism also differs from ethical theories that make the

rightness or wrongness of an act dependent upon the motive of
the agent, for, according to the utilitarian, it is possible for the right
thing to be done from a bad motive. Utilitarian may, however,
distinguish the aptness of praising or blaming an agent from
whether the act was right.

▪ The Nature of Utilitarianism

o Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical
question “What ought a person to do?” The answer is that a
person ought to act so as to produce the best consequences
possible.

• Basic concepts
o In the notion of consequences, the utilitarian includes all of the
good and bad produced by the act, whether arising after the
act has been performed or during its performance. If the
 difference in the consequences of alternative acts is not great,
some utilitarian do not regard the choice between them as
a moral issue.

o According to Mill, acts should be classified as morally right or

wrong only if the consequences are of such significance that
a person would wish to see the agent compelled, not merely
persuaded and exhorted, to act in the preferred manner.

o In assessing the consequences of actions, utilitarianism relies

upon some theory of intrinsic value: something is held to be
good in itself, apart from further consequences, and all other
values are believed to derive their worth from their relation to
this intrinsic good as a means to an end.

o Bentham and Mill were hedonists; i.e, they analyzed happiness

as a balance of pleasure over pain and believed that these
feelings alone are of intrinsic value and disvalue. Utilitarians also
assume that it is possible to compare the intrinsic values
produced by two alternative actions and to estimate which
would have better consequences. Bentham believed that
a hedonic calculus is theoretically possible.

o A moralist, he maintained, could sum up the units of pleasure

and the units of pain for everyone likely to be affected,
immediately and in the future, and could take the balance as
a measure of the overall good or evil tendency of an action.
Such precise measurement as Bentham envisioned is perhaps
not essential, but it is nonetheless necessary for the utilitarian to
make some interpersonal comparisons of the values of the
effects of alternative courses of action.