Question: Discuss the concept of Deontological Ethics as described by Kant.
Answer: The word Deontology is derived form a Greek word which means ‘obligation.’
Deontological ethics stresses that each of us has certain duties – actions that we ought or
ought not to perform – and that acting morally amounts to doing our duty, whatever
consequences might follow from this. Thus, some actions are absolutely right or wrong
regardless of the results which follow from them.
The most famous deontologist is the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel
Kant. Kant believed that all of our actions are performed either to achieve a desired result
or out of a sense of moral duty—our need to follow the moral law. Acts of the first kind
are motivated by inclination (a form of passion). Kant thought that actions motivated by
passion cannot be moral. Kant believed, like Aristotle, that an act can be virtuous without
the agent being virtuous. An act can only be a moral action, he argued, if the agent puts
his or her inclinations aside and performs it out of duty (because it is required by the
moral law). Our actions, therefore, are moral, as long as our intentions are good and we
act out of reverence for the moral law. If we could find such moral absolute laws, then a
complete system of ethics could be established. Kant claimed that he had discovered such
a law and named it the Categorical Imperative.
Imperatives tell us what to do—they are instructions. Kant made a distinction between
two types of imperative – hypothetical and categorical. A hypothetical imperative tells us
how to act in order to achieve a desired goal. It applies only to people who want to achieve
that particular goal. The categorical imperative, on the other hand, applies to everyone,
regardless of individual desires or circumstances.
The Categorical Imperative may be stated in several ways, but basically it asserts that an
act is immoral if the rule that would authorize it cannot be made into a rule for all human
beings to follow. This means that whenever someone is about to make a moral decision,
he or she must, according to Kant, ask first, “What is the rule authorizing this act I am
about to perform?” and, second, “Can it become a universal rule for all human beings to
follow?” Formally, this formulation of the Categorical Imperative reads, “Act only on that
maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should be universal law.”
The second formulation of the Categorical Imperative reads, “So act that you use
humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same
time as an end, never merely as a means.” This implies that no human being should be
treated only as a means to the ends of others. In other words, we must not neglect the
needs of others or dehumanize them in order to achieve our goals as individuals.
In Kant's view the categorical imperative is to be obeyed as a moral duty, regardless of an
individual's inclinations. Our inclinations are outside our conscious control. Someone
who has no natural inclinations to sympathy or compassion, yet who helps others out of
a sense of duty, is morally praiseworthy; those who act purely out of inclinations, no
matter how admirable those inclinations happen to be, are not acting morally at all. Duty
therefore stands in contrast to mere inclination. Acting from a motive of duty is acting
simply because you know that this is the right thing to do, not from any other motive.
