Kantian Deontology

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Ethics

Overview

For Kant the moral worth of an action lies in the principle it is done on, not in what it brings about. A maxim qualifies only if it could be willed as a universal law without contradiction, and the test's deeper content is the standing of persons: a rational being is an end in itself and may never be treated merely as a means, however good the result of doing so.

This is what lets deontology say flatly that some acts are forbidden — that you may not frame an innocent person to prevent a riot — where consequentialism can only ever say so conditionally. The cost is rigidity. It is pressed hardest by cases where two duties conflict and the theory supplies no scale on which to weigh them, and by Kant's own insistence that the prohibition on lying holds even towards a murderer at the door.

Position on

• The Basis of Right Action

Held by traditions

• Kantian Critical Philosophy

  Question scope: The Basis of Right Action

Incompatible positions

• Virtue Ethics

  Question scope: The Basis of Right Action

• Consequentialism

  Question scope: The Basis of Right Action

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Deontological Ethics
• G. E. M. Anscombe, 'Modern Moral Philosophy', Philosophy 33 (1958), which rejects duty-based accounts of right action in favour of an account grounded in the virtues
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Virtue Ethics, §1 (deontology and virtue ethics differ over whether the rule or the virtuous agent is the primary bearer of rightness)