Module 7

Deontology and Utilitarianism

OBJECTIVES:
• Understand the concept of deontology
• Compare it with the concept of virtue ethics
• Determine the difference of utilitarianism with the other concepts

Deontological Ethics

Deontology
• Why must I do the right thing?
o Because it is the right thing to do
• Duty as MOTIVE
• The moral worth of an action
• The RIGHT ACTION:
o FROM ACTION vs MERELY IN CONFORMITY WITH DUTY
• How can I figure out what my duty is?
o By using the UNIVERSALIZABILITY procedure to test the rightness/wrongness of actions.
▪ Identify the action to be tested
▪ Formulate a maxim (I ought to…)
▪ Test the Universalizability
(Excerpt from Rich and Butts’ Introduction to Ethics)
All deontological ethics theories are non-consequentialist. This means that they place the emphasis on
the decision or action itself – on the motivations, principles, or ideals underlying the decision or action
– rather than being concerned with the outcomes or consequences of that decision or action. This
reasoning is founded on the desirability of principle (usually duties or rights) to act in a given situation.
The two main non-consequentialist theories are ethics of duties and ethics of rights and justice. Both of
these are rooted in assumptions about universal rights and wrongs and responsibilities. This means that
people who promote these types of ethical principles usually believe that they should be applied to
everyone, everywhere in the world. If a child in one country has a right to an education, this means
that all children, everyone in the world, should have the right to an education.
Duties
Most people believe that all human beings have some duties to other human beings. Duties can be
positive, such as the duty to look after one’s children, or negative, such as the duty not to murder
another human being. When people use the language of duties, they usually do so in a way that
implies that the duty is universal to all human beings (or at least to all adult humans of sound mind).
The foundation of theories of duties is the theory developed by the German philosopher, Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804). Rather than relying on religion to tell us what our duties are, Kant believed that we
could rely on our power of reason to do so. At the center of Kant’s theory of duty is what he termed
Categorical Imperatives. Some actions and decisions are founded on our personal desires. For
example, you could say, ‘If you want to live in a beautiful house, you ought to work hard.’ However,
this is not a categorical imperative, as it is based simply on fulfilling our desires. A categorical imperative
tells us that we must do something, irrespective of our personal desire: for example, ‘You ought to look
after your parents’.
A central principle of the categorical imperative is that we should treat people as an end, never as a
means to an end. This means that people should be treated with dignity. Treating someone as a means
to an end involves using them as a tool to achieve something else. Buying products made by workers
who have been paid unacceptably low wages in order to ensure a cheap price for the goods they
produce is treating the workers as a means to an end and it is not fulfilling the duties we have to those
workers. Buying a guaranteed ‘fair trade’ product, in contrast, recognizes our duty to ensure that the
workers who produce our goods earn acceptable wages.
Duties are very often closely linked to the notion of rights. When somebody has a right, usually this
implies that others have a duty to uphold this right.
Rights
Rights theory is one particular duty-based theory of ethics. A right is a justified claim against another
person’s behavior. So, rights and duties are related in that the rights of one person imply the duty of
someone else to uphold that right. As Traer (200relylains, ‘the most widely accepted justification for
moral rights relies in Kant’s deontological argument that we have a duty to treat every person as an
end, and not as means to our ends, because every person is autonomous and rational, and thus has
intrinsic worth’.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
• History: response to the need for legal and social reform in Britain
• An example of CONSEQENTIALISM
• Moral Value of and Action = Outcome

Characteristics of UT
• Hedonism
• Impartiality
• Instrumentality

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism

• Plainly Quantitative (Felific Calculus – Happiness Calculator)
• Pain and Pleasure
• In deciding whether an action is to be done or not, one must ask oneself whether the action
will bring about greater X than an alternative option

John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism

• Added a Qualitative Dimension
• Some kinds of pleasure are more desirable
• Greatest Happiness Principle – Quantity and Quality

Utilitarianism vs Virtue Ethics

• UT – Act evaluation
• VE – Values formation
Utilitarianism vs Natural Law
• UT – Actions are good only in instrumental sense
• NL – Actions are wrong because they go against Natural Law
Utilitarianism vs Deontology
• UT – Consequence
• DT – Moral value of the act
(Excerpt from Butts and Rich)
The modern form of the consequentialist theory of utilitarianism derives from 19th century British
philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and it has been particularly influential in
areas of the world influences by British culture. Rather than maximizing individual welfare, utilitarianism
focuses on collective welfare, and it identifies goodness with the greatest amount of good for the
greatest number of people: the ‘greatest happiness principle’.
Maximizing benefits for the greatest number of people involves net assessment of benefit: utility is the
new result of benefits and costs. Utilitarianism has three essential elements:
• Whether an action is right or wrong is determined solely by its consequences.
• The value of the consequences of an action is assessed in terms of the amount of happiness or
well-being caused.
• In assessing the total happiness caused to a number of people, equal amounts of happiness
are to have equal value, no one person’s happiness having greater value than another’s.
Jeremy Bentham’s Contribution
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) famously held that humans were ruled by two sovereign masters –
pleasure and pain. We seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain; these two forces govern us in all we
do, in all we say, in all we think. Actions are approved when they are such as to promote happiness,
or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to cause unhappiness, or pain.
Bentham notes that there is a variety of parameters along which we quantitatively measure pleasure:
intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity and extent.
Criticisms of Bentham’s Utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill)
John Stuart Mill (18006)-1873) was a follower of Bentham, and, through most of his life, greatly admired
Bentham’s work even though he disagreed with some of Bentham’s claims – particularly on the nature
of ‘happiness’.
• Bentham’s Hedonism was too egalitarian. Simple-minded pleasures, sensual pleasures, were just
as good, at least intrinsically, than more sophisticated and complex pleasures. The pleasure of
drinking a beer in front of the T.V. surely doesn’t rate as highly as the pleasure one gets solving
a complicated math problem, or reading a poem, or listening to Mozart.
• Bentham’s view that there were no qualitative differences in pleasures also left him open to the
complaint that in his view, human pleasures were of no more value than animal pleasures.
• Bentham committed to the corollary that the moral status of animals was same as that of
humans. While harming a puppy and harming a person are both bad, however, most people
had the view that harming the person was worse.
Mill sought changes to the theory. For him, there are some pleasures that are more fitting than others.
Intellectual pleasures are of higher, better, sort than the ones that are merely sensual and those that
we share with animals. Mill’s ‘proof’ of the claim that intellectual pleasures are better in kind than
others. He argues that those who experience both view the higher as better than the lower. Who would
rather be a happy oyster, living an enormously long life, than a person living a normal life? To use his
famous example – it is better to be Socrates ‘dissatisfied’ than a fool ‘satisfied’.

References:
• Butts, J. & Rich, K. (2008). Nursing ethics: across the curriculum into practice: Jones and Bartlett
Publishers.