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Can Deontologists Be Moderate?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Saul Smilansky
Saul Smilansky
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, [email protected]
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Abstract

There is a widespread view according to which deontology can be construed as a flexible, reasonable view, able to incorporate consequentialist considerations when it seems compelling to do so. According to this view, deontologists can be moderate, and their presentation as die-hard fanatics, even if true to some historical figures, is basically a slanderous and misleading philosophical straw man. I argue that deontologists, properly understood, are not moderate. In the way deontology is typically understood, a deontology, as such, conceptually needs to be overriding. The error I point out has pernicious implications, which are noted.

Type
Articles
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 71 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 Kagan, S., Normative Ethics, Boulder, 1998Google Scholar.

2 Kagan, p. 79.

3 Nussbaum, M., ‘Comment’, Goodness and Advice, ed. Gutmann, A., Princeton, 2001, p. 101Google Scholar.

4 As Nussbaum recognizes, the cases we are considering are ones where deontological considerations confront opposing consequentialist ones, and should not be confused with the very different types of cases, where deontological injunctions themselves point in opposite directions. See more on this below. Deciding among opposing deontological injunctions in the light of consequentialist considerations may also be said to take one outside of the deontological sphere, but discussing these types of cases is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

5 Many think that the problem of the utilitarian incentives for the punishment of the innocent exists only in the contrived ‘Sheriff and Lynching Mob’ type of examples. As I have shown previously, this is not so. See Smilansky, S., ‘Utilitarianism and the “Punishment” of the Innocent: The General Problem’, Analysis, l (1990)Google Scholar.

6 Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good, Oxford, 1930Google Scholar.

7 Kagan, p. 73.

8 Ibid.

9 An earlier version of this paper was given at the annual Israeli Philosophical Association meeting in February 2002, and I am grateful for comments made by participants. I am also very grateful to Jonathan Berg, Nir Eyal, Iddo Landau, Daniel Statman, and the Editor and anonymous referees of Utilitas, for helpful comments on drafts of the paper.