II.—RULES AND CONSEQUENCES

Abstract

SIR DAVID Ross has remarked on the clear antithesis between ethical systems in which duty is the central theme, and those in which goods or ends are central. It is an antithesis between those philosophers who hold that ' right ', ' ought ', and ' duty ' embodied in certain moral rules, are terms more fundamental to the judgment of what persons do than are 'good' or 'intrinsic good '; and those philosophers who hold that good ' or ' intrinsic good ', embodied in certain ethical principles is the more fundamental concept. This antithesis has also been expressed as one between deontological and teleological ethical systems. It has, among its other effects, generated the controversy between philosophers who believe that ' right ' can be defined in terms of' good' and those who believe that it cannot. I shall maintain that the traditional teleological-deontological distinction does not mark two fundamentally different theories about what is relevant to the rightness of an action, but instead only distinguishes two alternative ways of saying the same thing, which I shall call the language of ends and the language of rules . Hence I shall argue that the teleological-deontological distinction is a false dualism which has contributed only confusion to moral philosophy. My point of attack is to examine the common distinction between actions, on the one hand, and the consequences of actions, on the other, with an eye to seeing how or why it is that some events count as parts of actions and others count as consequences of actions. Roughly, my first three sections attack the idea that the appeal to rules and the appeal to consequences are logically distinct and incompatible tests for the rightness of individual actions. In Section IV I argue that Stephen Tounlmin's restricted utilitarianism cannot resolve the difficulties of traditional formalist and teleological (or utilitarian) theories because it reaffirms and indeed glorifies the main source of these difficulties, namely the bifurcation of moral reasoning into deontological and teleological reasoning.