Deontological View Research Articles

К. МакГинн. Деонтологическая теодицея/ пер. с англ. В. А. Сергеевой

The essay examines the inconsistence problem of the existence a perfect God and evil in the world. It contains criticism of the traditional view that the concept of God as a morally perfect entity is paradoxical. Essay is demonstrated that such views are based on an extreme form of utilitarianism. It is argued that the idea of God and evil coexisting in the world is not inconsistent if we accept the deontological view in ethics that the general obligation to eliminate suffering wherever it occurs cannot be one’s moral duty. It is proved that the idea of the coexistence of God and evil in the world does not contain a contradiction if we accept the deontological point of view in ethics that the obligation to eliminate suffering wherever it occurs cannot be anyone’s moral duty.

Business Ethics: Moral or Amoral? An analysis from the perspective of Kantian ethics

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon related to business ethical purposes from a different perspective, using the philosophical lens developed by Immanuel Kant. This work is also oriented to identify the most important research topics related to business ethics through the combination of a different framework. The present paper intends to offer a conceptual contribution to the ongoing debate on the theme of ethics in corporate social responsibility, highlighting the main problematic aspects that emerge from the analysis of the literature and the observation of reality in the light of the philosophical framework of Kant. This paper, therefore, examines and applies the deontological view of Kant and his distinction between the ‘categorical’ and ‘hypothetic’ imperative. This ethical view is useful to prevent instrumental acceptance of ethical codes and sustainability reports; in fact, during the making of the work, several well-known practices are presented, which are far from behaving in a moral way (i.e., General Electrics, Lehman Brothers, and so on).

Ethics of Self-driving Cars: A Naturalistic Approach

The potential development of self-driving cars (also known as autonomous vehicles or AVs – particularly Level 5 AVs) has called the attention of different interested parties. Yet, there are still only a few relevant international regulations on them, no emergency patterns accepted by communities and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and no publicly accepted solutions to some of their pending ethical problems. Thus, this paper aims to provide some possible answers to these moral and practical dilemmas. In particular, we focus on what AVs should do in no-win scenarios and on who should be held responsible for these types of decisions. A naturalistic perspective on ethics informs our proposal, which, we argue, could represent a pragmatic and realistic solution to the regulation of AVs. We discuss the proposals already set out in the current literature regarding both policy-making strategies and theoretical accounts. In fact, we consider and reject descriptive approaches to the problem as well as the option of using either a strict deontological view or a solely utilitarian one to set AVs’ ethical choices. Instead, to provide concrete answers to AVs’ ethical problems, we examine three hierarchical levels of decision-making processes: country-wide regulations, OEM policies, and buyers’ moral attitudes. By appropriately distributing ethical decisions and considering their practical implications, we maintain that our proposal based on ethical naturalism recognizes the importance of all stakeholders and allows the most able of them to take actions (the OEMs and buyers) to reflect on the moral leeway and weight of their options.

Checklist for Professional Communication: A Path to a Healthy Personality, Reflective Mindfulness, and Self-Development Management

Have you ever had multiple goals and aspirations at once? Psychologically, planning a written list and working through the plan is likely to lead to more productivity than simply dreaming about achievements. Professionals in many disciplines use written checklists to ensure productivity and safety in the workplace. For example, Dr. Atul Gawande’s checklists for the healthcare industry have improved healthcare outcomes for many patients by reducing errors and getting things done more efficiently. We can all use similar checklists as touchstones or reminders to increase our efficiency and engagement in pursuing our own goals and thus to improve our own personal outcomes through greater sensemaking and mindfulness. In this article, we undertake a literature review identifying and synthesizing key concepts from various areas of organizational and leadership theories to provide a broadly valuable basis for constructing a professional and personal development checklist. Professional communication is about representing yourself in the best sense of your character, image, and abilities through sensemaking, collaboration, storytelling, listening, and effective conflict management practices. Having a professional checklist works best when it is aligned with your true inner character as well as outward personality and social identity. Professional communication is about being sincere, principled, deliberate, meaningful, and authentic in all circumstances. The key is to balance your life’s important values-based priorities and be yourself, instead of acting as someone you are not. In other words, focus on the deontological view of ethical decision-making, as opposed to always leaning toward the teleological or consequentialism perspective. People often attribute their own moral or amoral decisions and behaviors to situational factors. The reality is that the human mind is a complex biological machine that is programmed and reprogrammed from the time of one’s conception until the day we die. The complexity of genetic and environmental factors, socialization under different circumstances, and lived experience across culture and opportunity mean people have varied capacities to make choices and attributions. As professionals, we all play the cards we are dealt and the more effectively and strategically we use these “cards,” the better will be the future outcomes. Human behavior is often influenced and driven by factors that we might not fully understand, but we must make the best use of what we do comprehend at any given time before the opportunity is gone. Science has proven that the use of an appropriate checklist for personal development can lead to productivity, professional career success, better work-life balance, and personal happiness.

The Duty of Violence

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence.

Caesarean section between doctrine to heresis. medicoethical and deontological view of caesarology: an opinion

Increasing the incidence of caesarean section is not in line with professional and deontological guidelines. Elective cesarean section prevents primordial prevention of chronic cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, imunological, endocrinological morbidity by peripartal programming. Elective non-medical indicated caesarean section is not a procedure that respects deontological, clinical etics, scientific and professional principles. It is like an unacceptable surgery outside the scope of medical ethics. Clientelism in high-risk clinical obstetric medicine is not a professional and deontologically correct category: a physician should not be a provider on request of healthy pregnant women with the potential to have a medically incorrect procedure and complications associated with it and to put a healthy pregnant/maternity and child status in the patient’s status. The financial, social, political and cultural components must not outweigh good clinical practice and the moral principles of medicine.

Ahlak Kuramları Açısından Kobay İnsan

Tıbbî deneyler, tıp alanında geçerli ve güvenilir bilgileri sağlamada en çok kullanılan yöntemlerdendir. Amacı insan sağlığını korumak ve hastalıklara çare bulmak olan bu yöntemlerin en önemli parçasını hayvanlar ve insanlar üzerinde gerçekleşen deneyler oluşturur. Yüzyıllardır gerçekleştirilen bu deneyler ile bilim dünyasının doyurucu sonuçlara ulaştığı söylenebilir. Fakat geçmişten günümüze uygulandığını bildiğimiz bu deneylerin kontrolsüz yapılması ise belli etik ve hukuki problemlerin ortaya çıkmasına neden olmuştur. Bir deneyde, bir insanın kobay olarak kullanılmasının hukuki ve ahlaki çerçevede belli kıstasları vardır. Bu kıstaslarla kişinin bir takım etik ve yasal ilkeler çerçevesinde haklarının korunması amaçlanmakta ve bu tip çalışmaların kontrolsüz yapılması engellenmektedir. İnsan hayatının tek ve özel olması ve herhangi bir zarara uğramaması üzerine kurulu etik ilkeler, hukuk ile de güvence altına alınmaktadır.Bu çalışmada, uygulamalı etiğin bir alt alanı olan meslek etiklerinden tıp etiği çerçevesinde bir problemin- deneylerde kobay insan kullanımının- temel ahlak kuramcıları açısından ahlakiliği tartışılmıştır. Bu bağlamda deontolojik, ahlaki duyu ve sonuçcu ahlak kuramlarının, pratikte karşılaştığımız ve tıp etiği çerçevesinde ilkelerce belirlenmiş bir probleme verebileceği muhtemel cevaplar tartışılacaktır.

I See Me: The Role of Observer Imagery in Reducing Consumer Transgressions

As the number of consumer transgressions (i.e., acts of deliberately violating the established marketplace codes of conduct) continues to increase, so do their financial repercussions for companies. Though academic and managerial interest in addressing this issue is growing, research on how to dissuade consumers from committing transgressions remains scarce. Drawing on the mental imagery literature and normative moral theory, the present research examines a novel way of reducing consumers’ appraisals of their own transgressions. Whereas an actor-imagery perspective fosters a teleological, egoistic view of morality and, in turn, induces moral leniency, having consumers adopt an observer-imagery perspective fosters a deontological view of morality and, in turn, induces moral stringency. The effects are robust across various types of consumer transgressions, including the purchase of counterfeit products (Studies 1 and 3) and return fraud in the form of wardrobing (Study 2). Study 2 also rules out vividness as an alternative explanation for these effects. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

States of Violence and the Right to Exclude

ABSTRACTDo states have a right to exclude immigrants? The conventional view is states have some authority in restricting its borders. Others reject this and argue for open borders. Two restrictionist perspectives are critically evaluated: Wellman’s (2011) and Macedo’s (2007). The former deontological view argues because legitimate states have a right to self-determination and freedom of association is integral to political self-determination therefore legitimate states have a right to exclude. The latter offers an iteration of the threats to the public order argument, namely, that because high levels of immigration contribute to the creation of poverty and increase levels of unemployment then the U.S. should restrict immigration. This paper thinks though some of the ways of avoiding the limits of the political ontologies undergirding their idealized notions of states which inform their analyses of political self-determination and the way immigrants get cast as causes of poverty (i.e. threats to the economic order of a state). As a way of opening up a more realist conceptual path that can reorient discussions in the ethics of immigration I suggest attention be given to the colonial histories that constitute the making of the borders circumscribing states. When colonial considerations are taken into account of discussions in the ethics of immigration I argue states should be conceived not so much in terms of thinly nonconsensual coercive institutions but in terms of states of violence.

Justification and the Truth-Connection By CLAYTON LITTLEJOHN

What is the relation between justification and truth? According to one widely shared view, acquiring justification for a given belief raises the probability that that belief is true. Justification is here seen as truth-conducive though not truth-guaranteeing. Those who disagree typically deny the truth-conduciveness of justification. In Justification and the Truth-Connection Clayton Littlejohn defends still another view: Justification is factive and truth-guaranteeing. Littlejohn thus adds an interesting heterodox view to the debate between internalists and externalists about justification.1 In the long first, introductory chapter Littlejohn argues for a deontological view of justification: One justifiably believes something just in case one meets one’s epistemic obligations and doesn’t violate the basic epistemic norms, especially to believe something only if it is true (1–4).2 The nature of justification can be discovered by identifying our epistemic obligations. Littlejohn distinguishes clearly and discusses the relations between personal, doxastic and propositional justification3 (contrasting them with knowledge, too), making it clear that he is focusing on doxastic justification (5–11). In the main part of the chapter, he discusses a series of common arguments for internalism and for externalism, dismissing them as non-conclusive in the end (18–61). The second chapter picks up here and argues that considerations about epistemic value (defending evidentialism or epistemic consequentialism) do not tell us what our epistemic obligations are and thus don’t settle the debate between internalists and externalists.

DEONTOLOGICAL MORAL OBLIGATIONS AND NON‐WELFARIST AGENT‐RELATIVE VALUES

AbstractMany claim that a plausible moral theory would have to include a principle of beneficence, a principle telling us to produce goods that are both welfarist and agent‐neutral. But when we think carefully about the necessary connection between moral obligations and reasons for action, we see that agents have two reasons for action, and two moral obligations: they must not interfere with any agent's exercise of his rational capacities and they must do what they can to make sure that agents have rational capacities to exercise. According to this distinctively deontological view of morality, though we are obliged to produce goods, the goods in question are non‐welfarist and agent‐relative. The value of welfare thus turns out to be, at best, instrumental.

Coercion in psychiatric care: Global and Indian perspective

Byline: Ruchita. Shah, Debasish. Basu Introduction and Historical Aspects Coercion in health care is well known and forced treatment against the patient's will is even more common in psychiatric care. In fact, psychiatry is the only discipline where coercion in care can be legal and state-sanctioned. Although autonomous decision-making is challenged because of the power relationship between the skilled practitioner and the unskilled patient; this power gradient is even more intense in psychiatry because of the nature of mental illness. [sup][1] History is replete with examples of political abuse of the power entrusted in physicians and more specifically, psychiatrists, as seen during the Nazi rule and the Soviet regime when political dissidents were labeled 'mentally ill' and subjected to inhumane 'treatments'. Coercion in psychiatric care is seen in the form of involuntary admission, involuntary treatment, seclusion/restraint, outpatient commitment, and in the Indian context, also includes surreptitious treatment. Thus to say the least, discussing the controversies hovering coercion in psychiatric care is of utmost importance and these controversies mainly center on the issues of 'justification' and 'human rights'. Conceptual Issues Coercion and persuasion are closely linked, but are definitely different terms. Persuasion is defined as the clinician's aim 'to utilize the patient's reasoning ability to arrive at a desired result', [sup][2] whereas, coercion occurs 'when the doctor aims to manipulate the patient by introducing extraneous elements which have the effect of undermining the patient's ability to reason'. [sup][3] The four basic ethical principles [sup][2] that dictate professional behavior are: (a) Respect for autonomy: this includes components of liberty or independence from controlling influences and agencies or the capacity for intentional action; (b) Beneficence: it refers to a moral obligation to act for the benefit of others; (c) Nonmaleficence: this simply means 'First do no harm'; and (d) Justice: it refers to the fair and equitable distribution of treatment resources. Although these are the guiding principles, it is common in actual practice that these come in conflict with each other. The doctrine of double effect states that an action producing both helpful and harmful effects is not necessarily wrong. Although the deontological view states that right behavior (respect for autonomy) is obligatory without regard for consequences, paternalism is widely practiced in psychiatry. Paternalism is defined as the intentional overriding of one person's known preferences or actions by another person, where the person who overrides justifies the action by the goal of benefiting or avoiding harm to the person whose preferences or actions are overridden. [sup][2] To promote individual autonomy and to encourage rational decision-making, the concept of informed consent [sup][4] was developed. Informed consent is built upon the elements of information, decisional capacity, and voluntarism. Decisional capacity or competency, in turn, comprises of the ability to communicate, understand, and logically work with information and to appreciate the meaning of a decision within the context of one's life. Competency assessment involves assessment of the mental ability to understand the nature and consequences of a decision (includes benefits/risks of consenting as well as refusing). Voluntarism [sup][1] encompasses an individual's ability to act in accordance with one's authentic sense of what is good, right, and best in light of one's situation, values, and prior history. Voluntarism further entails the capacity to make this choice freely and in the absence of coercion. Perception of Coercion It is widely believed by the providers that coercion is returned by patient's subsequent gratitude for the psychiatrist's unilateral action; the so called 'Thank you' test. …

The Instrumental Justice of Private Law

Instrumentalists and deontologists have long battled for an exclusive theory of private law. The instrumentalists have argued that private law is merely a means to achieving any number of political or social ends. Deontologists, by contrast, have contended that the law seeks only the moral end of justice and cannot be used for anything else. In this article, I critique these extreme positions and offer an intermediate theory called justice. I show that the absolute instrumental view is elusive, illusory, and illiberal, while the absolute deontological view is incoherent, implausible, and in one critical respect, impossible. Instrumental justice avoids these problems by combining the best elements of both perspectives. This composite theory acknowledges the inherent instrumental nature of private law, but establishes justice as its central, organizing idea. So framed, instrumental justice's primary function is to create rights that serve as tools for marking and mapping important interests, and for defending and vindicating those interests when they are threatened or impaired. Rights, in turn, both imbue the law with the moral credibility necessary to perform secondary social functions, and prevent it from pursuing these functions at the expense of its core principles.

The Inadequacy of our Traditional Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights

I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions (duties not to kill, assault and so on). I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions.

The Ethics of Killing

This book is an important contribution to moral philosophy. With respect to the interest of its ideas, and the strength of its arguments, the level of quality is consistently high. Readers will struggle to follow the twists and turns of the discussion, not because it is badly presented or unnecessarily complex, but because it is difficult for us to think as deeply into the issues as McMahan himself does. The book uses the method of testing moral views by appealing to our judgments about particular cases. It does not offer a justification for this methodology, but in my view it practises it in the right way. Usually the examples are ones where we do make confident judgments, rather than being as hard to assess as the ideas they are being used to test. Sometimes when this method is employed as soon as one principle has been questioned on the strength of an example the reader is presented with several alternative principles that might be able to account for our judgment, so that we must consider even more examples to decide between the new contending principles. But McMahan's discussions do not leave the reader with an uneasy feeling that no real progress is being made. Also he is not committed to always following our intuitive judgments. About some issues he thinks that we should hold a view even if it seriously conflicts with our intuitions. For example, he reacts in this way to the proposal that infanticide is not a seriously wrong act of killing, at least not if we assess it in terms of the interests and moral claims of the infant whose life is ended. As its title indicates, the book discusses a wide range of issues concerned with killing and death. The main subjects are the badness of death (ch. 2), comparisons between the morality of death and killing in the case of people and in the case of animals (ch. 3), the ethics of abortion (ch. 4), and the ethics of euthanasia (ch. 5 the book does not discuss killing in self-defense or as punishment). The book is not unified by an allegiance to one moral theory, for example maximizing consequentialism or a moderate deontological view. This distinguishes it from much of the literature about these topics.

A Contextualist Solution to the Gettier Problem

According to the deontological view on justification, being justified in believing some proposition is a matter of having done one's epistemic duty with respect to that proposition. The present paper argues that, given a proper articulation of the deontological view, it is defensible that knowledge is justified true belief, virtually all epistemologists since Gettier. One important claim to be argued for is that once it is appreciated that it depends on contextual factors whether a person has done her epistemic duty with respect to a given proposition, many so-called Gettier cases, which are supposed to be cases of justified true belief that are not cases of knowledge, will be seen to be not really cases of justified belief after all. A second important claim is that the remaining alleged Gettier cases can be qualified as cases of knowledge. This requires that we countenance a notion of epistemic luck, but the requisite kind of luck is of a quite benign nature.

An interdisciplinary look at the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill

Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has had an enormous impact on the mentally ill, the community, family members and taxpayers. This paper assesses the impact of deinstitutionalization on each of these groups. The approach is interdisciplinary in nature, using schools of thought found in the fields of political and economic thought in analyzing the effect of deinstitutionalization on each stakeholder group. Although assessments vary by stakeholder group, some overall observations can be made. Ironically, both libertarian and utilitarian arguments favor deinstitutionalization, although for different reasons. A deontological view, however, finds deinstitutionalization lacking.

Reason in Morals

This essay is a defense of rationally normative ethics and individualism. Communitarians remedy the shortcomings of deontology's conception of the self as disembodied, asocial, and willful by reuniting reason and desire and by regarding reason as a principle of coordination within a social or communal context. While this renders reason more efficacious than it can be on the deontological view, it still falls short of the aspiration of Western ethics for rational control over the formation of moral judgment; reason and the individual in whom it resides are subordinated to the social. In order for there to be a truly rational norm of moral decision-making, reason must have a constitutive function. That is, reason must not only seek coordiantion or harmony among elements other than and beneath itself, butit must also be capable of realizing and perpetuating itself in that harmony. A certain kind of harmony is thus sought, one in which reason (self-aware, self-possessed, and self-determinated agency) rules the soul. This ethical position is frankly realistic from a metaphysical point of view and is opposed to nominalistic theories of personhood. It is argued that nominalistic accounts of personhood which would exclude the unborn and others from the class of persons or rational agents are logically inconsistent.

Nurses and whistleblowing: the ethical issues.

Whistleblowing - the public exposure of organizational wrongdoing - presents practical and ethical dilemma for nurses, and needs to be seen as part of a spectrum of increasingly confrontative actions against miscreant organizations by their employees. The ethics of whistleblowing can only be understood in relation to its moral purpose, whether that is to achieve a good outcome (a consequentialist view) or fulfil a duty (a deontological view). The consequentialist perspective is unable on its own to resolve problems arising from the balance of good and harm resulting from the act of whistleblowing (where considerable harm might be caused) or of responsibility for that harm. A deontological approach provides an analysis of these problems but raises its own problem of conflicting duties for nurses. However, a strong argument can be made for the precedence of the nurse's duty to the patient over her duty to the employer. Although both duties are based on an implicit or an explicit promise, the promise to a person (the patient) must take precedence over the promise to an organization. It can even be argued that duty to the employer may in fact justify whistleblowing by nurses in some circumstances. However, the consequences of whistleblowing are forced upon nurses in a different way by the fact that the danger of reprisals acts as a deterrent to whistleblowers, however justified their actions may be. A more robust approach to the protection of whistleblowers is needed on the part of the government and the National Health Service (NHS) to remedy this situation.

Counter-evidence and the Duty to Critically Reflect

The intuitive appeal of the deontological approach to epistemic justification has diminished of late, as objection has grown to the assumption of doxastic voluntarism which this approach is said to entail. (For a classic statement of the problem see Alston 1989.) With a view to defending the deontological view, Kiheyon Kim (1994) distinguishes two kinds of duties which might serve as a basis for epistemic justification: (1) the duty to form one's beliefs in a prescribed manner (2) the duty to reflect critically on the beliefs one holds. The former kind of duty would indeed require that one have direct voluntary control over one's beliefs, which is the assumption that the critics reject. Epistemic deontologists have in mind, however, according to Kim, the latter kind of duty, and the assumption of voluntarism entailed by that duty, he asserts, does not seem to be problematic. It is this last claim that I wish to call into question. That we do have the ability to critically reflect at will upon our beliefs certainly seems to be the case, in the way that our having the ability to voluntarily choose our beliefs does not. When we find ourselves troubled about a belief we often make efforts to confirm or correct it. Is it ever our duty to do so, however? Clearly, we cannot have a duty to reflect on all our beliefs. As Paul Tidman (1996) points out, so long as the duty to critically reflect on one's beliefs is formulated in utterly general terms, it is far too demanding. We do not even notice most of our ordinary, everyday beliefs, much less critically reflect upon them, yet no one would think to hold us in violation of our epistemic duty on that account. Such an unrestricted duty, moreover, would be ruled out by the principle of 'ought' implies 'can', Tidman adds, for in the course of critically reflecting on any one belief one typically forms additional beliefs. These latter beliefs would in turn call for critical reflection, so that one's duty with respect to the initial belief could never be discharged. Although Tidman argues that there is no version of epistemic duty adequate to provide for a deontological notion of epistemic justification, he considers the possibility that in some cases we may have an epistemic duty to reflect on our beliefs. Whatever other problems he sees with this duty, he seems to concur with Kim and others that it is not subject to problems of doxastic voluntarism (e.g. Steup 1988 and 1996). If the duty is to be viable, then, and it does not apply to all our beliefs, by what criteria do we pick out those beliefs to which it does apply?