CHAPTER 4: DEONTOLOGY (WEEK 9-11)

At the end of the lesson, the students must be able to:

1. discuss the basic principles of deontology;
2. apply the concepts of agency and autonomy to one’s moral experience; and
3. evaluate actions using the universalizability test.

INTRODUCTION
During the flag ceremony of that Monday morning, January 24, 2017, the mayor
of Baguio City awarded a certificate from the City Government that commended Reggie
Cabututan for his “extraordinary show of honesty in the performance of their duties or
practice of profession”. Reggie is a taxi driver who just three days before the awarding,
drove his passenger, an Australian named Trent Shields, to his workplace. The
foreigner having little sleep and was ill the previous day, left his suitcase inside the taxi
cab after he reached his destination. The suitcase contained a laptop, passport, and an
expensive pair of headphones, which Trent claimed amounted to around P260,000.

Consider closely the moment when Reggie found that Trent had left a suitcase in
his taxi cab: If he were to return the suitcase, there was no promise of an award from
the City Government of Baguio and no promise of a reward from the owner. What if he
took the suitcase and sold its contents? That could surely help him supplement his daily
wages. Life as a taxi driver in the Philippines is not easy. A little extra cash would go a
long way to put food on the table to pay tuition fees for his children.

Yet, Reggie returned the suitcase without the promise of a reward. Why?
Perhaps, he had previously returned lost luggage to passengers. Maybe, it was his first
time to do so. Maybe, he received a reward before, or maybe he knows some fellow taxi
drivers who did or not did receive rewards from passengers after they returned lost
luggage. However, the point is that no promise of a reward. A reward in the first place,
is not an entitlement. It is freely given as unrequired gift for one’s service or effort.
Otherwise, it would be a payment, not a reward, if someone demanded it.
Why did Reggie return the suitcase? For now, let us suppose his main reason
was simply because it was right to return lost property to the rightful owner, no matter
how tempting it is to keep it for oneself. It is possible that Reggie’s reason for returning
the luggage was not because of any reward whether psychic or physical? “It is simply
the right thing to do.” Reggie might have told himself.

What if Reggie did not return the suitcase, destroyed the lock, then took and sold
its valuable contents? What is wrong about keeping and benefiting from the valuables
that someone misplaced? “It is his fault; he was mindless and careless,” Reggie could
have mused: “He will learn to be mindful of his things from now on.” Yet, Reggie
returned the suitcase without the promise of a reward.
 As we previously said, perhaps, Reggie believed that it was the right thing to do.
Even if he felt that he could have benefitted from the sale of the valuable items in the
suitcase, he must have believed the principle that it is right to do the right thing. Reggie
could be holding on to this moral conviction as a principle of action.

To hold a moral conviction means believing that it is one’s duty to do the right
thing. What is duty? Why does one choose to follow her duty even if doing otherwise
may bring her more benefits?

DUTY AND AGENCY

The moral theory that evaluates actions that are done because of duty is called
deontology. Deontology comes from the Greek word dean, which means “being
necessary”. Hence, deontology refers to the study of duty and obligation. The main
proponent of deontology is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He was a German
Enlightenment philosopher who wrote one of the most important works on moral
philosophy, Groundwork towards a Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In this work, Kant
brings out the attention to the fact that we, human beings, have the faculty called
rational will, which is the capacity to act according to principles that we determine for
ourselves.

To consider the rational will is to point out the difference between animals and
persons. On one hand, animals are sentient organisms. Sentience, meaning an
organism has the ability to perceive and navigate its external environment. Insofar as
dogs and carabaos are sentient organisms, we do not see them bumping into trees and
walls unless their senses are weak. Animals constantly interact with their surroundings.
This is also true to us humans; we are also sentient. Thus, both animals and persons
interact in and with the world, reacting to external stimuli and internal impulses to
survive and thrive.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German enlightenment philosopher
who is thought to herald the “Copernican Revolution in Philosophy.”
What is meant by Copernican Revolution? Nicolaus Copernicus was
the 15th century astronomer who proposed the heliocentric model of the
universe in his book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. This was
the major event in the history of ideas because it heralded a radical
paradigm shift in the way humans considered their place in the
universe. Akin to Copernicus, Kant developed revolutionary insights
concerning the human mind and conditions for the possibility of
knowledge. In this chapter, the primary text of Kant, Groundwork
towards a Metaphysics of Morals, shows his contributions in moral
philosophy. By itself, this text is also revolutionary, insofar as Kant’s
ambition in the text is radical. He intends to develop what he calls the
“supreme principle of morality”. It is supposedly supreme because by
basing it on the faculty of reason, it becomes binding for all creatures
that have that faculty. (“Faculty here means inherent mental capacity.)
This way, the binding force of obligation is no longer relative but
universal. It no longer depends on what a person’s historical, cultural, or
religious circumstances are. For as long as that person has the faculty
of reason, the moral law is binding. Hence, Kant become a key thinker
in moral reflection.
 On other hand, people are also rational. Rationality consists of the mental faculty
to construct ideas and thoughts that are beyond our immediate surroundings. This is the
capacity for mental abstraction, which arises from the operations of the faculty of
reason. Thus, we have the ability to stop and think about what we are doing. We can
remove ourselves mentally from the immediacy of surroundings and reflect on our
actions and how such actions affect the world. We can imagine a different and better
world, and create mental images of how we interact with other people in that world.

We do not only have the capacity to imagine and construct mental images, but
we also have the ability to act on—to enact and make real—those mental images. This
ability to enact our thoughts is the basis for the rational will. The rational will refers to the
faculty to intervene in the world, to act in a manner that is consistent with our reason. As
far as we know, animals only act according to impulses, based on their natural instincts.
Thus, animals “act” with immediacy (from Latin: i + medius, or “no middle”) with nothing
that intervenes between the impulse and the action. They do not and cannot deliberate
on their actions. In fact, we may say that animals do not “act”. They only “react” to their
external surroundings and internal impulses. In contrast, we humans have reason,
which intervenes between impulse and act. We have the ability to stop and think about
what we are doing to evaluate our actions according to principles. Simply stated, we are
not only reacting to our surroundings and internal impulses, but are also conceiving of
ways to act according to certain rational principles.

AUTONOMY
Kant claims that the property of the rational will is autonomy (Ak 4:4400, which is
the opposite of heteronomy. These three Greek words are instructive: autos, heteros,
and nomos, which means “self”, “other”, and “law”, respectively. Hence, when we
combine autos and nomos, we get autonomy; heteros and nomos to heteronomy.
Crudely stated, autonomy means self-law (or self-legislating) and heteronomy means
law.

At the heart of Kant’s moral theory is the idea of autonomy. Most readers
interpret Kant as holding that autonomy is a property of rational wills or agents.
Understanding the idea of autonomy was, in Kant’s view, key to understanding and
justifying the authority that moral requirements have over us. As with Rousseau, whose
views influenced Kant, freedom does not consist in being bound by no law, but by laws
that are in some sense of one’s own making. The idea of freedom as autonomy thus
goes beyond the merely “negative” sense of being free from causes on our conduct
originating outside of ourselves. It contains first and foremost the idea of laws made and
laid down by oneself, and, in virtue of this, laws that have decisive authority over
oneself.

Kant’s basic idea can be grasped intuitively by analogy with the idea of political
freedom as autonomy (See Reath 1994). Consider how political freedom in liberal
theories is thought to be related to legitimate political authority: A state is free when its
citizens are bound only by laws in some sense of their own making — created and put
into effect, say, by vote or by elected representatives. The laws of that state then
express the will of the citizens who are bound by them. The idea, then, is that the
source of legitimate political authority is not external to its citizens, but internal to them,
internal to “the will of the people.” It is because the body politic created and enacted
these laws for itself that it can be bound by them. An autonomous state is thus one in
which the authority of its laws is in the will of the people in that state, rather than in the
will of a people external to that state, as when one state imposes laws on another
during occupation or colonization. In the latter case, the laws have no legitimate
authority over those citizens. In a similar fashion, we may think of a person as free when
bound only by her own will and not by the will of another. Her actions then express her
own will and not the will of someone or something else. The authority of the principles
binding her will is then also not external to her will. It comes from the fact that she willed
them. So autonomy, when applied to an individual, ensures that the source of the
authority of the principles that bind her is in her own will. Kant’s view can be seen as the
view that the moral law is just such a principle. Hence, the “moral legitimacy” of the CI is
grounded in its being an expression of each person’s own rational will. It is because
each person’s own reason is the legislator and executor of the moral law that it is
authoritative for her.

Kant argues that the idea of an autonomous will emerges from a consideration of
the idea of a will that is free “in a negative sense.” The concept of a rational will is of a
will that operates by responding to what it takes to be reasons. This is, firstly, the
concept of a will that does not operate through the influence of factors outside of this
responsiveness to apparent reasons. For a will to be free is thus for it to be physically
and psychologically unforced in its operation. Hence, behaviors that are performed
because of obsessions or thought disorders are not free in this negative sense. But
also, for Kant, a will that operates by being determined through the operation of natural
laws, such as those of biology or psychology, cannot be thought of as operating by
responding to reasons. Hence, determination by natural laws is conceptually
incompatible with being free in a negative sense.
A crucial move in Kant’s argument is his claim that a rational will cannot act
except “under the Idea” of its own freedom (G 4:448). The expression “acting under the
Idea of freedom” is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean that a rational will must
believe it is free, since determinists are as free as libertarians in Kant’s view. Indeed,
Kant goes out of his way in his most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason, to
argue that we have no rational basis for believing our wills to be free. This would
involve, he argues, attributing a property to our wills that they would have to have as
‘things in themselves’ apart from the causally determined world of appearances. Of
such things, he insists, we can have no knowledge. For much the same reason, Kant is
not claiming that a rational will cannot operate without feeling free. Feelings, even the
feeling of operating freely or the “looseness” Hume refers to when we act, cannot be
used in an a priori argument to establish the CI, since they are empirical data.

One helpful way to understand acting “under the Idea of freedom” is by analogy
with acting “under the Idea” that there are purposes in nature: Although there is,
according to Kant, no rational basis for the belief that the natural world is (or is not)
arranged according to some purpose by a Designer, the actual practices of science
often require looking for the purpose of this or that chemical, organ, creature,
environment, and so on. Thus, one engages in these natural sciences by searching for
purposes in nature. Yet when an evolutionary biologist, for instance, looks for the
purpose of some organ in some creature, she does not after all thereby believe that the
creature was designed that way, for instance, by a Deity. Nor is she having some
feeling of “designedness” in the creature. To say that she “acts under the Idea of”
design is to say something about the practice of biology: Practicing biology involves
searching for the purposes of the parts of living organisms. In much the same way,
although there is no rational justification for the belief that our wills are (or are not) free,
the actual practice of practical deliberation and decision consists of a search for the
right casual chain of which to be the origin — consists, that is, seeking to be the first
causes of things, wholly and completely through the exercise of one’s own will.

A different interpretive strategy, which has gained prominence in recent years,

focuses on Kant’s apparent identification, in Groundwork III, of the will and practical
reason. One natural way of interpreting Kant’s conception of freedom is to understand it
in terms of the freedom and spontaneity of reason itself. This in turn apparently implies
that our wills are necessarily aimed at what is rational and reasonable. To will
something, on this picture, is to govern oneself in accordance with reason. Often,
however, we fail to effectively so govern ourselves because we are imperfect rational
beings who are caused to act by our non–rational desires and inclinations. The result, at
least on one version of this interpretation (Wolff 1973), is that we either act rationally
and reasonably (and so autonomously) or we are merely caused to behave in certain
ways by non–rational forces acting on us (and so heteronomously). This is, however, an
implausible view. It implies that all irrational acts, and hence all immoral acts, are not
willed and therefore not free. Most interpreters have denied that this is the proper
interpretation of Kant’s views. However, several prominent commentators nonetheless
think that there is some truth in it (Engstrom 2009; Reath 2015; Korsgaard 1996, 2008,
2009). They agree that we always act under the “guise of the good” in the sense that
our will is necessarily aimed at what is objectively and subjectively rational and
reasonable, but these interpreters also think that, for Kant, there is a middle–ground
between perfect conformity to reason and being caused to act by natural forces. In
particular, when we act immorally, we are either weak–willed or we are misusing our
practical reason by willing badly. We do not have the capacity to aim to act on an
immoral maxim because the will is identified with practical reason, so when we will to
perform an immoral act, we implicitly but mistakenly take our underlying policy to be
required by reason. By representing our immoral act as rational and reasonable, we are
not exercising our powers of reason well, so we are simply making a “choice” that is
contrary to reason without “willing” it as such. Our choice is nonetheless free and
attributable to us because our will was involved in leading us to take the act to be
rational and reasonable. It remains to be seen whether, on this complicated
interpretation of Kant, it sufficiently allows for the possibility that one can knowingly and
willingly do wrong if the will is practical reason and practical reason is, in part, the moral
law.

UNIVERSALIZABILITY
 To figure out the how the faculty of reason can be the cause of autonomous
action, we need to learn a method or a specific procedure that will demonstrate
autonomy of the will. But before explaining this procedure, it will be helpful to first make
a distinction about kinds of moral theories, namely, substantive and formal moral
theories.

A substantive theory immediately promulgates the specific actions that comprise

the theory. As such, it identifies the particular duties in a straight forward manner that
the adherents of the theory must follow. The set of Ten Commandments of the Judeo-
Christian tradition is an ambiguous example of a substantive moral theory. The specific
laws are articulated mostly in the form of a straight forward moral command: “Honor
your father and mother”. “You shall not kill”. And so forth.

In contrast, formal moral theory does not supply the rules or command
straightaway. It does not tell you what you may or may not do. Instead, a moral formal
theory provides us the “form” or “framework” of the moral theory. To provide the “form”
of a moral theory is to supply a procedure and the criteria for determining, on one’s own,
the rules and moral commands.

Kant endorses this formal kind of moral theory. The Grundlegung zur Metaphysik
der Sitten, which he wrote in 1785, embodies a formal moral theory in what he calls the
categorical imperative, which provides a procedural way of identifying the rightness or
wrongness of an action. Kant articulates the categorical imperative this way:
Act only according to such a maxim, by which you can at once will that it become a
universal law. (Ak 4:421)

There are four key elements in this formulation of the categorical imperative,
namely, action, maxim, will, and universal law. Kant states that we must formulate an
action as a maxim, which he defines as a “subject principle of action” (Ak 4:422). In this
context, a maxim consists of a “rule” that we live in our day-to-day lives, but it does not
have the status of a law or moral command that binds us to act in a certain way. Rather,
maxims depicts the patterns of our behaviour.

In the formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant calls our attention to the
kind of maxims that we live by. He claims that new ought to act according to the maxim
“by which you can at once will that it become a universal law”. What does it mean to will
a maxim that can become a universal law? It means that the maxim must be
universalizable, which is what it means to “will that it becomes a universal law.” This
means nothing other than imagining a world in which the maxim, or a personal rule, that
I live by were adopted by everyone as their own maxim. In this formulation, Kant is
telling us to conceive of the maxim as if it is obligated everyone to comply. This mental
act of imagining a universalized maxim does not mean we picture a world in which
everyone actually followed the maxim. Instead, we merely imagine the maxim as a law
that everyone ought to follow. The proper way to imagine the universalized maxim is by
not asking, “What if everyone did the maxim?
 We reveal the rational permissibility of actions insofar as they cannot be rejected
as universalizable maxims. In contrast, those universalized maxims that are rejected are
shown to be impermissible, that is, they are irrational and thus, in Kant’s mind, immoral.
But what does rational permissibility mean? Simply put, it refers to the intrinsic quality of
an action that is objectively and necessarily rational. Using the universalizability test, we
can reveal the objective necessity of an action as rational. Observe, for example, the
quality of the arithmetical claim, “1+1=2.” It is objectively necessary because the quality
of the claim is universally and logically valid, and we understand this to be always true
as rational beings. Observe the difference between the quality of objectively necessary
claims with contingent claims, such as claims about the world like “The sky is blue”, the
truth of which depends on the actual situation in the world.