Against Deontology
-
Nils Holtug
Abstract
According to deontologists, morality includes constraints. These constraints are (in part) intended to cater for our moral intuitions about various cases in which an agent can prevent harm to some by seeing to it that someone (else) is harmed. I briefly argue that neither the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing nor the Doctrine of Double Effect quite match our intuitions about such cases, and suggest that our intuitions are better explained in terms of a psychological mechanism that Peter Unger has called ‘projective separating’. Furthermore, I argue that projective separating has no moral merit and that this casts some doubt on the enterprise of defending constraints.
© Philosophia Press 2000
Articles in the same Issue
- Rational Ends: Humean and Non-Humean Considerations
- Two kinds of methodological solipsism
- The Touch of Art: Adorno and the Sublime
- Understanding Scepticism
- Against Deontology
- The Passivity of Reason – On Heidegger's Concept of Stimmung
- The Undeflated Domain of Semantics
- Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 159 pp.
- Herbert Schnädelbach: Philosophie in der modernen Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, 283 Seiten
- Gronke, Horst: Das Denken des Anderen: Führt die Selbstaufhebung von Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität zur transzendentalen Sprachpragmatik? (Epistemata: Reihe Philosophie Bd. 234) Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999, 294 sider Zahavi, Dan: Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. (Phaenomenologica 135) Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, 204+xii sider
- Laura Otis. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 210 pp.
- Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul. The Welfare State edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul, Cambridge University Press 1997, 292 sider
- Søren Kjørup. Kunstens filosofi: En indføring i œstetik. Roskilde: Roskilde Universitets Forlag, 2000, 213 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Rational Ends: Humean and Non-Humean Considerations
- Two kinds of methodological solipsism
- The Touch of Art: Adorno and the Sublime
- Understanding Scepticism
- Against Deontology
- The Passivity of Reason – On Heidegger's Concept of Stimmung
- The Undeflated Domain of Semantics
- Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 159 pp.
- Herbert Schnädelbach: Philosophie in der modernen Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, 283 Seiten
- Gronke, Horst: Das Denken des Anderen: Führt die Selbstaufhebung von Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität zur transzendentalen Sprachpragmatik? (Epistemata: Reihe Philosophie Bd. 234) Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999, 294 sider Zahavi, Dan: Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. (Phaenomenologica 135) Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, 204+xii sider
- Laura Otis. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 210 pp.
- Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul. The Welfare State edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul, Cambridge University Press 1997, 292 sider
- Søren Kjørup. Kunstens filosofi: En indføring i œstetik. Roskilde: Roskilde Universitets Forlag, 2000, 213 pp.