Certain professions come with extra rights and duties. Physicians, for example, have the right to exercise their profession despite possible external pressures with also the duty to provide competent medical service with compassion and respect for human dignity. The extra rights and duties associated with a certain profession are called its deontology. From the Greek Deon, duty and logos, signs. In ethics, deontological views why then this scope of deontology. We are continuously doing jobs and they are all associated with rights and duties or rules that should be followed to do the job properly. Now, I'm a teacher and have the duty not to talk too much nonsense, and when I'm done teaching and become a road user, then I can talk nonsense as much as I like but then I obviously have to follow other rules, the traffic regulations. Ultimately, for each person in each situation, there is a rule to be followed. The right thing to do. Welcome to the second clip of Week 7 in which we will first discuss Kant's deontological view, its main problem, and a solution to it. Subsequently, we'll also briefly touch upon virtue ethics which is not a deontological view in the strict sense but is nevertheless closely related to it. Kant's specific proposal is known as the categorical imperative because he believes that moral principles are not conditional imperatives, imperatives that should be obeyed under certain conditions, but rather imperatives that should be obeyed under all conditions. Interestingly, Kant gives two formulations of the categorical imperative and suggests that they are equivalent. The first formulation reads, "Act only on that maxim to which you can at the same time will, that it should become a universal law." The second formulation reads, "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end." Let's consider the first formulation first. Acting is always on what Kant calls a maxim or principle or rule. Now, to determine whether a principle is morally permissible, we have to perform a thought experiment. If we can conceive of a possible world in which everyone acted on that principle, it's universalizable. If we are willing to live in that possible world, the principal is also reversible. According to Kant's categorical imperative, universalizability and reversibility are the necessary and sufficient conditions of moral permissibility. Conversely, the categorical imperative establishes the existence of duties to ourselves and others. For instance, breaking promises isn't reversible, so we should never do it. However, we can easily imagine counterexamples to the existence of duties without exceptions like someone who breaks a trivial promise to prevent a serious accident. Now let's turn to Kant's second formulation of his categorical imperative. We should treat people as ends in themselves and not merely as a means to an end. It isn't obvious that the two formulations are equivalent, but extensionally, the resulting duties are the same. For instance, manipulation is wrong because manipulating people is using them as a means to an end. But manipulation isn't reversible either, so indeed the two formulations seem equivalent. They also face similar problems. Suppose for instance, that by manipulating a dictator a diplomat might prevent a third world war. Moreover, sometimes treating people as a means to an end seems unavoidable. Quarantining people who have a dangerous virus is treating them as a means to an end, but not quarantining them is treating all other people as a means to their end. Although the main problem with Kant's categorical imperative is that it doesn't allow for duties with exceptions. Russell's pluralistic formalism can also handle situations in which several duties compete for prevalence. Russell distinguishes between prima facie duties, duties we should always perform unless there are extenuating circumstances, and actual duties, duties we should actually perform in specific situations. According to a Russell then, there is no one-size-fits-all ranking of prima facie duties that covers every possible situation. Rather, specific situations determine which prima facie duties prevail so that they can become actual duties. Finally, let's briefly consider the re-emergence of virtue ethics in normative ethics. At face value, the central question in virtual ethics is not what a right action is, the thing to do, but rather what a good person is. However, on a closer inspection, the only way to figure out whether a person is, for instance, honest, is by looking at their actions. If a person's behavioral dispositions turn out to be robust, if for instance, there are hardly any circumstances in which they lie, one can safely conclude that the person is honest.
