''Consequentialism and deontology are the two dominant theories in contemporary normative ethics. Consequentialism, frequently identified with Utilitarianism, is the theory according to which right actions are those that maximize good outcomes. Deontology, with its roots in Kant, determines rightness by features of acts other than their outcomes. For example, where consequentialism might require sacrificing one innocent for the greater good, deontology might forbid such an act on the grounds that it violates the innocent person’s rights, or violates some other moral constraint. Each approach has its appeal; yet neither fully conforms with “ordinary morality”.

Professor T. Isaacs

http://pirate.shu.edu/~mckenndo/ethics-deontology-consequentialism.htm

''Deontology (Greek: "deon" means "duty") is a theory in ethics, where one has an unchanging duty to abide by some set of moral principles, and nothing else. Thus, the ends never justify the means in this ethical system. If someone were to do his or her moral duty, then it would not matter if it had negative consequences. ''

''Consequentialist theories usually maintain that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the consequences of the act, and hence on the circumstances in which it is performed.''

Louis you have not addressed which of the two approaches (conduct-based or character-based) you find to be more useful in real life. May I assume that, since you spoke here only of Consequentialism and Deontology, you are casting your vote for conduct-based ethics as being the more practical?

Jacob - May I interpret this as a holistic and somewhat eclectic approach to ethics? I take it that character matters to you, but that you believe that the final determinant of what demonstrates character is a given response (conduct) to an ethical decision. If this is right then you are not discarding character as a concern, you are just saying that you believe that character is an abstract concept apart from conduct.

Bill,

I do not think that a moral judgement should be based onto an explicit logical moral methodology. Given a situation where a decision has to be made about the proper behavior or choice, one should try to assimilate the problem and then let his/her instinct and heart guide his/her reflection and then in a final stage express it in language. This is the same unconscious process that is taking place in all forms creative activities. A pre-conceive logical procedure is counter productive to any creative process including moral judgement.

Okay, there seems to be some confusion about what I am asking here. Let me state it this way: Consequentialism and Deontology are the two approaches to ethics that have been most prevalent in the West since the Enlightenment. They are both attempts to do ethics without addressing metaphysics. They were arrived at by Bentham and Mills, and by Kant, as a result of the prevailing Enlightenment desire to "do ethics" without recourse to religion.

In the 1950's Elizabeth Anscombe wrote a critique of modern ethics called Modern Moral Philosophy. In that short but profoundly significant article she coined the term "consequentialism" for all forms of ethical reasoning which use outcomes as their determining way of reasoning. She meant the term in a pejorative manner - it was not a compliment. She claimed that both Utilitarian and Deontological thought were, in a sense, "cheating". That is, they were illicitly using language which came from a more ancient way of doing ethics (the Christian ethics which had prevailed in the West since the Middle Ages) that had access to the notion of moral prescriptions and prohibitions as having the force of a law. Anscombe claimed that although these conduct-based ways of doing ethics had no moral weightiness behind them, they still invoked terminology from a world where there was, what she called, a "law-conception" of ethics. She said that modern moral philosophers needed to stop this practice because it was unfounded and made no sense. Since Anscombe's critique we have seen the rise of Virtue Ethics, which was an alternate and ancient ethical strategy, which was not necessarily religious in any way. She suggested it as a viable alternative to the two conduct-based systems which were in vogue. Since that time Virtue Ethics and other Aristotelian forms of thought have been making a lot of progress in the world of ethics. The language that we hear which invokes the notion of "eudaimonia" dates (in its current usage) to Anscombe's critique. The emphasis on "flourishing", "thriving", and "well-being", which are all synonyms for eudaimonia, has come into common usage since the rise of the Virtue approach to ethics. Perhaps the best known book to address this issue in contemporary times was Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

If you take a basic ethics course in the West today you will earn about Consequentialism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics as the three primary schools of ethical thought. Virtue reasoning does not ask "How can we maximize happiness (or utility)?", nor does it ask "What is my duty?", rather it asks "What would a man or a woman of character do in this situation?

My question is simply this: which of these two ways of reasoning (conduct-based or character-based) is more helpful or workable in the real world? The one is the modern and Enlightenment strategy, the other is an ancient strategy, which has been revived, and which has a weightiness to it without necessarily having any religious implications.

Bill,

You are asking for best way of reasoning and my answer is that reasoning do not follow a method in all its aspect. In mathematics, the area the most formal of human inquiry, Poincarre described his creative process as mostly unconscious with logic as only taking place in the initial phase and final phase.

http://www.is.wayne.edu/DRBOWEN/CRTVYW99/POINCARE.HTM

If methodology and procedure are not central in the most formal domain, why should it be central in the less formal form of inquiries? The more you will convince yourself that you follow a procedure and search for the best procedure and the more you will effectively follow a procedure, and so become machine-like non-creative­ person. In AI, most researchers are moving away from algorithm approaches. A search for the best moral procedure is an algorithmic moral search.

Louis, I read the Poincarre piece, it is quite interesting (thank you), but I am not quite sure how it ties together with what I am addressing. It is addressing reasoning in general. I just want to know if you think a conduct-based approach to ethics is the most practical strategy, or do you prefer a character-based approach. Which strategy seems more reasonable to you? Which one is less theoretical than the other? Which one "fits" with how you think most people make ethical decisions?

Jacob, I find your comment "And, how could we expect to know what a man or woman of character would do if we can't truly trust our most primitive Ideas concerning right and wrong?" to be an interesting one, but it seems to need some "unpacking". I don't know quite what you mean. You are speaking very generally of your dismay about this issue, but for it to make sense to me I need for you to provide more particulars. As it stands it feels like you are "painting with a broom", and I perceive your skepticism in this regard, but I do not perceive its source or foundation.

Bill,

When I read what consequentialism was , it kind of scare me. Any genocide, any atrocities can be justified with this type of logic. The ends, particularly grandiose hypothetical ones may justified all kind of sacrifices. Staline, Pol Pot, Hitler have all justified their murdering projects using this procedure.

Since you offered me only two choices, I will choose deontology. It is narrow mind, it undully limit my choices, but it will prevent the worst excess.

You did not react to my criticism against any such rule based approaches.

Louis, There are both hard and soft forms of Consequentialist thought. Some very kind and even self-sacrificing acts have been done out of a Consequentialist thought process. Nevertheless, you are right, it has the potential, in the wrong hands, to permit very frightening behaviors. I believe it is a form of Consequentialist thought which is behind the practice in China of executing people and then harvesting most of their organs for transplant purposes at a profit.

I take it that when you say I didn't react to your criticism against rule-based approaches you mean this from above: "I do not think that a moral judgment should be based onto an explicit logical moral methodology. Given a situation where a decision has to be made about the proper behavior or choice, one should try to assimilate the problem and then let his/her instinct and heart guide his/her reflection and then in a final stage express it in language."

Louis I guess I find that altogether too individualistic an approach. If we make moral judgments this way, ten people will likely have ten different moral responses. The creation of moral codes seems to be a basic human practice worldwide and across time. I am not a primarily rule-based ethicist, but I think that moral codes or rules form a minimal "safety net" underneath the moral reasoning process you describe. Even my intuiting a choice as you have described must have some basic rules underlying it, e.g. "human life is good" or something of the sort. We do not reason and intuit in a vacuum.

Bill,

We do not reason and intuit in a vacuum but based on the accumulated wisdom of the Universe that is in us. Rules prevent our access to it.

Jacob, In the modern world conduct did indeed come first, but in the ancient world, with many philosophers, Aristotle included, character came first. You could say that in our modern rediscovery or resurrection of conduct-based ethics we have made a forward sort of progress, but we appear to have done so by looking backwards rather than forwards.

Louis why do you hold that rules prevent our access to wisdom? I think especially in terms of prudentia or wisdom as applied knowledge. Aquinas said it was "right practical reason". It would seem that many of the codes of ethics (rules) which humanity has created came forth out of prudentia. A wooden legalism with no capacity to reflect and think critically may keep us from wisdom, but I don't think that right practical reason has anything to fear from codes of ethics. When your parents (if you have siblings), taught you not to hit your brother or sister they were giving you a rule. Have such rules been helps or a hindrances toward wisdom in your life?

Dear Bill Johnson - this is an interesting discussion!

I am a big fan of deontological reasoning theory which does not concern itself with the consequences of the action but rather with the will of the action. An action is good or bad depending on the will inherent in it. According to deontological theory, an act is considered good if the individual committing it had a good reason to do so. Any thoughts Bill Johnson , Louis Brassard , Radu Catalin Tarca , V. Ashok , Sajda Taha Mahmood , Louis Brassard , Salman Keyani Borujeni , Priyakrushna Mohanty , Lamia Al-Naama , Bisma S Khan , H Gin Chong , Yrgalem desta Smegnew , Lubaba Yemer and Hind S. Abdulhay ?

Hello Mohammed,

I have not been on Researchgate in years, but your question, which appeared in my email, intrigued me. As I am sure you are aware, a Good Will is Kant's starting point. Not to conflate ethical theories, but I think of Kant's emphasis on having a Good Will as being his equivalent of Plato's Chariot driver (charioteer) in the Phaedrus. In that analogy, there is a charioteer who must drive his chariot while it is being pulled by two winged horses. The one horse is a good and noble horse and the other is wild and unmanageable. If memory serves, the first speaks of reason and prudence within a person, and the other speaks of the appetites and passions. The charioteer must guide both the thinking aspect of the human as well as the hungering, wanting, desiring part of the human. This assumes a good and wise charioteer. Kant is headed in the direction of the Categorical Imperatives, but before he can go there, he must address the "bent" the disposition, the overall makeup of the moral agent.

Thus, Kant begins the Grundwerk (the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals) with the stark and obvious claim that, "There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will." By that I take him to mean that all our abilities, talents, gifts, and even our dispositions are inert. They can be used for good or for evil, to help or to harm, selflessly or selfishly. It is the will that drives them. Some of history's greatest monsters had great gifting, great intelligence, and wonderful talents, but they had evil and self-serving wills. There is an old rhyme that says, "One ship drives East and another one West by the selfsame winds that blow, 'tis the set of the sails, and not the gales that determines the way that they go." The Good Will sets the sails, drives the chariot, and orients both the intellect and the passions in a good direction. Therefore, assuming a good will in our moral agent we can then speak about Categorical Imperatives. Kant without the Categorical Imperatives is only concerned with a general sense of duty out of a Good Will, but the Categorical Imperative gives this latently good will the means whereby to reason its way to what is rightly its duty by way of the principles of moral universalizability, and thinking of humans and humanity as ends in themselves, and never as merely means to our own ends.

So, a Good Will is the starting point, the necessary frame of reference from which to reason morally, but it is "blind" so to speak, if it has not the Categorical Imperatives to guide it.

Dear Bill,

Great to hear from you. Life took a few billion years to evolve and to produce humans, a totally new type of animals, a totally social animal, and speaking of social is speaking of good versus bad behavior vis a vis the community. The good and the bad are social . But the social is not random, it took at most 100 000 years of socio cultural evolution to have the type of societies we have but this is almost nothing compared to amount of biological knowledge encapsulated into our body and so most of the judgement is biologically based and accessible. We may call that LIFE or GOD or whatever. It calls us to the Good although we are not made to be like other animals, naturally set to be good. Our freedom, our flexible nature, is our most precious gift, the novelty of our type of mammalian imagination, but also our curse, our freedom to Fall, to loose the path of LIFE. It cannot be a traced path, LIFE had to give up traced path to go the next step, but this life form is vulnerable to individualistic hubris, the equivalent of cancer, where an individual cell behave for itself and not for the common good of the whole organism. So through the age, we have created one form of religions after another, whose purpose is to control the enculturation so we find our way to the common good. But these can't be HOW TO because of the intrinsic possibility to have a HOW TO specification of the good which is the reason why LIFE created us in the first place.

Regards,

- Louis

Hello Louis,

It is always a pleasure to hear from you. It has been a long time since the last time we "spoke" here.

The question under discussion here is: " Which ethical approach is more practical: focusing on conduct (Consequentialism and Deontology) or focusing on character (Virtue Ethics)?" Mohammed was saying that what appeals to him about Deontology is its emphasis on one having a Good Will, and I was agreeing with him, and speaking of how basic or seminal that concept is to the formation of Kant's particular form of Deontological reasoning.

What you write is interesting, and shows that you hold a Naturalistic/Biological understanding of human origins, as well as of human societies and conceptions of Good and Evil. I am not clear about how religion came into the picture, as we were discussing secular theories of ethics (e.g. Utilitarianism and Deontology). These are intentionally irreligious conceptions of ethics, not (for Kant at least) in the sense of being anti-religious, so much as demonstrating that one does not need to invoke a particular faith or particular moral code in order to reason about right and wrong effectively. That being said, I find it fascination that your particular Naturalistic metanarrative of human origins includes its equivalent of the religious concept of sin: "... but this life form is vulnerable to individualistic hubris, the equivalent of cancer, where an individual cell behaves for itself and not for the common good of the whole organism." How fascinating!

This statement is not clear to me: "But these can't be HOW TO because of the intrinsic possibility to have a HOW TO specification of the good which is the reason why LIFE created us in the first place." I do not understand what you're saying here. Could you clarify that sentence for me?

What I do find quite interesting is that you speak of how LIFE created us. You are using LIFE like one might use the notion of a Deity. It sounds purposeful, teleological, intentional, and ordered. This is a new worldview for me. The closest I have seen to this notion is James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. Tell me about this notion - I find it very intriguing.

Hello Louis,

It is always a pleasure to hear from you. It has been a long time since the last time we "spoke" here.

The question under discussion here is: " Which ethical approach is more practical: focusing on conduct (Consequentialism and Deontology) or focusing on character (Virtue Ethics)?" Mohammed was saying that what appeals to him about Deontology is its emphasis on one having a Good Will, and I was agreeing with him, and speaking of how basic or seminal that concept is to the formation of Kant's particular form of Deontological reasoning.

What you write is interesting, and shows that you hold a Naturalistic/Biological understanding of human origins, as well as of human societies and conceptions of Good and Evil. I am not clear about how religion came into the picture, as we were discussing secular theories of ethics (e.g. Utilitarianism and Deontology). These are intentionally irreligious conceptions of ethics, not (for Kant at least) in the sense of being anti-religious, so much as demonstrating that one does not need to invoke a particular faith or particular moral code in order to reason about right and wrong effectively. That being said, I find it fascinating that your particular Naturalistic metanarrative of human origins includes its equivalent of the religious concept of sin: "... but this life form is vulnerable to individualistic hubris, the equivalent of cancer, where an individual cell behaves for itself and not for the common good of the whole organism." How fascinating!

This statement is not clear to me: "But these can't be HOW TO because of the intrinsic possibility to have a HOW TO specification of the good which is the reason why LIFE created us in the first place." I do not understand what you're saying here. Could you clarify that sentence for me?

What I do find quite interesting is that you speak of how LIFE created us. You are using LIFE like one might use the notion of a Deity. It sounds purposeful, teleological, intentional, and ordered. This is a new worldview for me. The closest I have seen to this notion is James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. Tell me about this notion - I find it very intriguing.

Dear Bill,

At some late stages in the different great civilisation (India,China,West) some almost secular forms of ethic appeared but these are relatively very recent social phenomena , all societies used to be religious and this as far as we can trace human beings. My thesis is that in some hominin tribe, most probably a bonobo like matriarchal society (extended family group) One day, one particularly caring female or group of female began the walk towards humanity throw a new form of being social, our first religion, our first art, our first language: singing dancing together and becoming One, merging themself into a communal being. This allowed a relatively rapid process of biological evolution favoring this new total sociality based on the decoupling of the mammalian imagination; the willfull enaction of a living dream and the gradual control of attention. This first religious primates, the society of poets as Vico named them and which modern anthropology is speculating gradually learned to live into a bio-cultural world , more and more gradually of their own making. We gradually became suspended into a reality that we were making together. Gradually our language would separate from our communal practice as a separate and a pragmatic communication practices which were not at first and at some point our Laryn will allow voice language instead of combination of signs and sounds.

I will leave the details of the gradual making of homo sapiens sapiens through this religious social process. So what makes humans is its coming together, its particular form of being social and this is essentially religious and there is no out of it and still remaining humans, coming out of it is necessarily biologically the unmaking of humanity. It is not a process that can be suspended, even less reverse and hoping to conserve humanity. It is on going or undoing.

Why LIFE came to humanity? It was going on for million of years in the social evolution of the mammal, each step favoring sociality and faster learning was requiring a gradual uncoupling of the imagination. It started with uncoupling during night and this is dreaming. Uncoupling during youth and this is called play.

Sociality is a process of forming a single integrated being out of multiple one. It is the same that life did prior to the Cambrian revolution with unicellular life and that took 3 billion years to take place and the creation of the social cell: the Eukaryotic cell. Then 500 years ago , life started moving to the next step, the social being and humans are this Eukaryatic animal at the social level, an animal with a nervous system made for participating into a social being. Now life evolution has become a social evolution towards and we are in this process which is in deep crisis since modernity. Vico is one of first to have discovered that something in this new movement was very wrong indeed.

I will furher elaborate later today. I am travelling in your nice western coast.

Regards,

-LOuis

Dear Bill,

Louis "So through the age, we have created one form of religions after another, whose purpose is to control the enculturation so we find our way to the common good. But these can't be HOW TO because of the intrinsic possibility to have a HOW TO specification of the good which is the reason why LIFE created us in the first place.."

Here I am saying that it is not possible to enculturate infants in HOW TO mode and hope that will make an adult that will be searching for the common good. In ''Oration on the Dignity of Man'' https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pico_della_mirandola/giovanni/dignity/

Pico writes:

''The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”''

Such social animal with nature that still need to be invented would be prevented to do so by HOW TO type of inculturation, rule following, it is intrinsicly against its nature. There is a balance to be found between two disasters: No guidance and Total guidance in order for our imagination (our divine life) to unfold .

Regards,

- Louis