Deontology, Kant And Utilitarian Theory

Defending Deontological/Kant
Growing up we are put in situations where we learn what is the moral thing to do and non moral just by our upbringing like religion, culture, and or race. This is called Ethics which is one of the major branch of philosophy that systematize, defend, and recommend concepts of right and wrong conduct. With that being said there are different kind of ethical approaches different philosophers discovered/ believed in which lay in the structure of consequentialist (the consequence of an action), Deontological ( duty, obligation, motivation, intention), and teleological ( striving to be a certain kind of person or fulfilling a kind of purpose ). In this paper I’m going to be defending Kant’s deontological theory which

It originally originated from philosopher Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism believed that the purpose of morality is to make life better by increasing the amount of good thing such as pleasure and happiness in the world and decreasing the amount of bad things such as pain and unhappiness. Utilitarianism holds several varieties, it implies that no act or rule is right or wrong but implies that the rightness or wrongness of an act or rule is solely a matter of the overall non moral good produced in the consequences of doing that act or following that rule. As you can see utilitarianism and deontological have very little in common. Where utilitarianism bases its judgment on the consequences of a person action and the action is good or bad because of the consequences, deontological doesn’t care about the consequences as long as your action was in a good place. An example of this would be imagine you were at gun point and the person decided to shoot but ended up missing and shooting someone else by accident who had a gun also that was about to murder 10 people. According to utilitarianism it doesn’t matter if the shooter killed unintentionally or if they were pointing a gun at you beforehand. All that matters is that the person that had a gun pointed at you committed a good act because they saved 10 people from dying.

It holds two version which is individual ethical egoism all persons should serve my self-interest and universal ethical egoism all person should pursue their own interest exclusively. Where utilitarianism focuses on the well-being of all ethical egoism is all about “ME”. A big concern with ethical egoism is that they are look upon as being selfish because they are always seeking their own self-interest no matter what. In order for an ethical egoist to promote their own interest as much as possible they would have to keep their ethical egoist a secret in order to benefit from someone else’s action. If not than they may not be the beneficiary since others may not want to benefit someone that only purses their own interest. Dealing with ethical egoist seems as though you are always using someone, whereas deontological requires you to treat people with respect and never use them as a mean. I truly believe that the reason things function in this world has to do a lot with all of us helping each other out and not wanting anything in return or trying to benefit from it. And with us doing that we do it because we feel like it’s our duty weather its helping a friend, family member, our children, or even a