Haidt’s Chapter 6 challenge — deontology as a “one-receptor” cuisine
Haidt presents Kant’s universal-law formulation as the deontological counterpart to Bentham’s arithmetic: calculation gives way to logic, but one formula still claims jurisdiction over morality. His True Taste analogy asks what gets lost when duty and universalizability crowd out relationship, loyalty, sanctity, authority, cultivated character, or the texture of lived motives.
The criticism does not show that universalization, dignity, autonomy, or duty are false. Haidt explicitly rejects an ad hominem inference from a philosopher’s psychology, and his interpretive portrait of Kant as a high systemizer is not a diagnosis. At most, the chapter argues that logic alone cannot supply a descriptively adequate psychology of moral life. True Taste and moral monism, PDF pp. 136–138 (file not included in this release) · Kant, universal law, and psychological realism, PDF pp. 145–147 (file not included in this release) · Chapter 6 source audit
normative ethicaltheory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action.
action is more important than the consequences
Definition
normative ethicaltheory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action.
The word deontology derives from the Greek words for duty (deon) and science (or study) of (logos). In contemporary moral philosophy, deontology is one of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. In other words, deontology falls within the domain of moral theories that guide and assess our choices of what we ought to do (deontic theories), in contrast to those that guide and assess what kind of person we are and should be (aretaic [virtue] theories). And within the domain of moral theories that assess our choices, deontologists—those who subscribe to deontological theories of morality—stand in opposition to consequentialists.
- action is more important than the consequences
- Universal Law
Proponents
- Kant would say that a person’s will is good if he would do the right thing because it is right regardless of whether he wanted to. The important thing for Kant is that one do the right thing simply because it is the right thing.
- Would it be rational for everyone to act this way?
- Could what I propose to do be a universal rule?
Main Ideas
- “Good will, a will”