Return to search

The Justification of Deontology

Agent-centered restrictions are widely accepted both in commonsense morality and across social and legal institutions, making it all the more striking that we have yet to ground them in a compelling theoretical rationale. This dissertation amounts to an effort to fill that gap by seeking out a new principled basis for justifying such constraints. I devote each of the first three chapters, respectively, to the three established deontological normative ethical theories: Rossian intuitionism, Kantianism, and Neo-Thomism. In each of these chapters, I lay out the relevant portion of the view’s deontological apparatus, analyzing it both for its plausibility as a whole and for its ability to justify constraints of the appropriate shape. After assessing and rejecting all three approaches, I devote the next two chapters to developing a new rationale for grounding constraints—one that avoids the pitfalls indicated in the prominent historical alternatives. Specifically, I anchor constraints in the distinction between the agent-neutral and agent-relative points of view, basing them in the widely accepted psychological fact of the natural independence of the personal point of view.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/35718
Date18 July 2013
CreatorsSinha, Gaurav Alex
ContributorsHurka, Thomas
Source SetsUniversity of Toronto
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

Page generated in 0.0022 seconds