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.

Department dc:contributor.department

Philosophy

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Sinha, Gaurav Alex

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hurka, Thomas

• Deontology
• Agent-Centered Restrictions
• Consequentialism
• Constraints

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 3.0 Unported

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/35718

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/35718