36 What are challenges to deontology?

Deontology is a powerful framework that often makes much intuitive sense, because personal ethics often derive from a sense of duty and rights. As with utilitarianism, however, it faces challenges.

First, consider the caveats we raised at the end of the prior Question. Suppose, based on Kantian thought, one decided that breaking promises was always unethical. Would one keep that commitment if another’s life was on the line? It can be hard to consistently live up to the requirements of the principles of universalizability.

This is illustrated in the second problem, which we term the “bad maxim” problem. Suppose someone had a maxim that stated “I will rob banks, because I want the banking system to fail.” Is this universalizable? Yes! If everyone robbed banks, then the banking system would, in fact, likely fail. The why (ruin banks) is still achievable if the do (rob banks) is done by everyone. Thus, we might consider such an outcome ethical under the principles we just considered. Since robbing banks is obviously not ethical, we have a problem. To justify our intuitive sense of ethics, we need to begin with a maxim that is ethical in the first place. We thus end with circular reasoning: to be ethical, one should have a universalizable maxim, but that maxim needs to be ethical to begin with! Our next ethical framework will address this challenge.

Third, deontology may be difficult to apply in a business setting. While calculating costs and benefits to others may come naturally in a field influenced heavily by economists and accountants, making business decisions based on more abstract concepts such as rights and duties may be more complicated.

For more on rights as a basis for ethics, see Rights from the Markulla Center.