Deontological ethics of duty for dutys sake may recognize be either act deontology or rule deontolog

1

• Deontological ethics of duty for dutys sake may
  recognize be either act deontology or rule
  deontology.
• Act deontological ethics says that an act is
  right because conscience seeks that it is right
  without following any rules.
• Rule deontological ethics holds that conscience
  first holds an ethical rule to be right, and
  holds an action to be right only because it falls
  under a correct rule.

2

• Rule deontological ethics can be either one rule
  deontological ethics or many rule deontolgical
  ethics.
• One rule deontological ethics avoids conflicts of
  duty.
• Conflicts of duty are dealt with in many rule
  deontological ethics by holding that the rules of
  ethics define prima facie duties rather than
  actual duties.

3

• A prima facie duty to tell the truth means that
  the fact that an act is an act of telling the
  truth always tends to make the act right. (That
  fact is a right-making consideration.)
• But there may be other facts about the act that
  tend to make it wrong. The act may also be an act
  of hurting someones feelings.
• This leads to a conflict of duties.
• This conflict is settled by seeing which duty is
  the stronger duty in the situation.

4

• In some situations truth-telling might be the
  weightier duty, and in other situations no
  hurting someone might be weightier.
• There is no fixed hierarchy of duties that says
  that truth-telling is always a higher duty that
  not hurting people.
• Your actual duty according to many rule
  deontological ethics is always your weightiest
  duty in the situation.

5

• Here is a list of possible prima facie duties
• 1. The duty to keep promises
• 2. The duty to be fair or just in the
  distribution of happiness to others.
• 3. The duty to help others, to be beneficent and
  to avoid being hurtful.
• 4. The duty to tell the truth if you speak (but
  not necessarily the whole truth).
• 4. The duty to pay for services rendered.
• 6. The duty to compensate others in case you
  injure them.
• THIS LIST COMES FROM W.D. ROSS

6

• You acquire duties by promise making.
• For example, you make a promise to yourself (as
  well as to others) to be fair. You have the
  obligation because through a promise to yourself
  you place the obligation upon yourself.
• e.g. Treat like cases similarly, to give the same
  grade to one student for a certain student that
  you give to another student for the same
  achievement.

7

• You have a prima facie duty to keep all promises
  that you have placed on yourself in making those
  promises.
• You ought not make any promises to yourself that
  you do not perceive to be justified by good
  reasons.
• If you promise to obey the law because you will
  otherwise get in trouble that may be a good
  reason.
• But if you perceive that the law is bad you
  should also place a promise on yourself to try to
  change the law.

8

• To be fair is to give to each individual what he
  or she deserves, what is due to that person.
  This is called distributive justice. It is
  justice in the distribution of what goods and
  services you have to distribute to others.
• Reparative justice is different. It consists in
  finding fair compensation for the injury you have
  done to others.
• Commutative justice (Aristotle) consists in
  finding the fair price for goods and services.
  Question Is the market price always the fair
  price?

9

• The duty to help others or beneficence is not
  benevolence. Benevolence consists in feelings of
  love and kindness towards others. Beneficence
  consists in external actions of helping others,
  with or without those feelings.
• You can only have a duty perform actions. You
  cannot have a duty to have certain feelings, at
  least not in the short term, since your feelings
  are beyond your control.
• You have a duty only to do what you can do. Ought
  implies can. If you cannot bring yourself to feel
  love for criminals you have no duty to do so, but
  you may still have a duty to perform external
  actions of helping them, e.g., giving them humane
  treatment.

10

• Is the duty of beneficence a duty to help
  everyone in the world?
• Or is it more centrally a duty to help people
  closer to home?
• Does charity begin at home? Do you help the
  whole world by first helping those you know
  best?10
• Why would those far away have less a right to
  your aid than those close to come. Because you do
  not impact their lives?
• What if the United States by global warming
  injures people far away.

11

• The duty to tell the truth to the best of your
  ability exists only if when you open your mouth
  you make an implicit promise to tell your hearers
  the truth.
• In some contexts when you speak, such as
  play-acting, you do not lead hearers to expect
  the truth by any tacit promise on your part, and
  so you do not have an obligation to say the
  truth.
• Dialogue by definition is directed to the truth.
  So you do have such an obligation in that
  context.