CONSEQUENTIALISM AND DEONTOLOGY

Ethical and Legal Issue with relation to Consequentialism and Deontology: A Case Study

Ethical and Legal Issue with relation to Consequentialism and Deontology

Introduction

Much of this report was inspired by the idea that consequentialism could be shown to be incompatible with any adequate metaphysics of rational agency. One of the most frustrating obstacles on the path along which that inspiration drew me is the fact that consequentialism does not these days always mean what I think it should(Reamer 2006, pp. 85). That is what consequentialism should mean and that is what I thought it meant when I was inspired to write this report. So that pending one further clarification that I will get to at the end of this section is how I will use the term consequentialism. The next section of the report is based on the analysis of the case study. The case is based on the paediatric care for neuroblastoma patient.

Rationale

It is important to generate a sense for their importance by pointing to the way in which certain answers to even more basic questions about the metaphysics of agency tend to be presupposed by those who only try to settle questions about what to do. I will try to do this by providing a novel characterization of the debate between consequentialism and deontology (Tschudin 2003, pp. 10). Now, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of thinking both that the deepest axis of disagreement between consequentialism and deontology is very different from how it is commonly conceived, and also that the idea (which is as widespread as it is unrecognized) that a disagreement can turn on this axis can fairly easily be shown to be a consequence of a confused metaphysics of action.

Ethics

The word ethics comes from the Greek ethos, meaning custom and morality comes from the Latin word we, Moris also means custom (Read, Clements & Ruebain 2006, pp. 47). The two words refer to the customs. So the nominal definition of ethics would be the science of morals. But what really matters to ethics is to study the goodness or badness of human acts, without being interested in other aspects or approaches. Therefore we can determine that its material object of study is human acts and its formal object is the rightness or wrongness of such acts. With this we can give a real definition of ethics as the science that studies the goodness or badness of human acts.

Ethical philosophy

Ethical philosophy of a certain sort tends to concern itself with the question of which actions would be ethically right, good, permissible, obligatory, or perhaps something else, to perform. It is not controversial that such questions about what to do are at least some of the questions that ethical philosophy should aspire to answer. But I think that attention to these questions tends to obscure the importance of questions of another sort let us call them questions about motivation that ethical philosophy should also aspire to ...