Deontology, Teleology and Virtue Based Ethics

Rupak Balami

Jeff Fager

Ethics for Life and Career

2 May, 2017

“Deontology, Teleology and Virtue Based Ethics”

        Deontology believes that certain acts are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. This ethical theory mainly focuses on the duties and rules rather than the result of those things. There will be two options in everything like “Yes” or “No”. If you are doing the wrong things than it does not create the result of those things. Deon refers to the duty and we always need to do our duty to get success in our life. The advantages of deontology is that we can easily judge a person whether he is moral or not. In this process, if he/she is following the basic principles, then he/she is good regardless of the consequences of their actions. For instance, In Hinduism, if a person eats beef anywhere in the world, he is considered to be a person who does not follow the path of Hinduism, regardless of the consequences of his/her acts. It emphasizes the value of all people and provide human rights. Deontology has the feature of certainty, which is very important. The main advantage of this principle is that we can easily understand what is right and what is wrong. Deontology does not take the complexity of our different life situation seriously and the outcome of this deontology might cause the death of person because it only sees what is right or wrong and it does not care about the consequences, which seems to be very dangerous in various cases. The other disadvantages of Deontology are that it will create more problem and does apply effectively when we try to include the idea from other ethical theory like Utilitarian because it discusses what is right is always right and what is wrong is always wrong. This theory will make the world to be less social to live. I believed that Deontology is somehow related to the Kantian theory.

        Teleology theory refers to the moral obligation and duty, which will look at the outcome or consequences of one’s actions. It is exactly opposite to the Deontology theory, which does not care about the outcome or consequences. The advantage of teleological theory is that it provides happiness to the people because when we do our duty or help other people, it will give some good sense of pleasure. We know that we need to help to those people who are in need of help. So, it is easy to understand and this is our basic duty. The other advantages of this theory is that we can sense that our earth is designed by the god and he is the common creator of all the human beings. In this way, it will help to decrease the discrimination in between people based on race, color, and religion. The disadvantage of teleology is that every person does not agree on the way how they calculate the consequences. We also know that different people from all over the world may have different consequences of their own things, so it does not work on this situation. It is very hard to predict the future outcome of their action so, it does not work for all the times and it might be unreliable with the human rights.