• Duty and Agency • Autonomy • Universalizability Chapter Objectives After reading this chapter, you should be able to: • Discuss the basic principles of deontology; • Apply the concepts of agency and autonomy to your moral experience; and • Evaluate actions using the universalizability test. INTRODUCTION During the flag ceremony of that Monday morning, January 24, 2017, the mayor of Baguio City awarded a certificate from the City Government that commended Reggie Cabututan for his “extraordinary show of honesty in the performance of their duties or practice of profession.”Reggie is a taxi driver who, just three days before the awarding, drove his passenger, an Australian named Trent Shields, to his workplace. The foreigner, having little sleep and was ill the previous day, left his suitcase inside the taxi cab after. The suitcase contained a laptop, Trent’s passport, and an expensive pair of headphones, which Trent claimed amounted to around ₱260,000. Consider closely the moment when Reggie found that Trent had left a suitcase in his taxi cab: If he were to return the suitcase, there was no promise of an award from the City Government of Baguio and no promise of a reward from the owner. What if he took the suitcase and sold its contents? Yet, Reggie returned the suitcase without the promise of a reward. Why? Perhaps Reggie believed that it was the right thing to do. Even if he felt that he could have benefited from the sale of the valuable items in the suitcase, he must have believed the principle that it is right to do the right thing. Reggie could be holding on to this moral conviction as a principle of action. To hold a moral conviction means believing that it is one’s duty to do the right thing. What is duty? Why does one choose to follow his/her duty even if doing otherwise may bring his/her more benefits? DUTY AND AGENCY • The moral theory that evaluates actions that are done because of duty is called deontology. Deontology comes from the Greek word deon, which means “being necessary.” Hence, deontology refers to the study of duty and obligation. The main proponent of deontology is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). • Kant brings our attention to the fact that we human beings have the faculty called rational will, which is the capacity to act according to principles that we determine for ourselves. • Rationality consists of the mental faculty to construct ideas and thoughts that are beyond our immediate surroundings. This is the capacity for mental abstraction, which arises from the operations of the faculty of reason. Thus, we have the ability to stop and think about what we are doing. • Let us go back to Reggie. The moment he discovered that Trent had left his suitcase in the taxi cab, Reggie reacted according to his rational will—to return the suitcase. He determined that it was his duty to return it inasmuch as his rational will had conceived such a duty. • Hence, to act according to a duty is a specifically human experience. Animals, if it is true that they do not possess the faculty of rational will, cannot conceive of having duties. This is the starting point of deontology. We may claim that as long as we have rationality, there will always be the tension between our base impulses and our rational will. AUTONOMY • Kant claims that the property of the rational will is autonomy, which is the opposite of heteronomy. Autonomy means self-law (or self-legislating) and heteronomy means other-law. • Kant claims that there is a difference between rational will and animal impulse. Take a close look at how he describes the distinction in this passage: The choice that can be determined by pure reason is called free choice. That which is determinable only by inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus) would be animal choice (arbitrium brutum). Human choice, in contrast, is a choice that may indeed be affected but not determined by impulses, and is therefore in itself (without an acquired skill of reason) not pure, but can nevertheless be determined to do actions from pure will (Ak 6:213). • “The human person is not only an animal, but is also rational,” we admit to two possible causes of our actions: sensible impulses and the faculty of reason. Human freedom resides in that distinction. UNIVERSALIZABILITY • Kant endorses this formal kind of moral theory. The Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, which he wrote in 1785, embodies a formal moral theory in what he calls the categorical imperative, which provides a procedural way of identifying the rightness or wrongness of an action. Kant articulates the categorical imperative this way:
Act only according to such a maxim, by which you can
at once will that it become a universal law. (Ak 4:421)
• There are four key elements in this formulation of the categorical
imperative, namely, action, maxim, will, and universal law. Kant states that we must formulate an action as a maxim, which he defines as a “subjective principle of action.” • What does it mean t will a maxim that can become a universal law? It means that the maxim must be universalizable, which is what it means to “will that it become a universal law.” • We reveal the rational permissibility of actions insofar as they cannot be rejected as universalizable maxims. In contrast, those universalized maxims that are rejected are shown to be impermissible, that is, they are irrational and thus, in Kant’s mind, immoral. DISCUSSION POINTS 1. In what way does a rational will distinguish a human being from an animal insofar as the animal is only sentient? 2. What is the difference between autonomy and heteronomy? What does autonomy have to do with free will in contrast to animal impulse? PROCESSING QUESTIONS 1. How does the method called universalizability work? What are the steps to test if an action is rationally permissible? 2. What is meant by enlightenment morality as opposed to paternalism? Why is deontology a kind of enlightenment morality? LESSON SUMMARY • We have the capacity to make our own list of moral commands. Instead of receiving them from others, we use our own rational faculty to produce our own list of moral duties. • The categorical imperative is precisely for the rational will that is autonomous. The test for universalizability makes possible that self- legislation, for the result of the categorical imperative, is nothing other than the capacity to distinguish between permissible and impermissible moral acts. • Deontology is based on the “light” of one’s own reason when maturity and rational capacity take hold of a person’s decision-making. • With deontology, particularly the method of universalizability, we can validate and adopt rules and laws that are right and reject those that are irrational, thus impermissible because they are self-contradictory. • We are encouraged to have courage to think on our own, to use our rational will against external authorities as well as internal base impulses that tend to undermine our autonomy and self-determination.