The foundations of duty-based thinking

From goals to duties

Utilitarianism asks no more of us as moral agents than that we consider the outcome of our actions. Provided that its outcome maximizes happiness, an action is morally justified. We are not asked to give an account of the rightness of the action itself. There are no principles to refer to for that sort of judgement. The last chapter found that the goals of research are important issues morally, but it is not enough to identify a good goal for research and leave the moral consideration at that, even if the related issues of scientific method and the dissemination of results are satisfactorily included. The conduct of the research itself has to be subjected to moral constraints. The example quoted from the Nuremberg Trials helped to show why. If someone's focus as a researcher is only on the outcome of her research, she is going to miss the ethical implications of what she has to do to arrive at that result. Goal-based morality cannot help us think about the ethics of the research procedures, because its focus is always on the future. We need a duty-based deontological moral approach rather than a teleological one to assist our analysis at this stage.

Duty-based deontological morality concerns itself specifically with the contents of an action rather than with its results. It considers actions in the light of explicit moral principles, which have to be identified and adhered to.