It's hard to decide what to do in morally ambiguous situations. Especially for these cases, some universities have the subject “deontology” in the program. This is a science that studies the area of duty and moral correctness of behavior in various situations. Many solutions have already been invented long before us, but it must be remembered that the responsibility still lies with us, and not with abstract rules.
Dogmas outside religion
The foundations of the direction of research were laid by Immaunil Kant. According to his teaching, a person is obliged to follow moral standards, regardless of the unusual situation in which he finds himself. Moral flexibility, according to Kant, is unacceptable. Even if following ethical canons leads to tragic consequences, a person must still adhere to moral rules. Deontology is the opposite of another ethical approach called consequentialism. The latter means that morality is determined by the result. What is not always true: it is a different nameprinciple known as “the end justifies the means.”
Spheres of special closeness of people
In the deontological system of values, a person's character is evaluated primarily from the position of how he follows his duty. Based on the general theory, rules were developed for certain areas of human activity: medicine, social work, and legal practice. All these areas are distinguished by pronounced ethical problems, since a specialist in them takes responsibility for another person. One of the unwritten but observed rules, for example, of medical deontology, is the principle of division of responsibility - a council gathers to make important decisions.
Egoist Right
Within the overall discipline, there are different currents and different teachings. For example, there is a trend called agent-centered deontology, an approach that claims that a person has every moral right to put his obligations above other people's problems. For example, consider the interests of your child more important than the interests of any other person. Opponents of this doctrine accuse proponents of the agent-centered approach of indulging selfishness.
Careful care
The patient-centered approach is not limited to medicine. This trend is also supported by the deontology of social work. In practice, this means that the person being looked after cannot be used for the benefit of another person.
For example, iftake care of two pensioners living together, it is impossible to spend part of the money allocated for one person for another, even if one of them needs more. However, in social work, deontology is still a debatable direction.
Rescue is illegal
Also, responsible decisions have to be made by specialists in the field of law. Legal deontology argues that a lawyer, from a moral point of view, has no right to lie against a client, even to save the life of this person.
Boundaries and compromises
There is also the so-called "threshold deontology". This is the doctrine that, under certain conditions, moral norms can and should be violated. Of course, this approach causes a lot of heated debate. For example, is it possible to torture one person in order to save a large number of people? Or vice versa: is it possible to execute a murderer, because his life threatens many other people? Critics of the approach argue that raising the question of the threshold of morality devalues the very direction called "deontology". This forces us to recognize that one cannot transfer responsibility from oneself to moral standards. So the decision should always be made by the person acting.
