Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to present a duty-based approach to moral decision-making. A duty-based system of doing ethics is technically known as deontology. This chapter focuses mainly on Immanuel Kant’s duty-based ethics as it is the major theory within the deontological tradition. The chapter explains some of the main features of Kant’s moral philosophy and its key terms such as autonomy, dignity and respect for persons, which have become part of the parlance of nursing ethics and practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Consequentialism is a term that describes ethical theories that base the morality of actions on the type of consequences produced. See Chap. 3 of this book for an explanation of one of the most prominent forms of consequentialism, i.e. Utilitarianism.
- 2.
Other forms of duty-based ethics include, for example, the Divine Command Theory and Rossian Ethics. The Divine Command approach would claim that actions are right or wrong because God commands that they are right or wrong and therefore we have a duty to perform (or not to perform) them. Rossian Ethics is explained on p. 25 of this chapter.
- 3.
Chap. 7 of this book provides a more detailed analysis of autonomy.
- 4.
The ‘Realm of Ends’ – often described as the ‘Kingdom of Ends’ – formulation of the categorical imperative refers to the social context of respecting persons as ‘ends’. Deigh (2010 p. 169) explains that this is “… a community of all rational agents governed by laws that they give to themselves collectively.”
- 5.
The contradictions in maxims are often referred to as a contradiction in conception and a contradiction in willing. O’Neill (1989 p. 89) uses the terms “conceptual inconsistency” and “volitional inconsistency”.
- 6.
See Chap. 4 for an explanation of Virtue Ethics.
- 7.
This is another form of deontology, sometimes known as Rossian, which deals with the problem of conflicting duties.
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Kearns, A.J. (2017). A Duty-Based Approach for Nursing Ethics & Practice. In: Scott, P. (eds) Key Concepts and Issues in Nursing Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49250-6_2
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