Anti-Climacus

TELEOLOGICAL VERSUS DEONTOLOGICAL THEORIES OF MORALITY: Oh gosh, I bet you're salivating at the prospect of the post to follow:

This is a whole mess of issues that came up as a result of reading John Rawls' Theory of Justice (Rawls is crazy, yes, but he's got nothing on Bobby Nozick). Rawls defines teleological moral theories as the following:

"the good is defined independently from the right, and then the right is defined as that which maximizes the good." (21-22 if you have the 2nd edition)

It follows, Rawls says, that:

"This means two things. First, the theory accounts for our considered judgments as to which things are good (our judgments of value) as a separate class of judgments intuitively distinguishable by common sense, and then proposes the hypothesis that the right is maximizing the good as already specified. Second, the theory enables one to judge the goodness of things without referring to what is right." (22)

He contrasts this with deontological theory:

"By definition, then, [justice as fairness] is a deontological theory, one that either does not specify the good independently from the right, or does not interpret the right as maximizing the good." (26)

The controversial part of this (for me, anyway) comes in Rawls' desire to put such petty little differences as religion away from people behind the veil of ignorance, because, he argues (at least in part), religious moralities are teleological. Which got me thinking: this can't possibly be true, right? Christianity doesn't link the good and the right together (on one interpretation) or, if it does, it only links them by indexing the good to the right, and not the other way around (so the theory couldn't be teleological). In further discussion with one of my housemates, though, something like the following chain of logic came out: if you're a moral realist (as I am), then every act which has a moral status at all has one given to it just as a facet of its very nature or existence, and ethics is then about doing the things which are right and not doing the things which are wrong. But that's a teleological theory: right acts are good because they're right, and we ought to strive for the best possible ends, oughtn't we?

But it also seems like there's a further complication for the Christian moral realist (and possibly also deontologist--er, me): there are two standards of the good, the one that comes from worldly things, and the one that comes from Christianity. So it might end up being the case that the deontologicalness/teleologicalness of Christian ethics depends on which set of standards of the good you're measuring it against: if against those of the world, well, the Christian says that right and good are different things, and one ought to be concerned with maximizing the right, not the good (deontological); if one speaks of Christian goods, then one sees them as the same thing (though one still wants to maximize the good because it's right and not the other way around, though I'm not wedded to this view), and wants to maximize them collectively (teleological).

Anyway, just a set of thoughts, feel free to give your opinion in the comments.