Michelle Chiu

Deontological Ethics Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek deon, "obligation, duty"; and -logia) is an approach to ethics that judges the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to a rule or rules. Deontologists look at rules[1] and duties. It is sometimes described as "duty" or "obligation" or "rule" -based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty".[2] The term "deontological" was first used in this way in 1930, in C. D. Broad's book, Five Types of Ethical Theory.[3] Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted with consequentialist ethical theories, according to which the rightness of an action is determined by its consequences.[4] However, there is a difference between deontological ethics and moral absolutism.[5] Some deontologists are also moral absolutists, believing that some actions are wrong no matter what consequences follow from them. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that the only absolutely good thing is a good will, and so the single determining factor of whether an action is morally right is the will, or motive of the person doing it. If they are acting on a bad maxim, e.g. "I will lie", then their action is wrong, even if some good consequences come of it. Non-absolutist deontologists, such as W. D. Ross, hold that the consequences of an action such as lying may sometimes make lying the right thing to do. Kant's and Ross's theories are discussed in more detail below. Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca use the term Protected Valueswhen referring to values governed by deontological rules. Deontological ethics is also contrasted from pragmatic ethics. Since ethical pragmatists hold that moral behavior evolves socially over the course of many lifetimes (similar to scientific knowledge), they think that any currently explicated rules are liable to be supplanted by improved versions discovered by future generations (e.g. improved norms concerning slavery, environmental protection, etc.). Where deontologists would judge actions adhering to yet-imperfect modern rules as (accidentally) less moral, ethical pragmatists may disagree. They may judge them as moral (for current, but not in future eras) on the grounds that they stem from a society evolving towards morally correct behavior.

Michelle Chiu Anti-Realism In analytic philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false. This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not P." Thus, we may speak of anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or eventhought. The two construals are clearly distinct and often confused. For example, an "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is quite different from an "anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).

Anti-realist arguments Idealists are skeptics about the physical world, maintaining either: 1) that nothing exists outside the mind, or 2) that we would have no access to a mind-independent reality even if it may exist; the latter case often takes the form of a denial of the idea that we can have unconceptualised experiences (see Myth of the Given). Conversely, most realists (specifically, indirect realists) hold that perceptions or sense data are caused by mind-independent objects. But this introduces the possibility of another kind of skepticism: since our understanding of causalityis that the same effect can be produced by multiple causes, there is a lack of determinacy about what one is really perceiving. A concrete example of a situation where an individual's sensory input might be caused by something other than what he thinks is causing it is the brain in a vat scenario. On a more abstract level, model theoretic arguments hold that a given set of symbols in a theory can be mapped onto any number of sets of real-world objects each set being a "model" of the theory providing the interrelationships between the objects are the same. (Compare with symbol grounding).