The Ethics of Death: Religious and Philosophical Perspectives in Dialogue: Religious and Philosophical Perspectives in Dialogue

By Lloyd Steffen and Dennis R. Cooley

For the living, death has a moral dimension. When we confront death and dying in our own lives and in the lives of others, we ask questions about the good, right, and fitting as they relate to our experiences of human mortality. When others die, the living are left with moral questions—questions that often generate personal inquiry as to whether a particular death was “good” or whether it was tragic, terrifying, or peaceful.

In The Ethics of Death, the authors, one a philosopher and one a religious studies scholar, undertake an examination of the deaths that we experience as members of a larger moral community. Their respectful and engaging dialogue highlights the complex and challenging issues that surround many deaths in our modern world and helps readers frame thoughtful responses.

Unafraid of difficult topics, Steffen and Cooley fully engage suicide, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment, abortion, and war as areas of life where death poses moral challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781451487572

Book preview

Subjects

Introduction

Introduction

The title of this book is odd. Although ethical issues often take center stage in discussions of dying, particularly around actions to hasten, inflict, or prevent death, the idea of an ethics of death is peculiar. Ethics is to a large extent concerned with action, and death is not an action. It is more like a state, but to call it a state implies a state of being—namely, the state of being dead—and that is not quite right either.[1] Ethics is concerned with decision making, and while we can make decisions about what to do with someone who has died, treating the dead as an object of our deliberation, ethics is meant to help living human subjects decide what to do, who to be, and how to act: what can ethics possibly means to a human subject who has died and is thus incapable of decision making? How can there be an ethics of death when death seems to cancel the possibility of all the things we associate with ethics: being an agent, a person who reasons, acts, exercises volition, experiences the world, and engages others through various forms of relationship. Even the idea of being dead seems odd. We can acknowledge being toward death with death a future prospect, but once death comes, the being toward appears to be canceled. Death obliterates the being—how can we have an ethics without being? [2]

We—the two authors of this book—have an answer to these questions, although it is tentative and may not satisfy all readers. Here goes: in focusing our attention on what we call the ethics of death, we are claiming that death is an experience for the living.

No doubt people go through the experience of dying, but whether those who die actually experience their own deaths is at least an unknown.[3] What we do know is that the living experience death, but always the deaths of others. Others is a term important in ethics. The moral point of view would insist that our decision making take into account others, and even principles in ethics like universalizability—that what is good for me to do is good for anyone to do—or utilitarian calculation—acting to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number—clearly center deliberation on our relationships to others. If there is, as Kierkegaard offered, a moral sphere or stage of life, it is a sphere that is concerned specifically with self-other relations. The relationship of the self to others is what defines the very context for moral thinking and ethical reflection.

So, in human experience, human beings we know—some we love—die. These others who are not me go through a dying process of various durations under various circumstances. When that dying process comes to an end—which it does—we, who have not gone through that process, speak about the death of others and what that death means and how it affects what we do, who we are, and how we act. In this sense, death is an experience for the living.

This book is written to think about how we, the living, experience death as we encounter it through our involvements and reflections with those others with whom we are in relationship, which is to say the whole moral community broadly speaking. Our effort in these pages is to deliberate on the moral meaning of death for the living. For we, the living, confront death in our own lives and in the lives of others, and we ask questions about what is good, right, and fitting as persons—even we ourselves—face death. When others die, the living are left with moral questions that reflect back on the movement toward death, which comes to have standing as a moral project in people’s lives whether we recognize it as such or not; we, the living, will even judge whether a particular death was a good death, or whether it was a tragic death, a justified death, a wrongful death, a terrifying death, or a peaceful death. Death looms before all and presents us with the prospect of losing what is most important—our own life and the lives of others, many of whom we love. Although death will one day include each of us, the experience of anyone’s actual death, even our own, will be someone else’s. Another way to put this is that my death—your death—will be experienced by someone other than me—or you.

Having opened the idea of an ethics of death to reflection on the deaths of others as experienced by the living, we have undertaken to examine the deaths that all of us witness and involve ourselves in as members of the moral community. Death takes many forms. It comes to us through natural processes, such as disease, and through human action, such as killing. But in the processes whereby human beings come to death, decision making and questions of moral meaning are constantly present. Heart disease and cancer, for instance, are natural occurrences that can lead to death, but people make all kinds of decisions about what to do once they are handed a diagnosis: whether or not to treat, how aggressively to treat, and so on.[4] These may look like purely scientific questions, but medical science is actually providing information for deliberation and interpretation as well as treatment options: what is to be done with that information is a moral question. The physician who says to a patient, This is what we should do, is acting as a member of the moral community hoping to persuade another person with whom the physician is in relationship to act in such a way that the good of life might be preserved. The physician wants to see the patient flourish, which is to say that by taking one course of action over another the physician believes that the patient might continue to enjoy life and the many goods of life—friendship, aesthetic experience, bodily and psychological integrity, and so on. Ordinarily, reasonable persons want to avoid death—not only their own but the death of others—for as long as possible, since life is good in and of itself. There are many intrinsically good things in life, and death puts an end to those and grieves us with the pain of loss, which can be devastating and even at times unendurable. The pain of loss, which is part of the experience of death for the living, leads often to the conclusion that death is itself a great evil, but death can be thought of more neutrally, say, as a terminus in the life process, and it is known throughout nature among all life forms. Human beings can do things that bring about death in ways that challenge moral sensibilities and upset the possibility of human flourishing. This book investigates an ethics of death by examining those challenges.

In the pages ahead we examine such issues as suicide, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment, abortion, and war—all areas of life where death poses moral challenge. Each author comes at the issue of deciphering moral meaning in a different way. Dennis Cooley, a professor of philosophy and ethics at North Dakota State University (NDSU) and associate director of the Northern Plains Ethics Institute, has written on ethical issues at the end of life from the perspective of a philosopher. Lloyd Steffen, a professor of religion studies at Lehigh University, has also written on end-of-life issues, and he does so as an ethicist concerned about philosophical issues but also as a religion scholar who refers ethical issues to religious values and frameworks. We actually met in Salzburg, Austria, in 2008 at the sixth global Making Sense of Dying and Death conference, agreed to coedit the proceedings of that conference, which was published as Re-Imaging Death and Dying: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives, and then decided to pursue a new project—an interdisciplinary and dialogical inquiry into the ethics of death.[5] This book is the product of a two-year dialogue between a philosopher whose discipline is well defined and a religion scholar who works in a field rather than a discipline and who brings the perspectives of a philosopher of religion and ethicist to bear on a topic of importance in the study of religion: death.

From the beginning, dialogic engagement motivated this project. Both of us were committed to the idea that the book would be an exchange, a give-and-take, around ethical ideas involving the meaning of death for the living. Each author would provide background by laying out the ethical perspective to which he was committed, then address in an essay each of the topics taken up in individual chapters in the volume. At the close of the essays, each author would ask of the other person questions provoked by the essay, then each would respond and offer questions back. Much of what is found in this volume is a dialogue in which two scholars interrogate one another on topics of common interest but through different perspectives. The questions we ask of each other reflect differences in training and methodological commitment.

We undertook this project believing that scholars and students as well as more general readers would find this a valuable contribution to a cross-disciplinary discussion of issues related to the ethics of death. In the pages ahead, readers will encounter authors who are concerned to lay out how they go about analyzing ethical problems in light of theoretical commitments, and readers will discover quickly that different approaches are used in the examination of the moral questions at issue. The authors at times disagree with one another, sometimes over questions of analysis, sometimes in ethical outcomes. We ourselves found challenge in the other’s perspectives, essays, questions, and remarks. Readers may be interested to see what a philosopher wanted to know about religious attitudes and what sustains those attitudes in questions of life and death (and afterlife), as well as how a religion scholar presents a diversity of views from different religious traditions that may or may not provide clarity on particular philosophical questions. As we exchanged files via e-mail (and tried not to mix up or lose the latest version of a chapter), we found the ongoing conversation engaging, even fun at times, and both of us hope that in these pages readers will find a model for how to engage and inquire, push and disagree with civility and good will. There is no rancor in these pages, and neither of us engaged in critical inquiry of the other’s perspective with an eye toward criticizing for the sake of criticizing, as if that were the hallmark of critical thinking. Some ideas put forward in the pages ahead may surprise readers, but even controversial ideas are given a fair hearing and not rejected out of hand—we have tried to clarify issues and perspectives through the process of analysis and back-and-forth deliberation.

As a word of thanks, we want to express our gratitude for the global dying and death conference mentioned above that turns out to have been the true origin of this volume. This conference still meets yearly and is sponsored by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, with Dr. Rob Fisher and Dr. Nate Hinerman the primary organizers. We are also grateful for the support of Fortress Press throughout this project and to readers who offered helpful comments and suggestions that have improved what is offered in these pages.

Dennis Cooley would like to thank his department colleagues in the philosophy-humanities and the religious studies programs at NDSU and Catherine Cater, NDSU professor emeritus, who spent so much time discussing various positions and arguments with him and then kept him from making too many mistakes.

Lloyd Steffen would like to thank friends and scholars at Lehigh University, especially Kenneth Kraft, who provided a helpful assist on ethical issues in Buddhism, Dena Davis, who introduced him to the Jain practice of sallekhana, which finds its way into the suicide chapter, and Barbara Pavlock, for her instructive Latin lesson; and members of the ethics committee at St. Luke’s University Hospital in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania and colleagues at various conferences with whom he has discussed dying and death issues. He is, as always, grateful for the support of his spouse, Emmajane Finney, and his sons Nathan, Sam, and Will.

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Death is considered by some philosophers as a process rather than an event.↵

The first-person past-tense linguistic utterance to die is odd as well. I died is grammatically correct but philosophically contradictory. No one can coherently utter the words I died or I have died meaningfully in a literal way, although we use such expressions as I was so embarrassed that I just died or That joke just killed me as linguistic intensifiers.↵

The claim that people who have near-death experiences actually die overlooks that the individuals who have these experiences are near death. Near-death experiences, whatever they are empirically—and there is no reason to doubt them as experiences people have—are well termed as near death and are best associated with peculiarities in the dying process rather than with death or being dead.↵

Although the idea of such diseases as natural is made more complicated when they are caused by human action such as smoking or eating imprudently.↵

Here is the full publication information for the conference proceedings: Dennis R. Cooley and Lloyd Steffen, eds., Re-Imaging Death and Dying: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary, 2009). This e-book may be found at http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ebooks/re-imaging-death-and-dying.↵

1

Ethical Perspectives

Introduction

In all moral decision making, there are two necessary components: a value theory and a normative theory. The value theory tells us what things, including objects and properties, such as being pleased or being a living thing, have a worth that should be taken into account in some way when making a decision. Basically, values serve as the data in ethics. Normative theories, on the other hand, say how to use the data. Normative principles classify actions as morally right or wrong, or morally required, forbidden, or permissible. They also classify people, actions, and objects as good or bad. But the principles could not fulfill this function without values. As will be seen in what follows, some ethicists believe that an action is morally right because in performing the action, no moral agent was treated in an inappropriate way. In other words, everyone affected was respected for their intrinsic worth. So here value is found in being a person, and the normative principle states that we have to respect that value in order to do the right thing.

Below, we will develop normative principles we or others find useful in making moral decisions about death. We shall also develop a value theory that allows the normative theories from this chapter to be applied in theoretical and, more importantly, real-world situations.

Steffen

The question at the heart of ethics is this: Why do you do what you do?

This question may look simple, but consider all the other questions that it opens: What are our motives, our intentions, and our purposes? Why do we act one way rather than another? What goes into making a decision? Do we have to deliberate in a conscious reflective mode when we act or do our actions flow from something more basic and unreflective, as if the way we act is somehow a part of our personality, our habits and character? If what we do—our actions—reveals our character and character is built up over years of experience and interaction with others, what does it mean to say that what we do flows from decisions we make? Do we really deliberate over actions or do we act out of habit, almost out of moral instincts, and are we forced to hunker down and think things through only occasionally, when confronted for the first time with a really serious issue out of the ordinary?

And the questions continue. Can we change character—and why would we want to if we are feeling comfortable with our own sense of identity? Do we really aim at goodness in what we do? What role do emotions play in choosing how to act? What role does reason play in decision making, and what role does it play in decisions that seem to be grounded in emotion? Are reason and emotion really so different if both involve perceptions that entail judgments, evaluations, and interpretations of those things we perceive to be objects of fear, resentment, anger, or love? What authority do we try to serve when we act one way rather than another? Do we always try to choose the good thing to do, the best thing—and what is that, and how can we possibly know? Is the good action the one that promotes my interest, or is it the one that promotes the interests of my community, or of everyone taken altogether? Can we deceive ourselves about what is good so that sometimes we do something wrong, hurtful, or injurious to others or even ourselves while thinking that action is a good thing? Is being selfish or self-interested a good reason to act one way rather than another? Can I calculate goodness and make a decision by running the numbers? If I want no one else to enjoy the benefits I receive from some action, can the action be said to be good? Why do bad things happen to good people and why do good people sometimes do bad things? We can stop now with the questions. We have just started, but the questions go on and on.

The variety and breadth of the questions that arise in thinking about how we are to live well are what make ethics an intellectually demanding and even exciting arena of inquiry. It is worth noting at the outset, however, that ethics does not claim to be doing new things. New problems demanding ethical attention arise all the time, many of them created by technology or new political, social, or scientific advances. Kant never had to deal with a heart-lung machine and wonder when it might be justifiably turned off. Aristotle never had to contemplate a justification for a public policy on carbon emissions aimed at reversing global warming. These are our problems, not those of Kant or Aristotle, yet both Kant and Aristotle contemplated the meaning of ethical living and made contributions to moral philosophy that are still being used—and appreciated—today. Ethics adapts to address new issues and problems, but it is concerned with timeless issues that have preoccupied thoughtful people over the ages and probably before we even began thinking about ages and time, old issues such as the meaning of the good life and what is required to live life well.

Those old questions at the heart of moral inquiry may make the field of ethics look like it avoids innovation, which it does to a considerable extent, and they may lead the newcomer to the field to suspect that this is a subject area dominated by a lot of old fuddy-duddy philosophical types—probably male and privileged in one way or another—and from there it is an easy inference to the suspicion that ethics is boring. How could it not be if it is relying on the insights of thinkers who lived twenty-five-hundred years ago in the case of Aristotle or over two hundred years ago in the case of Kant? In a world where we expect change as rapidly as we expect to see a new advertisement proclaiming this year’s pair of jeans to be vastly superior to last year’s, the idea that we could benefit from philosophical thought about living well formulated in a faraway land two millennia ago seems itself far-fetched. But before stopping there, note that in this field, unlike many others, there are some actual proposals on the table for considering questions that, truth be told, really are of interest to just about everyone. In ethics, the question, What is it that makes life worth living? is a question worthy of consideration, and ethicists actually do answer it. When, at the end of this section, I share one of the most common answers ethicists offer, I hope that the reader who responds by saying That’s it? will also go on to say, Well, of course, but that just opens up a lot of questions.

What makes ethics interesting is not the answers but the questions—and the questions can be challenging. We cannot think about the topics that are the subject of this book—dying and death—and not realize that these topics raise hard questions. Dying and death are realities and prospects in life that have or will involve us all, and ethics reminds us that at the heart of these topics are real people in difficult, sometimes tragic situations. They often do not know what to do or what they should do, but decision making is inescapable. So ethics is going to prompt a series of questions: Why will people facing dying and death do what they do? How will they justify their actions? How will they present their positions so that we will agree with them and support them, or perhaps criticize them and even want to prevent them from enacting their decisions?

Before we enter into discussions and debate over the particular issues that will be addressed in this book—all those big and messy issues: abortion, capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, just to mention a few—we should pause to inquire about ethics and its resources.

Ethics and Morals

Ethics is a field of philosophy that inquires into the meaning of action and all that bears on reasons for action. Ethics has been described as the philosophical study of morality, with morality in this formulation pointing to behaviors—those things human beings actually do. In descriptive ethics, we take the pulse of the world and note how the world is filled with different kinds of behaviors, justifications, and systems of justification for those behaviors. In metaethics, philosophers analyze the nature of moral judgments and consider the adequacy of theoretical systems. And normative ethics, which will be the focus of this book, tries to establish which moral views are justifiable so that we can prescribe the good, right, and fitting thing to do, which one hopes will be a good action but which may sometimes be the least bad action.

In ethics we use prescriptive language, the kind of language physicians use when they direct a patient to take a medication three times a day: here is a prescribed action and this is what you ought to do. By saying that ethics uses prescriptive language—a language of shoulds and oughts—we are also saying that our aim is to arrive at a position where we can recommend some action to others as the best thing to do, just as the physician will say, Take one pill three times a day—do not skip a day or take three pills at a time.

To begin an ethics book by talking about prescriptive language may seem odd and out of step, especially when the view is widespread that ethics is really about opinions and the need to respect the diversity of opinion. We are rightly suspicious of a judgmentalism that can reveal ethnocentrism or, worse, cultural imperialism. We have learned the importance of toleration, respect for diversity, and the value of being nonjudgmental toward other viewpoints, all good things we could actually show to be good ethically speaking. Ethics, however, is filled with oughts and shoulds that commend certain kinds of actions and attitudes, such things as these: we ought not to tell lies, we should be kind to others and respect other persons, we ought to be tolerant of a position we disagree with but recognize as reasonable, and we ought not be judgmental in this situation for the reason that the facts are not all clear or known. Although normative ethics involves more than compiling a list of shoulds and oughts, it is still inescapable that analyzing situations and problems to establish what one should do is very much its aim. Moral inquiry pushes us to discern, establish, and then commend to others why we ought to do this rather than that. We are looking for reasons, the best reasons—which means the most justifiable reasons—for our actions, and what we determine to be the best, most fitting, and right thing to do is what we should do and others ought to do as well. It’s only logical.

Normative applied ethics seeks to resolve particular moral issues, and this book is about particular moral issues related to very specific topics familiar to everyone—abortion, suicide, euthanasia, war. What should one recommend in thinking about physician-assisted suicide or abortion or war? Are such activities allowable, not allowable, sometimes allowable? How do we know? How do we determine when such an activity is justified and, if so, under what circumstances? When we ask what is right and what is wrong, we are applying normative ethics to particular issues, and that is our purpose in the pages to follow. Readers may disagree with us, but when they do so, their disagreements should be based on an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the positions being offered. Disagreements should be welcomed if one encounters better arguments or questions that either were not raised or still are not satisfactorily answered. The work of applied normative ethics requires engagement with problems and with people who are confronting problems. Those who would study ethics and engage the problems that people face need to bring to their work of critical analysis clarity, constant questioning, and the envisioning of possible answers or imaginative solutions.

Ethics Education

We learn to be moral persons by all that intersects with us in our relations with others. We are schooled in what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. We learn to be moral persons from our parents and families, our friends, our schools and religious institutions, groups we join, the books we read, and the people who become friends, critics, or even enemies. We are educated into the moral life and then come into the study of ethics already formed as moral persons. The task of ethics is not to provide the moral education we associate with behavioral training, but ethics education is itself a good thing in the moral sense of good. For ethics education requires that we engage practical reason to consider action and justifications, values and behaviors, and engage processes whereby people create moral meaning. This book is an ethics education project, and as such it is meant to benefit those who will make use of it, for it is designed to contribute to the efforts each of us makes to live well in relation to both ourselves and others. The authors of this book both believe that ethics is important to the life projects every one of us undertakes. This book, then, as an exercise in ethics education, is a contribution to thinking about the good life (and perhaps, given our subject matter, a good death).

Ethics education—education into ethical thinking and reflection—is itself an activity that can be subjected to ethical critique. Ethics education is what allows us to construct an argument against the position of the reader who, in reflecting on the claim made just a short time ago that ethics might be boring, concluded that the study of ethics must therefore be a waste of time. A response to that position would point out that ethics education contributes to life projects aimed at living fulfilled and meaningful lives, and engaging with the meaning of one’s own life is the central task we face as moral persons. Individuals suffering from psychological distresses that prevent them from finding pleasure and enjoying life—Freud called such states anhedonia—might of course find such a task boring, but we might be concerned about such persons, make judgments about their condition, and wish to help them reinvigorate their existential passion for living. Our life projects are not boring, and boring is not bad in any case: persons who have faced an adrenaline rush caused by the possibility of mayhem or a threat to their lives could probably speak eloquently to the issue. Let us dwell there no further and turn instead to ethics education as it contributes to life projects aimed at life lived well and meaningfully.

We derive several benefits from ethics education, the first of which is that we increase our sensitivity to the needs and desires of others. That increase in sensitivity, which also represents increasing self-awareness, is made possible by learning to identify the various kinds of ethical issues that arise in the context of our relationships with self and others. Ethics education helps people learn about and identify a wide variety of such issues, and then provides some of the tools for analyzing those issues and considering responses. Involving oneself in an ethics case study, for instance, results in finding out about moral complexity and the many options for action people face when confronting problems and dilemmas. As life itself is complex, so too is the moral life. Deliberating on options for action increases our own awareness of the problems both we and others will face. Becoming sensitized to complexity may help us identify moral issues however they arise—in our personal life, in work or professional life, even in our downtime as we grapple with moral issues at the heart of the literature we read, the films we watch, and the video games we play. Moral complexity is central to any form of entertainment we judge to be challenging and ennobling, and grappling with that complexity contributes to our desire to live well.

Another benefit of ethics education is learning about ethical theories and systems of analysis. All ethical theories have strengths and weaknesses. Learning to use these theories and apply them to real-life issues makes them resources for ethical living. Ethical theories provide action guides that affect decision making. They articulate principles that people actually use to justify acting one way rather than another. I shall discuss ethical theories shortly.

Ethics education benefits us by helping us analyze the moral meaning of everyday activities. The more educated we are in ethics, the more able we are to apply theory to practice and refer actions to theory. As we apply the best in these theories to our everyday lives, we grow more confident of our moral reasoning abilities and powers. Ethics education seeks to nurture the processes of reasoning that lead us to accept ethical principles and then apply those principles to real-life situations and problems.

Finally, we must note that the study of ethics—this process of ethics education, of which this book is a part—may not lead us to consensus with others about what to do on so thorny a problem as, say, abortion. Yet the increase in ethical awareness may alter ethical behavior. This cannot always be assured, but ethics often presents situations other people confront even though they are not part of our personal experience. By making us think about the principles or action guides relevant to a particular situation, we may be shaped in new ways in our own thinking about how we would or should act. Ethics education is, after all, education. As such, the acquisition of ethical knowledge and understanding may enlarge our sense of empathy for those facing complex situations. That increase in empathy contributes to the possibility that what we learn will affect not only our understanding but our decision making and our behavior. Learning changes people. Going from not knowing to knowing, and from not understanding to now understanding, alters outlook, framework, and awareness. The reader should expect to be changed by studying ethics, even if he or she already knows that it is good to be kind to people and wrong to lie. Ethics education does not so much change basic moral commitments and orientation as it does increase understanding, deepen awareness, and expand empathy toward others. By sensitizing us to moral dynamics and ethical nuance, such education affects how we think, and it may very well affect how we live.

Ethical Theories

Ethics education presents various ethical theories for our consideration. These theories create a structure within which we can analyze moral issues and problems, and they provide working tools in the form of action guides or principles that we can apply to behavioral dilemmas. Ethical theories make it possible to sort out what is at issue when moral questions and perplexities arise. They help us propose options for action so that we might do what is good, right, and fitting. Theories, in other words, can help us determine the reasons to do one thing rather than another when faced with a choice. Ethical theories help determine why people do what they do, and they also provide the assessment tools to determine if those decisions, either proposed or already accomplished, are, or were, the best thing to do.

We shall examine four ethical theories that are worthy of attention because they are commonly discussed and studied by those who work in ethics. More importantly, however, these theories provide the ethics handles that people actually use in their everyday lives. The theories claim reason as their foundational authority. Deontological ethics, utilitarian ethics, virtue ethics (axiological ethics), and natural law ethics all claim to be reasonable and reason-based ethical structures. This distinguishes them from religiously based ethics, which, however reasonable they may be, do not look primarily to reason but to transcendent revelation and divine command as their source of authority.

Deontological Ethics or Kantianism

Deontological ethics is associated with the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher who formulated two versions of what he called the Categorical Imperative. Kant’s ethics proposes a formal prescription for discerning what is and what is not the good, fitting, and right thing to do, and he put it this way:

Act on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.[1]

These two principles are the core of Kant’s deontological or duty-based ethic. The ethic articulates two principles that establish the formal reasons for making decisions and then acting one way rather than another. The first principle is often called the universalizability principle, the second the respect for persons principle.

When contemplating an action under the universalizability principle, the Kantian constructs a maxim, or rule, and applies it universally. That means that if the rule is good for me to do, as in Cheating is a morally good action because it contributes to many good results not only for myself but for others, it is good for everyone else to do. My thinking might go like this: if I cheat I will improve my grade and help myself get into medical school; and if I get into medical school and become a doctor, many good things will accrue to me and those I will help as a doctor. The benefits look to be incalculable. Therefore cheating is a good thing, a morally good action as our maxim or rule states.

The principle of universalizability operates by taking the rule one has devised and making it universally applicable, like a law of nature as Kant put it. Perhaps Kant had in mind gravity, which is a constant, so when we talk about the law of gravity, we do not say it applies to left-handed people one way and to blue-eyed people another, but to everyone everywhere in a similar way. The rule about cheating, which is akin now to the law of gravity in that it applies to everyone, specifies a morally good action if it is good for everyone. If, however, it is not good for you to do it, or for everyone to do, then it is not something that I should do. In fact, if I apply the rule and find out that it will not apply universally, I must conclude that it is not good for anyone to do. That is how we identify under the rule of universalizability an immoral or wrongful act. What is immoral is whatever fails to pass the universalizability test. So if I am going to justify cheating, I can only do so by acknowledging the goodness of cheating for everyone, thereby authorizing everyone who is similarly situated to cheat.

But this will not work. The people who contemplate cheating do so because they want to increase their advantage over others, but the universalizability principle exposes a contradiction. On the one hand, I want to cheat to gain advantage for myself over others. On the other hand, if I universalize a rule that endorses cheating so that everyone is entitled to cheat, I am allowing others to seek their advantage by cheating me, and that makes no sense. A person who decided to cheat, therefore could not reasonably want someone else to cheat, for by allowing someone else to cheat the original advantage to be gained over others by means of cheating is lost.

The universalizability principle insists that this is how ethical determinations must be made. In the case of cheating, I have to admit that I do not want others to do what I want to do because cheating only works if other people are honest and do not cheat. In the logic of cheating, one gains the advantage only if others refuse to cheat. When we analyze cheating, the point of the behavior is to gain over others an unfair advantage, but reasonable people would not want others to take advantage of them in this way. If people do not want to be taken advantage of by others, then, on Kant’s viewpoint, neither should they act in a way that allows them to receive an unfair advantage. This analysis shows that cheating fails the test of universalizability, and that is why cheating, for Kant, is wrong.

On the principle of universalizability, one ought not to cheat. And on the second respect for persons principle, one ought not cheat because by doing so one is treating all those who do not cheat disrespectfully. They are actually harmed by the cheater because they are being put in a position of inequality and disadvantage—the playing field is not level, the deck is stacked and the cards are marked. When this happens, the noncheater is actually harmed by the cheater who treats others unjustly by taking unfair advantage of them. To cheat is to treat others as a means to an end. The cheater seeks to promote his or her own benefit and create through the act of cheating a situation in which all who do not cheat are disadvantaged. Cheaters act as if the rules that establish a level playing field do not apply to them, and they act as if they were superior to others. Who would willingly agree to have his or her own dignity assaulted as the victim of such an injustice? When someone cheats, those who do not cheat are being treated disrespectfully.

Utilitarianism/Consequentialism

In Kant’s ethic, no attention is paid to the consequences of an action. Attention is paid to intentions—the good will. The focus of the ethic is on motives and intentions because they are under rational control, and reason tells us that we can never truly foresee the consequences of our actions. One wants to do what reason bids, to do one’s duty and obey the moral law as formulated in the Categorical Imperative. Another reason-based Enlightenment ethic, utilitarianism, does pay attention to consequences and bases determinations of what is and what is not moral solely on the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism, associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, proposes that what is moral—what is good, right, and fitting to do—is what reason is able to establish as the best possible anticipated or foreseen consequences of an action for the greatest number of people. That is the sole determinant of moral meaning. The content of the principle of utility (usefulness) may be defined as happiness or pleasure, or even in Christian situation ethics as the act that shows itself to be the most loving, but moral meaning is always the result of assessing consequences. Although utilitarian consequentialism does not pay attention to intentions or principles of human dignity, it does understand human beings, because they possess the rational capacity, to have standards of happiness above those of other animals—better a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig, John Stuart Mill famously said, but the ethic determines moral meaning by rational calculation. If a utilitarian were to consider intentions, as in saying that physicians should intend to show kindness as they approach patient care, the showing of kindness would not be intrinsically valuable but would be justified as the best way to maximize the good of physician care.

Both Kantianism and utilitarianism are Enlightenment-era ethics grounded in reason, but they are not thereby compatible with one another. They engage reason in service to two quite divergent purposes. Both seek to provide a means for understanding good action and provide the tools for realizing what is good and morally appropriate, but they have no truck with one another. If one is a consequentialist, one is by necessity not a deontologist. Many students of ethics decide between these options, choosing which side of this ethical divide they will commit to, so we have deontologists—Kantians—on one side, utilitarian consequentialists on the other. They often arrive at the same conclusions about what to do in a particular situation. That student cheating on a test to get into medical school does not fare well on the utilitarian ethic any more than on the deontological side, since a consequentialist would question how much good comes from allowing a student to enter the medical profession when he or she is not in command of the body of knowledge required in physician training. Consider all the harm such an individual could do to patients and to the profession, and we can ask, Would I, or any reasonable person, want to have as a physician someone who cheated to get through medical school?

The consequentialist considers the greatest good for the greatest number—all those prospective patients who might one day have a doctor who cheated his or her way into the profession and who, if found out, would bring disgrace to the profession. The individual who cuts corners in study may be revealing a propensity to harm future patients by similar acts of dishonesty. A utilitarian, then, would on consequentialist grounds object to the cheating as well, though for different reasons than the Kantian. Consequentialism must not be thought