This position is summed up and underlined in the statement, now consolidated in deontological standards, that 'the physician must not undertake diagnostic and/or therapeutic activity without the acquisition of the patient's explicit and informed consent'.
Certainly, the deontological standards which provide for communication as a moment of 'exclusive technical-professional reflection which is reserved and confidential and aims at correcting the procedure and modifying organizational practices and professional behaviour' may not be sufficient to reassure physicians with regard to the risks of litigation.
(It is a noteworthy feature of our virtue and vice vocabulary that, although our list of generally recognised virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of vice terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceeding anything that anyone who thinks in terms of standard deontological rules has ever come up with.
There is little in Chan literature that could plausibly warrant positioning Chan wholly within any one of the standard Western categories of consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethics, or, for that matter, within such alternatives as communitarian or care ethics.
The feeling of deontological guilt occurs in individuals who, violating moral standards of the society in which they live, wonder how they were capable of such an attitude.
The principal difference between them is that deontological theories do not appeal to value considerations in establishing ethical standards, while teleological theories do.
Also known as consequentialist ethics, it is opposed to deontological ethics (from the Greek deon, "duty"), which holds that the basic standards for an action's being morally right are independent of the good or evil generated.
Deontological theories use the concept of their inherent rightness in establishing such standards, while teleological theories consider the goodness or value brought into being by actions as the principal criterion of their ethical value.
Threshold deontology (of either stripe) is an attempt to save deontological morality from the charge of fanaticism.
See also deontological ethics.
Modern ethics, especially since the 18th-century German deontological philosophy of Immanuel Kant, has been deeply divided between a form of teleological ethics (utilitarianism) and deontological theories.
