This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics.
Ross's attempt to argue that intuition is a source of moral knowledge was, however, heavily criticized, and by the end of the 20th century, Kantian ways of thinking especially the prohibition on using a person as a means rather than an end were again providing the basis for the deontological views that were most widely discussed among philosophers.
Rather, an agent is permitted on deontological views to give special attention to her own projects and interests.
Many ethical arguments against cloning mammoths are rooted in either the same utilitarian or deontological views that promote it.
But once Moore abandoned this definition, he had to treat the consequentialist principle as synthetic and did so in Ethics, which allowed that deontological views that say some acts that maximize the good are wrong are perfectly coherent.
On many deontological views, particularly Kantian ones, the significance of moral impartiality is seen as arising from the fact that a core role is given to the concept of universalizability (Gert 1998; Hare 1981; Kant 1964 [1785]; Kohlberg 1979).
Hence, dogmatic intuitional morality, which in the Methods is rather awkwardly taken to cover both more deontological views and non-hedonistic teleological ones, on the ground that the latter tend to construe virtue in the same fashion as the simply the done thing, whatever the consequences.
The sanctity of life view is thus a deontological position on suicide.
By contrast, the view that the aim of belief is simply to believe in the right way, regardless of whether that "right way" reliably leads to signficant truth, looks like the analogue of a deontological position in ethics that valorizes the intentional following of right principles rather than the achievement of some aim external to the act itself.
