Axiology, Deontics, and the Telic Question

A better framing of the normative landscape

The standard way of thinking about ethics distinguishes axiological questions (about value) from deontic ones (about right action). On this way of carving things up, it’s the deontic question that’s central to ethical debates—after all, a non-consequentialist could agree with a consequentialist about which action results in the best outcome, yet disagree about which action is right. So the axiological question is clearly insufficient.

I don’t like this framing, because—while I agree that axiology is insufficient—I also think the deontic question is overrated. Two big reasons I think it’s a bad question to focus on:

(1) It leads people to fixate on minimal permissibility (or avoiding blameworthiness), rather than thinking about what’s most worth doing (or the ought of most reason). This implicitly encourages reactive over goal-directed ethics, which is a huge moral mistake (even if it is a “permissible” one).

(2) It skips over, or implicitly conflates, the crucial distinction between the correct moral goals and the instrumentally rational way to pursue them. Most philosophers are very bad at thinking about consequentialism due to their failure to attend to this distinction. (For example, they’ll take deontic intuitions about cases like Transplant to undermine the utilitarian account of what matters, when it’s far more plausible to instead take them to undermine Naïve Instrumentalism as an account of instrumental rationality.)

The unreflective assumption of naive instrumentalism also makes many philosophers bad at applied ethics. They’ll claim that a well-meaning scammer, terrorist, or religious inquisitor has “respectable philosophical arguments” (i.e., for consequentialism) “on their side.” A better framing of the normative landscape would bring out more clearly why this is not true.

A Better Frame

Instead of dividing ethics into axiological and deontic questions, we should divide it into telic and decision-theoretic ones.

The telic question is just the question of what is worth caring about, or what our moral ends (desires/preferences) should be. As I explain in Deontology and Preferability, there’s no conceptual barrier to giving a deontological answer to the telic question.¹ The disagreement between consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists can be understood in terms of the diverging answers they offer to the telic question. (The question also highlights interesting points of intra-camp disagreement, e.g. between quiet vs robust deontology, and whether virtue ethicists see virtue as a goal to be achieved or rather as a lens through which we can better perceive the correct moral goals, where the latter needn’t inherently involve virtue at all.)

There’s then a distinct decision-theoretic question of how to wisely pursue the correct moral ends, whatever they turn out to be. This question is especially widely neglected, because extant “decision theory”—as pursued by philosophers to date—is almost entirely ideal theory, with very little to say about how fallible humans could best pursue their goals. We need to develop non-ideal decision theory to guide human ethics. (I’m pretty sure that naive instrumentalism is not the answer; non-ideal decision theory will presumably give more weight to generally-reliable heuristics and good judgment with numbers.)

This is the core of the framework that Beyond Right and Wrong will develop in depth.

Conclusion

The standard distinction between axiological vs deontic questions is not the best way to think about ethics. It’s fine to ask axiological and deontic questions, of course. But if this distinction provides the lens through which you view the normative landscape, your view is likely to end up distorted (in ways explained above). You’ll think more clearly, and better identify the most pressing questions in ethical theory, if you instead view the moral landscape through the distinct lenses of the telic and decision-theoretic questions. First ask what, in theory, we should want (the telic question); and then how, in practice, to pursue it (the decision-theoretic question). The combination may yield a kind of “deontic” answer, but in a way that’s much more illuminating than you’ll find via orthodox ethical theory.²

Indeed, for any students hoping to become better moral philosophers, my #1 piece of advice would be to “switch lenses” in this way. I can’t think of any other comparably simple “fix” that can so quickly improve the clarity of your ethical theorizing.

1. It just turns out to be substantively implausible, as my New Paradox of Deontology brings out.

2. For example, you’ll more immediately understand why various putative objections—from “cluelessness” to the “self-sacrifice” objection—aren’t real objections. (A real objection to a moral theory must cast doubt on either its answer to the telic question or its answer to the decision-theoretic question. Many concerns that people currently think of as “objections to utilitarianism” do neither, and so aren’t truth-indicative.)