Dr Gerald Lang: Saving the Emperor: Deontology and Defence

Event details

Speaker(s): Dr Gerald Lang, University of Leeds

The ‘paradox of deontology’ challenges deontology by asking why it does not sanction the minimization of rights violations overall in situations where at least some violations are unavoidable. An influential reply is to insist that each individual’s inviolability is boosted if it is impermissible to sacrifice them for the sake of the many. But this line of argument needs to do more to defend inviolability against rival measures of moral standing such as saveability, and it should also have something to say about the enforceability of our rights. These two problems are tackled by outlining a theory of ‘defence-based inviolability’, which injects defensive theory into the foundations of deontology.