Deontology Violates the Formula of Universal Law or Something in the Vicinity

Those who live in glass formulas of universal law shouldn't throw accusations of violating the formula of universal law

Deontologists love to accuse us valiant and brave defenders of utilitarianism—unapologetic speakers of hard truths like that one should kill one person and harvest their organs to save five—of violating the formula of universal law.

The FUL (formula of universal law) prescribes that one not act on maxims that could not be willed to be a universal law. A maxim is something like the principle behind an act or the reason to take the act—it’s a bit confusing, though Kantians have a lot to say about this. In fact, the way that deontology—albeit only the moderate kind, though that’s the only remotely plausible kind—violates the FUL is so egregious and entails the violation of other plausible principles that it is a knockdown objection to deontology, in my mind, even though the full on FUL (pun intended) is implausible.

Here’s something that almost certainly violates the FUL; taking an action if and only if taking that action in identical situations—and other situations where the action is structurally similar but strictly more preferable—is not universally followed. For example, if a person said that you should donate to charity, but only if that doesn’t cause other cross-world twins to donate to charity, that would seemingly be an egregious violation of the categorical imperative—especially if those charities are strictly better than yours.

If you have a good reason to do X, then others in a relevantly similar situation have good reason to do X. If so, then your action inducing others to do X counts in favor of it. If there’s an action that’s only worth taking of taking it in relevantly similar circumstances does not become a universal law, then surely that’s an egregious violation of the FUL.

But deontology has to deny this—at least if it’s moderate. For those who need a refresher, moderate deontology says that wrong acts are worth taking if they have sufficiently good outcomes, but the outcomes need to be very good. For instance, a moderate deontologist would say that one should kill one person to save the world but not to save five people.

Suppose that the deontologist says that you should kill one person to save 100 or more people. Now suppose that there are three rings of people, the first of which has 1 person, the second of which has 12, and the third of which has 144. Each of the people is paired off with 12 of the people in the circle outside of them—so the person in the first circle is paired with all 12 people in the second circle and each of the people in the second circle is paired with 12 people in the third circle.

Each person in circles one and two has two options. The first is to kill one person. The second is to do nothing in which case the people in the circle outside of them will be given the same options they were given. The second option is called buckpassing (I’m actually writing a paper about a similar idea). The people in the third circle have no option but to kill, if the buck keeps getting passed until it reaches them.

Suppose that the person in the first circle is deciding what to do. It seems that they should kill if and only if the people in the second circle will buckpass. After all, if the people in the second circle will buckpass, then the first person’s inaction will lead to 144 deaths—but one should kill if the alternative is over 100 deaths.

But wait a minute. On this account, the people in the second circle shouldn’t pass the buck—after all, their passing the buck only leads to twelve additional deaths. Thus, the end result is that the person in circle one should pass the buck only if the people in circle 2 don’t pass the buck, which would be the wrong thing to do. Bizarrely, the deontologist holds that the people in circle 2’s doing the wrong thing counts in favor of buckpassing. Thus, deontologists must hold that the fact that an action causes other people to act wrongly counts in favor of it—it makes it better than it would have otherwise been. This result seems crazy to me, and I think to most people.

I’ve pointed out this worry before. But it seems that there’s a new worry in the vicinity relating to the formula of universal law. The resultant view says that you should buckpass, but only if the rule “kill if the alternative is more than 100 deaths,” doesn’t become a universal law. The deontologist should only do the action if it induces others not to act like they did. But this seems to go against the very spirit of the formula of universal law, and to be wildly unintuitive. If you have a good reason to do something, and others follow along, that should count in favor of the act, not against it. There should not be any acts that are worth taking but only if they don’t cause others to act like you. The deontologist who passes the buck initially should feel deep regret if the rule “buckpass when it would cause under 100 deaths” becomes a universal law.

Thus, defenders of the formula of universal law have been barking up the wrong tree. It’s really deontologists who violate it.