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This chapter discusses moderate (or threshold) deontology, its critique, and possible responses. Deontological theories prioritize values such as autonomy, human dignity, and keeping one's promises over the promotion of good outcomes. In prohibiting the infliction of harm on other people, they resort to distinctions such as that between actively doing harm and merely allowing it, and between intending to do harm and merely foreseeing it. Moderate deontology holds that constraints (and options) have thresholds. A constraint may be overridden for the sake of furthering good outcomes or avoiding bad ones if enough good (or bad) is at stake; and an option not to promote the good may be overridden for the sake of attaining enough good or avoiding enough bad. The chapter analyzes the main critiques leveled against deontology in general and moderate deontology in particular. It concludes that threshold constraints (and options) are an indispensable part of any acceptable factoral moral theory, but that threshold deontology suffers from a lack of methodological rigor and precision.

Ordinary morality tells us that we ought (not) to act in certain ways at all. Killing an innocent person would be wrong even if it led to preventing the death of several others. This seems puzzling, because it requires an agent to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways, even if by violating that requirement she could achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction that she is required to heed. This essay focuses on the obligation to keep one’s promises, and explains the reasons for keeping one’s promises and for seeing to it that others keep theirs. In explaining the structure of reasons, the paper argues that while promising is subject to an agent-centered restriction, there is no puzzle. Taking a lead from promising, the paper argues that agent-centered restrictions on killing (or harming) others aren’t puzzling either, but they are less potent than some deontological accounts maintain.〉

Deontological views in ethics have been thought by many recent commentators to face ‘the paradox of deontology’. The way to resolve the paradox is simply to see the diversity of the roles that our agency can play, and hence the diversity of our reasons. But systematic moral thinkers such as Kantians are not always hospitable to ‘untidy’ thoughts about diversity, even when, as in this case, such untidiness crucially helps their cause; they have also displayed a tendency, which we can trace in Kant himself, to look for ways of complicating the story in directions that are at best of dubious help to them.