ources [b50] [b51] There are absolute moral rules and duties to follow (regardless of the consequences). They can be deduced by reasoning about the objective reality. Kantianism: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Meaning: only follow rules that you are ok with everyone else following. For example, you might conclude that it is wrong to lie no matter what the consequences are. Kant certainly thought so, but many have disagreed with him. Deontological thinking comes out of the same era as Natural Rights thinking, and they are rooted in similar assumptions about the world. Deontology is often associated with Kant, because at that time, he gave us one of the first systematic, or comprehensive, interpretations of those ideas in a fully-fledged ethical framework. But deontological ethics does not need to be based on Kant’s ethics, and many ethicists working in the deontological tradition have suggested that reasoning about the objective reality should lead us to derive different sets of principles.
This makes me think of how different this is from the Confucian virtue framework we read earlier. Deontology says: follow the rule, no matter what. It doesn't care who you are as a person. The Confucian approach is almost the opposite — it's about becoming a certain kind of person through repeated rituals (ancestor rites, tea, music), so that good action comes naturally. On social media, where rules are so easy to game and contexts keep shifting, I wonder if "just follow the universal law" actually trains us to be rule-following performers rather than people of good character.