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What is threshold deontology, and isn’t it just consequentialism with extra steps?

Deepa Kartha Fellow
· 4 replies
Moral theoriesAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticIndianKantianismImmanuel Kant#catastrophe#constraints#emergency-powers#threshold-deontology
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In my constitutional law seminar we discussed whether rights can ever be suspended in an emergency. I mentioned the ADM Jabalpur case from 1976, when our Supreme Court accepted that even the right to life could not be enforced during the Emergency, a decision now almost universally regarded as a disgrace and later expressly disowned by the Court itself. Someone then said that most philosophers today are “threshold deontologists” anyway, so rights always have a breaking point.

I did not know the term. As far as I can tell, it means: some acts are forbidden whatever the gain, until the stakes become catastrophic, at which point the prohibition gives way.

My questions:

  1. Is that an accurate summary?
  2. Isn't this just consequentialism that refuses to admit it? If enough lives can override the constraint, it seems the numbers were in charge all along.
  3. Who decides where the threshold is, and is there any principled way to set it?

I care about this practically. If our constitution's rights are threshold rights, then the argument in every emergency will be that we have crossed the line.

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Henrike Vogel

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your summary is accurate, Deepa. On your second question, the answer is no, for three reasons.

    Below the threshold, nothing is traded. A consequentialist will kill one to save two. The threshold deontologist will not kill one to save two, or ten, or a hundred. For the vast range of real cases, the constraint is absolute in practice.

    The constraint stays agent-relative. Even near the threshold, what matters is that you would be doing the forbidden thing. Many threshold views also hold that the threshold is very much higher for intentionally harming someone than for failing to help.

    Crossing it leaves a remainder. Many threshold deontologists say that even when you rightly violate a constraint to avert catastrophe, you have still wronged someone, and owe something for it. A consequentialist has nothing left over once the sum is done.

    On your third question you have found the real weakness. No one has given a principled formula for the threshold. Critics such as Larry Alexander have pressed this hard, and absolutists, in the tradition of Kant's own rigour, say it shows the threshold is an arbitrary concession. Defenders reply that moral judgement does not need a formula, any more than a doctor needs one to tell a crisis from a bad day.

    Helpful · 1

Other answers

  1. Choi Byeong-hun

    Fellow

    The military version of your question is the ticking-bomb case, and the law's answer to it is clear. The Convention against Torture says that no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, including war or threat of war, may be invoked as a justification for torture. That is an absolute rule written precisely because everyone knew threshold arguments would be made in every emergency. The drafters decided that the threshold is too easy to claim and too hard to check.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Thandeka Mokoena

    Fellow

    Our constitution in South Africa does something interesting with your worry. Most rights can be limited, but only if the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, and the state must show this. And in a declared state of emergency, a list of rights, or parts of them, is non-derogable, including the right to life and dignity and freedom from torture. So it is a threshold system for most rights and an absolute one for a core. That may be the honest institutional form of Henrike's answer.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Deepa Kartha

      Fellow

      Thandeka's two-tier structure is exactly what ADM Jabalpur lacked: there was no core that could not be suspended. Henrike's point about remainder answers my second question for me. A consequentialist who saves the many has nothing to apologise for. A threshold deontologist does, and that difference shows up in how a state should behave after an emergency.