I'm pretty sure the standard reply is, "Sometimes there is no right answer." These are rules for classifying actions as moral or immoral, not rules that describe the behavior of an always moral actor. If every possible action (including inaction) is immoral, then your actions are immoral.

The problem with unbreakable rules is that you're only allowed to have one.

I second the question. Is there a standard reply in deontology?

In my experience, deontologists treat this as a feature rather than a bug. The absolute necessity that the rules never conflict is a constraint, which, they think, helps them to deduce what those rules must be.

Is there a standard reply in deontology? The standard reply of a consequentialist, of course, is the utility function.

I don't know whether there is a standard reply in deontology but the appropriate reply is using a function equivalent to the utility function by a consequentialist.

• Take the concept of the utility function
• Rename it to something suitably impressive (but I'll just go with the bland 'deontological decision function')
• Replace 'utility of this decision' with 'rightness of this decision'.
• A primitive utility function may include a term for 'my bank balance'. A primitive deontological decision function would have a term for "Not telling a lie".

Obviously, the 'deontological decision function' sacrifices the unbreakable criteria. This is appropriate when making a fair comparison between consequentialist and deontological decisions. The utility function sacrifice absolute reliance on one particular desideratum in order to accommodate all the others.

For the sake of completeness I'll iterate what seem to be the only possible approaches that actually allow having multiple unbreakable rules.

1) Only allow unbreakable rules that never contradict each other. This involves making the rules more complex. For example:

• Always rescue puppies.
• Never lie, except if it saves the life of puppies.
• Do not commit adultery unless you are prostituting yourself in order to donate to the (R)SPCA.

Such a system is results in an approximation of the continuous deontological decision function.

2) Just have a single unbreakable meta-rule. For example:

• Always do the most right thing in the deontological decision function. Or,
• Always maximise utility.

These responses amount to "Hack a deontological system with unbreakable rules to work around the spirit of either 'unbreakable' or 'deontological'" and I include them only for completeness. My main point is that a deontological approach can be practically the same as the consequentialist 'utility function' approach.

This assumes that deontological rules must be unbreakable, doesn't it? That might be true for Kantian deontology, but probably isn't true for Rossian deontology or situation ethics.

We can, for instance imagine a deontological system (moral code) with three rules A, B and C. Where A and B conflict, B takes precedence; where B and C conflict, C takes precedence; where C and A conflict, A takes precedence (and there are no circumstances where rules A, B and C all apply together). That would give a clear moral conclusion in all cases, but with no unbreakable rules at all.

True, there would be a complex, messy rule which combines A, B and C in such a way as not to create exceptions, but the messy rule is not itself part of the moral code, so it is not strictly a deontological rule.

All unbreakable rules in a deontological moral system are negative; you would never have one saying "protect the innocent." But you can have "don't lie" and "don't murder" and so on.

And no, if you answer the question truthfully, failing to protect the innocent, they don't count that as murdering (unless there was some other choice that you could have made without either lying or failing to protect the person.)