Deontology: This week I want you to come up with a maxim (a rule) that you think would make the world a better place if everyone were to follow it. And then give yourself a duty to obey this rule between now and when we next meet. What was your rule? Were you able to keep your duty to yourself to obey it? How was this experience different from the “brief habit” experiment from last week? Can you imagine ordering your life with other rules that you come up with in this way?

Examples of possible rules include: giving other people a turn to speak at equal length to you when having a conversation; bringing a bag with you every time you go to the grocery store; picking up three pieces of litter every day to throw in the trash; refraining from purchasing things that you do not need.  

If you’d like more inspiration, here’s 18^th century philosopher Immanuel Kant on the topic:

"Consider the question: May I when in difficulties make a promise that I intend not to keep? The question obviously has two meanings: is it profitable for me to make a false promise? Does it conform to duty to make a false promise? No doubt it often is profitable to me, but not as often as you might think…

Obviously the false promise isn’t made profitable by its merely removing me from my present difficulties; I have to think about whether it will in the long run cause more trouble than it saves in the present.

Even with all my supposed cleverness, the consequences can’t be so easily predicted. People’s loss of trust in me might be far more worse than the trouble I am now trying to avoid, and it is hard to tell whether it mightn’t be more profitable to act according to a universal rule not ever to make a promise that I don’t intend to keep.

But I quickly come to see that such a maxim is based only on fear of consequences. Being truthful from duty is an entirely different thing from being truthful out of fear of bad consequences…

How can I know whether a deceitful promise is consistent with duty? The shortest way to go about finding out is also the surest. It is to ask myself: Would I be content for my maxim (of getting out of a difficulty through a false promise) to hold as a universal law, for myself as well as for others? ·That is tantamount to asking·: Could I say to myself that anyone may make a false promise when they are in a difficulty that they can’t get out of in any other way? …Such a law would result in there being no promises at all, because it would be pointless to offer stories about my future actions to people who wouldn’t believe me; or if they carelessly did believe me and were taken in ·by my promise·, would pay me back in my own coin. Thus my maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law."