Deontology in Contemporary Applied Ethics

Deontological concepts, and Kantian ones especially, remain among the most widely used moral vocabularies in contemporary applied ethics, often operating alongside rather than in place of consequentialist reasoning. In bioethics, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics, first published in 1979 and now in its eighth edition, makes "respect for autonomy" one of its four foundational mid-level principles, a concept with clear Kantian roots in the idea that rational agents must be permitted to set and pursue their own ends and cannot be treated as mere objects of others' beneficent intentions, a principle that underwrites the doctrine of informed consent central to modern research ethics and clinical practice, itself codified in international instruments such as the Declaration of Helsinki (first adopted by the World Medical Association in 1964).