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judgements cannot be relied upon. The fact is that when one makes a moral judgement in particular situations, one implicitly commits oneself to making the same judgement in any similar situations. The merit of act-deontologism is that it takes into consideration the particularity of the situation. It advises us to look into the act as such.
The weakness of rule-deonotologism is that it occupies itself with the extreme rightness or wrongness of the rule without allowing any exception to it. In this case, fulfillment of duty may sometime become fanaticism. Truth ought to be spoken even if the society has to face bad consequences. The defect of this position in particular and deontologism in general is that they do not take account of the specific situations and goodness or badness of the consequences following from such circumstances. Actions cannot be right or wrong in vacuum. They always produce effects either good or bad, and to be indifferent to effects is to ignore the verdict of moral experience which is deeply rooted in the goodness or badness of human situation.
Jaina ethics does not condemn the action of telling a lie to enemies, robbers, and even to persons who ask questions when they have no right to ask. Under some circumstances it is right to break a promise, or to take something that belongs to another without his permission. Thus no rule can be absolutely always right or wrong as the rule-deontologist prescribed. Mill rightly remarks, “It is not the fault of any creed but of the complicated nature of human affairs that rules of conduct cannot be so framed as to require no exception, and that hardly any kind of action can safely be laid down as either always obligatory or always condemnable."3 The merit of rule-deontologism is that it gives excessive importance to rules in moral life.
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Spiritual Awakening (Samyagdarśana) and Other Essays
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