Are deontology and teleology mutually exclusive?

People having even a passing acquaintance with moral philosophy have probably met with the distinction between deontological and teleological approaches to moral questions. "A deontological norm is one that evaluates an act by a characteristic that cannot be gathered from its consequences" (McCormick, 1973, p. 62). Deontological approaches to ethics attempt to ascertain the content of duty without considering the consequences of particular ways of acting. Generally speaking, deontologists have thought that moral principles are ascertained through some sort of logical test of consistency, as Kant maintained; or they have thought of the moral rightness of actions as directly intuited, as H. A. Pritchard (1949), for example, held.

Teleological approaches to ethics, on the other hand, morally evaluate actions by looking to their consequences -- right actions being right because they tend to have good consequences, wrong actions being wrong because they tend to have bad consequences. Thus, for teleologists, evaluations of consequences as good or bad provide the premises for inferring the norms of right acting. Arthur Andersen's educational programs in business ethics sup 1 have probably done as much to popularize this distinction as any other contributor, but Arthur Andersen is not alone: Most writers in business ethics seem eager to pay their respects to the distinction (Beauchamp and Bowie, 1993; Donaldson and Werhane, 1993). With tables of contents that look almost liturgical in their repetitive sameness, deontology is introduced with Immanuel Kant, teleology with Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. Teleology is quickly identified with some variety of utilitarianism and perhaps prettified in the latest, fashionable economic dressing -- for our money, a fair enough assessment of developments in the law and economics movement, although recently there have been calls for change (Solomon, 1992; Wolfe, 1991). Invariably, the apparent contradiction between deontology and teleology is emphasized, each approach is subjected to battering-ram criticism, and, in the rubble that remains, bewildered students, marvelling at so much effort squandered with so little to show for it, scavenge for something useful to carry away. Their antecedent moral skepticism and relativism seems confirmed in their minds, and their already too feeble grip on moral truth is further loosened, perhaps irretrievably. Their brief exposure to moral philosophy often leaves them worse off than they were before (Wolfe,...