Human Nature0328 What is ethics? Rights, duties
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While utilitarians typically do not believe in the existence of moral rights, duties, and obligations (the famous English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham called them "nonsense on stilts'), there are good utilitarian reasons for training oneself to use such concepts most of the time. For purposes of moral education, the rules need to be fairly simple, like "Don't lie," and given humans' tendency to self-deceit, they need to be, so to speak, deontological in "flavor." That is, we should internalize them in a way that causes us to be diffident about violating them.
The resulting vision of moral education seems to ring true. We are first taught an initial set of simple intuitive level rules as children. As we mature, we learn to think critically in cases when these simple rules conflict and in novel cases, and over time we amend our intuitive level rules by engaging in critical thinking.
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