Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty")is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to a rule or rules. It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty." Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to consequentialism, virtue ethics, and pragmatic ethics. In this terminology, action is more important than the consequences. The term deontological was first used to describe the current, specialised definition by C. D. Broad in his book, Five Types of Ethical Theory, which was published in 1930. Older usage of the term goes back to Jeremy Bentham, who coined it in c. 1826 to mean more generally "the knowledge of what is right and proper".The more general sense of the word is retained in French, especially in the term code de déontologie "ethical code", in the...