Refuting the Arbitrary Cutoff Objection to Moderate Deontology

Suppose that you must choose between killing an innocent person or letting others die. Moderate deontology says that when the stakes are high enough in such a case, killing the innocent person becomes right, but the stakes must be very high for this to happen—much higher than standard forms of consequentialism take them to be. Critics object that moderate deontology is committed to arbitrary cutoffs, and this feature makes the theory arbitrary in a way that competing theories are not. I refute this objection.