Voting in performatory utilitarianism is a matter of seconds, if not of nanoseconds. Until a certain moment your vote contributes to the 'production of value-laden threshold effects' and one second later, whether you know it or not, what you thought was the same act as your predecessor's, is useless, or even antiutilitarian. Instead of having performed, you have committed something. However, this time-dependent discrepancy between what is actually done and what is intended is not a problem which typifies consequence theories (or rather performatory consequence theories) in particular. To show that it does not, we will now turn to a typically deontological example of a case as circulating in deontic (theodemonical) logic.

The dilemma described in the following story is called after --let's assume-- a historical figure, but as we shall not mention the personal name of any being that once lived or existed, or that still lives or exists, in the books of this Model, we will refer to the dilemma as "the classical deontological dilemma". The story is a religious one in which a certain man promised to Mono --it could be anyone-- to immolate whatever would meet the man first on his return home. But the first one he met on his arrival was his daughter. On the one hand, because of his promise, he had to sacrifice his daughter. On the other hand, because of the prohibition to murder, interpreted as a prohibition to kill human beings, he ought to abstain from killing her. According to one deontological theorist the promise itself ought already not to have been made, for it gave rise to conflicting duties. Another one argues that the man in question did not have the duty to abstain from his promise, since the fact that the first one he met was a human being was an only later forthcoming contingency. The man's promise gave indeed rise to conflicting duties --the argument runs-- but did not create a conflict of duties (granting that the man's ethics did not even contain a prima facie duty to abstain from killing any animal being not reared by 'imself, something which has to be bluntly accepted on this reasoning.) That this distinction cannot be made in traditional deontic logic has been said to be a flaw in those systems which do not relativize acts to time. (This recognition is the first step from an 'eternal' or nontemporal, performatory ethics of duties to an ethics of moral agents who decide and act at a certain moment in time.) To make deontic judgments temporally relative is only a partial improvement, however. Let us look at an extension of the story as proposed at a later date.

Suppose the man's daughter in the original story promised her mother to surprise her father and meet him as the first one on his arrival. It would, from the purely performatory point of view, make a crucial difference whether she made her promise before her father's or after. If she made it at a later moment, she created a conflict of duties; if she made it one second before her father's, she did nothing wrong. It seems more plausible tho, that the moral status of the daughter's promise is independent of the question whether it was made before or after her father's. At least some deontic logicians realize that lack of knowledge does play a role in moral decisions, and that the 'accessibility of the set of best possible worlds' should be thought of in more doxastic terms. When one of them concludes that the accessibility for a moral agent at a certain moment should be looked upon as an 'epistemic datum' --read "doxastic datum"-- it is the distinction between purely performatory and decision-theoretical ethics 'e is implicitly referring to. In a 'logic of cues' for the moral agent the procedure is to be a rational one 'with cues defined in terms of best alternatives': this is one of the things the deontic logician regards as essential, besides a 'subjective-accessibility requirement'. Since the nature of traditional deontic logics seems to be very much, if not entirely, deontological, such points reemphasize that the requirements of an adequate normative system are little different from each other in deontology and consequentialism where the need of a normative decision-theory is concerned.

What the deontological theorist claims as distinct from the consequence-theorist is that keeping one's promise is right in itself, and that murder is wrong in itself, or --if 'e is smarter-- that certain kinds of killing are wrong in themselves, or that all killing is wrong in itself. Keeping a promise and abstaining from murder (or killing) are said to have characteristics which make them right independently of the good or bad consequences with respect to some performatory value, other than the moral value of keeping a promise or abstaining from murder in itself. It has been argued by others that it is, strictly speaking, not promises themselves but a so-called 'principle of fidelity' which binds people to their promises. Yet, if this is correct, breaking a promise is wrong because it violates the principle of fidelity, and this violation always corresponds to an action which has bad noncausal, simultaneous 'effects' with respect to a performatory value of fidelity. (Note firstly, that these 'effects' are not consequences, for they are not causal and do not follow afterwards. Note secondly, that the value of fidelity may be considered to be performatory if a person can break a promise without having the intention to do so, altho 'e may not be blamed for not doing what 'e promised in case of a misunderstanding or something of that sort.)

A deontologist is bound to rejoin now that fidelity or faithfulness can only be defined in terms of promises and duties like in firmness in adherence to promises or in observance of duty. This is not only a vicious circle; every separate ultimate duty, or deontic rule, in general seems to have its own little vicious circle. Consider, for example, the duty or rule that one should not lie, that one should keep agreements, that one should not steal, or perhaps more detailed duties and rules such as that one ought not to cross a lawn or that one ought to vote. All these ad hoc duties tend to make deontology excessively pluralistic with all the consequent dilemmas (such as the classical deontological one), unless they can all be reduced to one or a small number of ultimate duties, or deontic rules, in which the actions to be done or abstained from are described in purely denotative terms. An uninterpreted 'principle of justice' or 'axiom of equity' will, then, not provide a foundation for such an ultimate duty. (These ad hoc duties and interpretations arouse suspicion, particularly because --with one or a few exceptions-- ethical theorists just seem to be, or to have been, running behind the social norms of their own subcultures, or of their own eras and countries.)