What responsibilities do the stakeholders have and how should they fulfill them? Philosophers refer to the responsibility-based approach to ethics as the theory of "deontology." This academic-sounding term suggests that among some of the more important categories that need to be considered in reaching an ethical judgement are items like duties, obligations, and responsibilities. For the deontologist, any ethical analysis that fails to include these categories is an incomplete analysis. In the deontological theory of ethics, if an action fulfills one's responsibilities, the action is ethical. If it does not fulfill responsibilities, then it is an unethical action. The philosopher Immanuel Kant is recognized as an outspoken proponent of the deontological position. He recommended that people employ what he called the "categorical imperative" to determine the rightness or wrongness of their actions. The categorical imperative asks us to universalize the principle that stands behind our actions and if we can envision a world where everyone would act according to the resulting imperative, then that action can be called ethical. For example, take the act of lying. Can you envision a world where lying was the universal principle rather than truth-telling? The results of such a universal would be chaos, hence, according to Kant, lying is an unethical act and responsible people will not lie. We cannot universalize such acts. Philosophers divide the kinds of responsibilities into two groups:primary and secondary. Primary responsibilities refer to those kinds of first-order obligations that people have. The admonition to "do no harm" embodies a primary obligation and serves as a good example of one. Secondary obligations are more gray in nature and more difficult to identify which is to say that they are often the subject of moral disagreements. For example, do we have the obligation to assist another if that assistance may cause us some harm? In the study of professional ethics, responsibilities are central and the claim is often made that members of a profession and others such as corporations or governmental officials have certain special duties, obligations and responsibilities. Put in another way, it can be said that entrance into a profession carries with it an extra burden of responsibility that characterizes the concept of professionalism. For many ethicists, this extra burden is a social responsibility falling on the shoulders of professionals and a select group of others. The deontological approach will include questions about how well these stakeholders have fulfilled their special, social responsibilities as well as their individual, particular duties to clients, to employers, to other professionals, to third parties and so on. In applying this moral perspective, one asks: "What responsibilities does a stakeholder have in a given context and how shall they meet them?"