 We have already touched on such debates in the previous section (Brentano’s teleological ideal utilitarianism opposed by Levinas’s non-teleological ethics). Mandelbaum defended a type of deontological view, so-called perceptual intuitionism, according to which in both direct and removed moral judgments of obligation, the focus of one’s judgment is on the fittingness (or unfittingness) of the act in relation to the agent’s circumstances, a relation that one directly apprehends—a kind of intellectual perception. Although perceptual intuitionism is a kind of deontological theory, in arguing for this view on phenomenological grounds Mandelbaum attempted to “resolve … the conflict between utilitarianism and deontology” (1955: 71). So, for instance, regarding direct moral judgments of obligation focused on promoting good consequences, Mandelbaum argues that as with felt obligations to keep a promise, or express gratitude, whose grounds lie in one’s past, a felt obligation to bring about some good state of affairs rests upon one’s apprehension that an action one can perform is felt to be a fitting response to the envisioned state of affairs in question, indeed, that refraining from the action would be unfitting. He thus concludes that there is no genuine phenomenological difference between finding the ground of obligation in the envisioned end of action (its consequences) and finding the ground of this same obligation in the fittingness of the action to one’s situation. In this way, he claims, one can reconcile the phenomenology associated with teleologically focused judgments of direct obligation with the phenomenology of direct judgments of obligation whose experienced ground is the fittingness of the action to one’s situation. What Mandelbaum attempts to thereby show is that the phenomenology of judgments of obligation (both direct and removed) have a common phenomenological character properly captured in his favored perceptual intuitionism—a form of deontology—and thus on phenomenological grounds his form of deontology is to be preferred over versions of  teleology.[22]