It may be helpful to explain briefly what are the major types of normative theory about moral obligation (the analogues of hedonist and pluralist theories about what is intrinsically desirable), in order to see where we shall be going in the present and in the following chapter. There are two major types of theory: what we shall call "result" theories, and what we shall call "formalist" theories. (Result theories are often called "teleological," and formalist theories "deontological," but we shall not use these terms.) What is common to result theories is the view that one's over-all moral obligation depends entirely on the intrinsic worth of the actual or expectable results of the various acts one might perform at a given time; for instance, one form of theory says one is always morally obligated to act so as to produce results of maximum intrinsic worth. Formalist theories assert that the thesis of result theories is too simple, and they have in common the view that one's moral obligations are dependent on some other things about one's situation in addition to (or perhaps, instead of) the intrinsic value of the actual or expectable results of one's act; for instance, a formalist theory may say that one is morally obligated to keep one's promises irrespective of the consequences of keeping or breaking them. The nature of an act (that is, whether it is a lie or a breach of promise—something about it different from the intrinsic worth of actual or expected consequences) is held by formalists to be sometimes an important fact bearing on whether there is a moral obligation to perform or avoid it.
Result theories fall into two species. Egoist theories hold that one is morally obligated to perform a certain act if and only if so doing will (actually or expectably) produce a state of oneself that is of maximum intrinsic worth, for example, by maximizing one's enjoyment, satisfying one's desires fully, and so on. Universal theories roughly hold that it is morally obligatory to perform a given act if and only if performing it will (actually or expectably) produce more intrinsic good in general than any other act the agent could perform instead.
(Richard B. Brandt, Ethical Theory: The Problems of Normative and Critical Ethics, Prentice-Hall Philosophy Series, ed. Arthur E. Murphy [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959], 354-5 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])
