What Is Prima Facie Duties?

Direct Answer

Prima facie duties are the basic moral obligations that W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), took to be the true starting points of ethics. He identified seven: fidelity, the duty to keep promises and tell the truth; reparation, the duty to repair harm one has caused; gratitude, the duty to repay kindness; justice, the duty to distribute pleasure and happiness in proportion to merit; beneficence, the duty to improve the condition of others; self-improvement, the duty to improve one's own virtue and intelligence; and non-maleficence, the duty not to injure others. Each is a "prima facie" duty, a duty at first appearance: it always provides a genuine reason to act in its favor, but it can be outweighed when it conflicts with another duty in a particular situation. The actual duty, or duty proper, is what remains after weighing all the prima facie duties relevant to the case.

Historical Context

Ross developed his theory in reaction to the two dominant ethical systems of his day: Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. He argued that the attempt to reduce all morality to a single principle, whether the categorical imperative or the principle of utility, distorts moral life. Kant's theory, Ross held, fails to explain why we have duties such as beneficence and gratitude that do not follow from universalizability; utilitarianism fails because it denies that promise-keeping and reparation have any weight except through their consequences, and because it allows the aggregation of happiness to override justice to individuals. Ross belonged to the intuitionist tradition that descended from Henry Sidgwick through G. E. Moore, and he claimed that the prima facie duties are self-evident, in the sense that a mature and well-informed person simply sees that, for example, promise-keeping is prima facie right. The theory thereby restores moral pluralism: there are several irreducible sources of moral obligation, and no single scale can commensurate them.

Key Arguments & Debates

The argument for the theory is its fidelity to moral experience. Ross holds that we know the prima facie duties by direct insight, just as we know basic mathematical truths, and that any attempt to derive them from a single principle either leaves some out or distorts them. He also argues that the theory explains moral conflict better than monistic theories: when duties conflict, we do not discover that one was not a duty at all; rather, we must judge which duty is more stringent in the circumstances, a judgment that no rule can replace.

The objections are equally important. First, the appeal to self-evidence is challenged: if the duties are self-evident, why do moral disagreements persist, and how do we settle them? Ross replies that self-evidence applies to propositions in their simplest form, while practical judgment is always of particular, complex cases. Second, critics argue that the theory gives no method for resolving conflicts, leaving moral choice to unguided intuition; Ross accepts this, holding that the best we can do is compare the claims as carefully as possible. Third, the theory has been accused of lacking a unifying account of why these seven duties, and no others, are the basic ones. Contemporary intuitionists, such as Robert Audi and John Skorupski, have developed responses to these objections, defending a structured and fallibilist version of the view.

Contemporary Relevance

Ross's pluralism remains attractive to philosophers who find both monistic consequentialism and monistic deontology inadequate. It captures the commonsense thought that morality involves several distinct kinds of reasons, such as promises, gratitude, and the relief of suffering, and that deciding what to do is often a matter of balancing them with judgment rather than applying a formula. The theory has been influential in bioethics, where principlism, the approach that organizes medical ethics around four principles, is a direct descendant of Ross's list, and it continues to frame debates about moral dilemmas, self-evidence, and the limits of theory in ethics. For anyone who finds that no single principle captures all their moral intuitions, prima facie duties offers the most developed pluralist alternative.

Related Concepts

Prima facie duties belong to the pluralist and intuitionist wing of deontology and normative ethics. Ross built on the intuitionism of Moore and Sidgwick, and his theory is frequently contrasted with Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. Its practical method is explored in How to Make Ethical Decisions and How to Resolve a Moral Dilemma.

Further Learning

For authoritative treatment, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on William David Ross and Intuitionism in Ethics.