W.D. Ross: Prima Facie Duties & Ethics

Biography

William David Ross was born on April 15, 1877, in Thurso, in the far north of Scotland, the son of a schoolmaster. He was educated at the Royal High School in Edinburgh and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he excelled in classics and philosophy. After taking first-class degrees, he became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and later of Oriel College, where he taught for much of his career. Ross was not only a philosopher but a distinguished classical scholar and administrator: he edited the Oxford edition of Aristotle's works and translated the Nicomachean Ethics, and he served as Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University from 1941 to 1944, steering the university through the war years. He was knighted in 1938. His major philosophical work, The Right and the Good, appeared in 1930 and was followed by Foundations of Ethics in 1939. Ross died on May 5, 1971, in Oxford. He is remembered as the philosopher who gave the most influential statement of pluralistic, intuitionist ethics of the twentieth century.

Historical Background

Ross worked in the golden age of British analytic philosophy, alongside G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) had turned ethics toward the analysis of the concepts of good and right, and in the shadow of Henry Sidgwick, whose The Methods of Ethics had systematized the utilitarian tradition. The intellectual context was dominated by two camps: the utilitarians, who held that there is a single supreme principle — maximize the good — and the intuitionists, who held that moral truths are known directly. Moore's intuitionism, however, was still monistic: he identified the right action with the action that produces the most good. Ross's great innovation was to reject both the monism of Moore and the monism of the utilitarians. He argued that there is no single supreme principle of right action, and that our moral obligations form an irreducible plurality. The Right and the Good was the manifesto of this pluralism, and it reshaped twentieth-century ethics.

Core Ideas

Prima Facie Duties

Ross's central idea is the doctrine of prima facie duties. A prima facie duty is a duty that is always morally relevant and always generates a real moral claim, but which can be overridden by a weightier duty in a particular situation. Ross lists seven: fidelity (keeping promises and telling the truth), reparation (making amends for wrongs), gratitude (returning kindness), justice (distributing pleasure and happiness in accordance with merit), beneficence (improving the condition of others), self-improvement (improving one's own virtue and intelligence), and non-maleficence (not injuring others). These duties are not derived from a single principle; each is self-evident and each can conflict with the others. When they conflict, the agent must weigh them and determine the "actual duty" — the duty that is most incumbent in the circumstances. Ross's picture of moral life is therefore one of judgment and balance, not of mechanical application of a rule.

The Right and the Good

Ross insists on a strict separation between the right and the good. The right refers to the action — what we ought to do; the good refers to the states of affairs we aim to produce. Against Moore, Ross argues that the rightness of an action is not determined by the amount of good it produces: some right actions do not maximize the good, and some actions that maximize the good are wrong. Rightness, Ross holds, is a property of the act's being a fulfillment of a prima facie duty that is not outweighed. This pluralism is what makes Ross a deontologist: the right is not reducible to the good, and consequences are only one factor among several in determining what we ought to do.

Intuitionism

Ross is an intuitionist: he holds that our knowledge of prima facie duties is self-evident and immediate, like the knowledge of mathematical truths. We do not arrive at the duty of fidelity by inference or by observation of consequences; we grasp it directly, as a fundamental truth about the moral order. This does not mean we always know what to do — the weighing of conflicting duties requires experience and judgment — but the fundamental principles are known by intuition. Ross's intuitionism is a form of moral realism: moral truths are objective and mind-independent, and our moral intuitions are the faculty by which we apprehend them.

Major Works

The Right and the Good (1930) is Ross's masterpiece. In it he argues against utilitarianism, develops the doctrine of prima facie duties, and defends the intuitionist epistemology of ethics. The book also contains a famous discussion of the concept of "good" and a critique of the ideal utilitarianism of G.E. Moore. Foundations of Ethics (1939) extends and defends the earlier book, responding to critics and deepening the account of moral intuition and the nature of rightness. Ross was also one of the great Aristotle scholars of his generation: his editions and translations of Aristotle's works, especially the Nicomachean Ethics, remain standard references, and his philosophical work shows the influence of Aristotle's pluralism about the goods of life.

Philosophical Influence

Ross's influence has been immense and lasting. His doctrine of prima facie duties gave moral philosophy a way to be both pluralist and principled: it acknowledged the reality of moral conflict without collapsing into relativism, and it acknowledged the relevance of consequences without surrendering to utilitarianism. The doctrine became a standard fixture of ethics textbooks and is widely taught as the leading alternative to both Kantianism and consequentialism. Ross's work also anticipated the revival of virtue ethics and the "particularism" of later philosophers such as Bernard Williams and John McDowell. Contemporary moral theorists continue to debate whether prima facie duties can be systematized, whether Ross's list is complete, and whether intuitionism can be reconciled with modern moral psychology. The recent "rational intuitionism" revival in meta-ethics traces its lineage directly to Ross.

Related Concepts

Ross's philosophy connects directly to the doctrine of prima facie duties and to the classic dilemma of the promise to a dying man. His intuitionism aligns with moral realism, his pluralism with normative ethics, and his emphasis on character with moral character. The thinkers he engaged were G.E. Moore and Henry Sidgwick.