I have been writing a "book" for the past year or so. What follows is a section of a chapter which formulates and defends the moral theory presented by the British moral philosopher W. D. Ross, which includes a few additions by myself, and the extraction of several secondary notions that are important to the overall thesis of my book. I am looking for critique, even if it's just grammatical. Be advised that my citations are missing; I have them elsewhere at the end of the book.
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§ - Insight from (and a defense of) W. D. Ross’ ethics of prima facie duties: the ambiguity of moral decision-making

William David Ross was an English moral philosopher who worked in the intuitionist tradition dominant in analytic philosophy during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and who had the novel theory that what we ought to do in a situation depends on a plurality of reasons - prima facie duties - which cannot be reduced to one another or some single guiding principle. Ross was opposed to both monism and absolutism in ethics, as he saw them to be dogmatic and inadequate. He made it very clear in his most famous book, The Right and the Good, that he cared about recognizing the wide and varied diversity of moral sentiment in human beings, and he believed attempting to account for this through an ethical monism was misguided and/or dishonest:

“Loyalty to the facts is worth more than a symmetrical architectonic or a hastily reached simplicity.”

At the time, British moral philosophy was divided between the utilitarians and the intuitionists. Ross’ chief criticism of utilitarianism was precisely that it oversimplifies and distorts moral thought, to the extent that cannot be reconciled with how people actually reason about morality. Specifically, Ross held that consequentialist thinking failed to recognized the importance of special relationships in moral reasoning and their relative independence from consequential thinking.

According to Ross, if we make a promise to a friend, we have a prima facie duty to keep this promise. But prima facie duties are not absolute - they can be overridden by a different duty that “fits” the situation better. The prima facie duty to fulfill a promise to a friend may lose to a competing prima facie duty to promote the good (or prevent the bad), say, in the case that fulfilling a promise allows innocent people to die:

“If I have promised to meet a friend at a particular time for some trivial purpose, I should certainly think myself justified in breaking my engagement if by doing so I could prevent a serious accident or bring relief to the victims of one.”

Ross took care, however, to remind the reader that just because one duty overrides another duty in some circumstances does not mean the weaker duty is reducible to the stronger duty - it simply means that the circumstances were organized in such a way that this duty was more appropriate than the other. The fact that considerations of fidelity can be defeated by consequence-based considerations does not imply that when we should keep our promises this is also explained by consequence-based considerations:

“When we think ourselves justified in breaking, and indeed morally obliged to break, a promise in order to relieve some one’s distress, we do not for a moment cease to recognize a prima facie duty to keep our promise, and this leads us to feel, not indeed shame or repentance, but certainly compunction, for behaving as we do; we recognize, further, that it is our duty to make up somehow to the promisee for the breaking of the promise.”

Ross initially proposed that there are at least seven irreducible prima facie duties: fidelity, reparation, non-malevolence, beneficence, justice, gratitude, and self-improvement, which all provide distinct, yet non-absolute, reasons for acting in a certain way. He argued that these duties can be combined to form more complex reasons for action - for instance, honesty is a derivative duty that forms from the prima facie duties of fidelity and non-maleficence (we play games that often require us to lie, and we do not feel it is as bad to lie to a stranger than to lie to a friend), and the duty to obey the law stems from gratitude, fidelity and beneficence (with the consequence that, if the state fails to provide appropriate benefits or is in any way seen as illegitimate, this complex duty fails to hold - Ross believed this was the reasoning used by Socrates in his defense of the legitimacy of the city-state).

Ross’ list of prima facie duties is not a random assortment but rather a systematic attempt to capture the highest generality of the fundamental reasons behind our moral reasoning. He recognized that although they are irreducible to each other, some prima facie duties are “weightier” than others; he cited fidelity, reparation and non-malevolence to be more dominant than other duties. In fact in later works, Ross doubted that self-improvement and beneficence were legitimate prima facie duties. Ross effectively ended with the view that we have prima facie duties with respect to: special relationships (debtor to creditor, promisor to promisee, parent to child, etc, which encompasses fidelity, reparation and gratitude), promote the good (including beneficence, justice and self-improvement), and non-maleficence (I have added duties of non-harm and non-manipulation to elaborate on what non-maleficence entails):



When deliberating on what course of action to pursue, Ross believed people weigh different and competing reasons and try to see which one is most “appropriate”. Although they may be self-evident, prima facie duties are not necessarily knowledge of stringency, we only have a probable opinion about the degree of their prima facie obligatoriness. Ross thought moral issues, on the other hand, are not usually a conflict of differing moral beliefs but rather a conflict of certain ways of looking at things. When people disagree about abortion, for instance, they do not disagree about the immorality of killing innocent people. Hardly anyone disputes this (which, ironically, is not often recognized in the frustrating polemic that is public moral discourse). What people disagree about is whether or not a fetus is a person that can be killed, and/or whether the rights of the fetus or the mother are more important. It is essentially a metaphysical issue. Ross thought genuine moral progress generally occurs when people change their moral beliefs due to a change in factual beliefs - beliefs that are susceptible to moral reasoning. This is an important point because it recognizes the possibility that immoral acts may be done by good-natured people who have mistaken or missing beliefs.

It is Ross’ recognition of the importance of serious moral critique that refutes the charge that his theory of prima facie duties is too conservative, or even fails to be a normative (instead of simply a descriptive) theory. As was already mentioned, Ross held that moral progress usually occurs not when a person accepts a new fundamental moral principle or duty, but when this person realizes that these moral reasons are relevant to cases that they previously had not been seen as relevant to. There is nothing about Ross’ theory that prevents it from engaging in practical moral issues, nor is it insufficient to ground radical moral beliefs, because practical ethics revolves primarily around factual disputes that have relations to our moral duties, and radical moral beliefs are simply those that are unconventional with respects to the norms of any given society (we must distinguish between radical and extreme moral beliefs, as they are not necessarily the same thing).

Abstracting from Ross, we can see that moral progress, although good, logically entails that previous generations were morally inadequate. Yet these previous generations undoubtedly thought they had made legitimate moral progress from their ancestors and probably thought they were good people doing the right thing. A common reaction to this fact is to isolate acts from intentions - our ancestors may have done terrible things, but they probably had good intentions, and therefore what they did was “permissible”. Yet this fails to be convincing - the fact stands that these people did do terrible things and whether we are to blame them for doing so has nothing to do with the actual events that transpired. Moral progress could not occur unless what some of the things our ancestors did were morally bankrupt - that is to say, these things should not have happened, independent of the intentions of those in the past. It must be maintained that the rightness of an action is completely independent of the motivations from which it is done.

Perennial moral dilemmas are a bad thing because they imply there has been little or no moral progress in these areas. They are also a very troubling to those faced with them, especially in a real life situation. What does a person do when they don’t know what to do? They are stuck in a state of paralysis, unable to decide between competing courses of action. W. D. Ross was keenly aware of this ethical anxiety:

“Our judgements about our actual duty in concrete situations have none of the certainty that attaches to our recognition of the general principles of duty. A statement is certain, i.e. is an expression of knowledge, only in one or other of two cases: when it is either self-evident, or a valid conclusion from self-evident premisses. And our judgements about our particular duties have neither of these characteristics. [...] There is therefore much truth in the description of the right act as a fortunate act. If we cannot be certain that it is right, it is our good fortune if the act we do is the right act [emphasis mine].”

Ross actually held a fairly pessimistic view of ethics. He thought the right course of action was almost never obvious, implying there are many cases in which the action we choose is, in fact, the wrong one. He emphasized that even if we decide on one path, and even if this path is indeed the right one to do, we still feel regret that we had to choose one prima facie duty over another. Prima facie duties may not be absolute but they retain a prescriptive force even if they have been overridden.

Rossian deontology has a close affinity to ethical particularism, since it denies there is only one single, absolute moral principle that factors into a moral determination, and furthermore because it recognizes the inherent ambiguity in moral decision-making (that is not to say that other normative theories do not recognize this ambiguity but rather that Ross’ theory provides a convincing explanation as to why it is this way). Since it is pluralistic, Ross’ moral theory can be seen as also far less paternalistic than monistic theories. If what someone ought to do cannot be reduced to a single principle but rather an ambiguous assortment of prima facie duties, then it stands that, at least in some cases, it is inappropriate to command someone to follow one course of action when there are a plurality of reasons that must, in the end, be analyzed by the the person themselves. This is not an argument for relativism - it is an argument for moderate tolerance from a position of intellectual honesty. Many of the things we choose to do cannot be generalized under a universal category, but are rather particular situations with idiosyncratic features that resist totalization under a monistic framework, and some of which can only truly be analyzed by the individual themselves.

So, according to Ross, what we ought to do depends on a plurality of reasons with ambiguous stringency that leaves us in the privileged, yet demanding, position of having to choose a course of action that can not usually be determined with absolute certainty to be the right one. But Ross furthermore maintained a dismal view of the “purity” of our actions, for instance, when he wrote:

"[...] there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to any-one without doing harm to some-one else, and vice versa.”

I will bring this point up again when discussing both Levinas and Cabrera. Moral living requires one to get one’s hands dirty. It’s not clean, pure or easy. We feel compelled to hurt other people in order to spare others from similar or worse harm, neglect certain duties so we can honor more “important” ones. Sometimes we legitimately do not know what to do, and have to arbitrarily choose and simply hope we did the right thing. We may do the wrong thing unintentionally - well-intentioned acts may nevertheless be wrong. Pure moral existence is a rare and fleeting accident.