W.D. Ross’s Ethics of “Prima Facie” Duties

Author: Matthew Pianalto
Categories: Ethics, Historical Philosophy
Word Count: 1000

Many ethicists believe in monism, the view that all moral obligations are rooted in one ultimate principle. But pluralists, such as the British philosopher W.D. Ross (1877-1971), reject monism.

Ross held that monistic ethical theories, such as utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, oversimplify morality and are counter-intuitive. Utilitarians say that we must always maximize overall happiness. But maximizing happiness might sometimes be achieved by actions that seem quite wrong, such as torturing or killing innocent people. Kantians hold that we must always treat people with respect and never harm them to achieve good ends. But there could be situations in which we couldn’t avoid doing something that seems to disrespect at least one person, e.g., we might have to lie or harm someone in order to prevent something more disrespectful or harmful from occurring.^[1]

As a pluralist, Ross believed that there are multiple fundamental moral principles. He called them prima facie duties. This essay introduces Ross’s theory, which is often called intuitionism.

1. “Prima Facie” Duties

Ross uses the term prima facie duty to refer to actions that we have some moral reason to perform (or avoid). Ross adapts the Latin phrase “prima facie” (“at first glance”) to capture the idea that these are duties that always have some moral weight, but that no prima facie duty always has priority over the others.

Ross proposes the following list of prima facie duties:

• fidelity: keeping promises,
• reparation: making amends for wrongful actions,
• gratitude: repaying the good actions of others from whom we’ve benefitted,
• justice: apportioning pleasure or happiness to merit,
• beneficence: promoting the good of others,
• self-improvement: improving our moral character, and
• non-maleficence: not harming or injuring others.^[2]

Ross contends that these prima facie duties are self-evident: that is, any mature, rational person who reflects on these ideas can recognize that each prima facie duty points to a feature of an action that tends to make it right to do: e.g., if an action involves keeping a promise, that tends toward making that action right. Most of us understand that making a promise creates a responsibility to honor it. That’s what promises are. But if keeping a promise somehow involved committing an injustice or injuring others, those features would tend toward making the action wrong: it is also self-evident that treating people unfairly or injuring people is generally something we shouldn’t do.^[3]

2. Conflicts of Duty

Sometimes prima facie duties conflict. What is our actual duty in such situations?

Imagine you’ve promised to meet a friend for lunch. As you are leaving for the restaurant, your mother—who lives nearby—calls to say that she’s had an accident and needs you to drive her to the hospital.

Although you have a prima facie duty of fidelity to keep promises, it seems obviously OK to break the promise to your friend to take your mother to the hospital: that’s an emergency! Of course, in breaking a promise, you’ll also have a duty of reparation to apologize to your friend for missing lunch.

Now imagine again that you’ve promised to meet a friend for lunch. Your mother calls because her car broke down and she needs a ride to a local food bank, where she helps serve lunch to people in need. If you give your mom a ride, you won’t have time to meet your friend.

Here matters seem less clear. Helping mom may do more good than meeting up with your friend, since you would help her help others, but you promised to meet your friend.^[4] What has more weight—the prima facie duty of fidelity or the prima facie duty of beneficence?

In such cases, Ross says we must study the situation carefully in order to make the best judgment possible about what our actual duty is.^[5] In other words, we must rely on our intuition, or as Ross often puts it, “what we really think” the right thing to do is.^[6] That’s also what we did to resolve the scenario when mom needed to go to the hospital; the urgency of the emergency made the correct resolution seem more obvious to us in that case.

However, Ross claims that we cannot be certain about our actual duties. Our considered opinions are not perfect; acting on our intuition means taking a risk. Nevertheless, we can’t do any better than to go with our most carefully considered judgments.^[7]

3. Intuition?

A major criticism of Ross’s view is that his appeals to intuition and “what we really think” are not trustworthy. Our intuitions may be biased or unethical. They often conflict with others’ intuitions. Some object that the idea of using intuition to identify basic moral responsibilities and resolve moral conflicts seems mysterious and unprincipled.

For Ross, intuition is nothing more or less than our ability to think rationally, understand ideas, and make judgments; we should not think of intuition as a special faculty or a moral “sixth sense.” It simply refers to our considered opinions. Some of these, such as our views about the moral significance of promises, justice, and beneficence, are quite deep and settled; other intuitions may be more open to revision.

As noted already, Ross does not regard intuition as infallible. He recognizes that humans have refined their ideas about right and wrong and rejected ideas and practices that used to seem OK to many people.

Nevertheless, our best information about what is truly right comes from the carefully considered intuitions of people who are well-informed, perceptive, sensitive, and rational.^[8] The prima facie duties identify values that have stood the test of reflection, experience, and time.

Thoughtful people do sometimes have conflicting intuitions about complex cases. Because of this, Ross suggests that we should have some humility about our own opinions, and be willing to consider carefully the viewpoints of others.^[9]

4. Conclusion

Contemporary moral theorists continue to appeal to “prima facie” duties. Thus, perhaps there is a prima facie duty of gratitude to Ross for developing this idea, even if we disagree with other elements of his theory.^[10]

Notes

^[1] For an introduction to utilitarianism, see Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz. On this type of objection to utilitarianism, see Spencer Case’s Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas”: Would You Walk Away?. For an introduction to Kant’s ethics, including common objections, see Andrew Chapman’s Deontology: Kantian Ethics.

^[2] Ross allows that this list might be amended by expansion or simplification; later in The Right and the Good and in The Foundations of Ethics, he emphasizes prima facie obligations of fidelity, reparation, gratitude, beneficence, and non-maleficence, and treats justice and self-improvement as part of the prima facie duty of beneficence to add to the general good. The point of the list is to highlight that there is a plurality of prima facie duties—not just one sort of duty, such as to do whatever maximizes happiness. See Skelton (2022) and Simpson for further discussion. For a different proposal of ten basic prima facie duties, see Audi (2005).

^[3] Ross suggests that some prima facie duties typically have priority over others: e.g., while it’s good to do things that make people happy (beneficence), we usually shouldn’t do that by injuring other people (non-maleficence, justice). We should repay debts (fidelity) before giving to charity (beneficence).

^[4] Ross argues at length in The Right and The Good that it is not intuitive that we should break a promise just because by breaking it, we can do something else that produces a small amount of additional happiness: promises have moral weight that is not merely about producing the most happiness. My own intuition about the case involving your mother and your friend is that you should keep your promise. However, I’m assuming the food bank will serve lunch even if she can’t make it on this particular day. If it turns out that the food bank can’t open without mom, then it begins to seem to me that beneficence overrides fidelity; in that case, I would say help mom and call your friend to apologize and to reschedule the lunch date. I encourage readers to try filling out the details of the case in various ways in order to think about how those changes affect the presence and apparent strength of the different prima facie duties in each variation.

^[5] We can, and perhaps sometimes should, ask others we trust and respect to help us consider the situation, too.

^[6] Ross (2002), 39.

^[7] Ross points out that the lack of certainty is not a special problem for his view, since utilitarian calculations, e.g., are also based on less than certain predictions and measurements.

^[8] Ross (2002), 41. Notice that these points leave room for us to be skeptical of the intuitions of people who lack these characteristics, and to be critical of the intuitions even of apparent moral authorities who speak outside of their areas of expertise or who it turns out are relying on untrustworthy or limited information.

^[9] Of course, monists may find these responses unsatisfying. An additional theoretical objection to Ross’s view is that it offers only an “unconnected heap of duties”—i.e., an arbitrary list—that lacks a systematic or unifying basis. However, Ross would respond that our rational ability to grasp the prima facie rightness of each of the prima facie duties just is the unifying basis. Furthermore, in offering the list of prima facie duties, Ross argues that they correspond to specific roles (e.g. of promiser or wrongdoer), relationships (parent, friend, citizen), and features of the world (that pain hurts, that we can affect the world in positive or negative ways), and in that regard, are not arbitrary. For further discussion, see McNaughton (1996).

^[10] Thanks to Nathan Nobis, Kristin Seemuth Whaley, Thomas Metcalf, Dan Lowe, and David Kaspar for their helpful feedback and suggestions on this essay.

References

Audi, Robert (2005). The Good in the Right. Princeton University Press.

McNaughton, David (1996). “An Unconnected Heap of Duties?” The Philosophical Quarterly 46(185): 433-447.

Ross, W.D. (2002). The Right and the Good. Oxford University Press. Originally published in 1931.

Ross, W.D. (1939). The Foundations of Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Simpson, David. “William David Ross (1877-1971).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last Accessed 6/13/2023.

Skelton, Anthony (2022). “William David Ross.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Related Essays

Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas”: Would You Walk Away? by Spencer Case

Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman

Principlism in Biomedical Ethics: Respect for Autonomy, Non-Maleficence, Beneficence, and Justice by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf

Ethics and Absolute Poverty: Peter Singer and Effective Altruism by Brandon Boesch

Expertise by Jamie Carlin Watson

Happiness by Kiki Berk

Responding to Morally Flawed Historical Philosophers and Philosophies by Victor Fabian Abundez-Guerra and Nathan Nobis

Reparations for Historic Injustice by Joseph Frigault

Translation

Turkish

PDF Download

Download this essay in PDF. 

About the Author

Matthew Pianalto is a Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of On Patience (2016) and several articles and book chapters on ethics. philosophy.eku.edu/pianalto

Follow 1000-Word Philosophy on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to receive email notifications of new essays at 1000WordPhilosophy.com