The Right and the Good by W.D. Ross

Context

The Right and the Good, published by Oxford's Clarendon Press in 1930, is the most important statement of intuitionist ethics in the twentieth century. It was written by W.D. Ross, a Scottish philosopher who had just completed his great edition of Aristotle's works, and it was published a generation after G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) had founded analytic ethics. Moore had argued that "good" is a simple, indefinable quality and that right action is action that maximizes the good. The utilitarian tradition, from Henry Sidgwick onward, had made the same identification of rightness with the production of good outcomes. Ross's book was a double rebellion: against utilitarianism and against Moore's monism. It argued that there are many distinct moral duties, none reducible to the others, and that rightness is not a function of goodness alone. The book is short, dense, and written with austere clarity; it has never been out of print.

Core Arguments

Ross's central argument is that every attempt to reduce morality to a single principle fails. The utilitarian claim that we should always maximize the good is refuted, Ross argues, by the fact that we recognize duties that do not depend on consequences: the duty to keep a promise remains a duty even when breaking it would produce slightly better outcomes, and the duty of reparation does not come into being because of future benefits but because of past wrongs. Ross's method is introspective and appeals to what he calls "the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people." He argues that our considered moral judgments are the data of ethics, and that any theory which contradicts them — as utilitarianism contradicts the judgment that we must not punish an innocent person to pacify a mob — must be rejected.

The second core argument is the separation of the right and the good. Ross argues that the rightness of an action is a property of the action itself, determined by the totality of prima facie duties in the situation, and that rightness cannot be defined as "produces the most good." He also argues that "good" is not univocal: what is good in itself (virtue, pleasure, knowledge) cannot be lumped into a single quantity, and the distribution of good matters as much as its amount — the foundation of his duty of justice.

Key Concepts

The book's signature concept is the prima facie duty. A prima facie duty is a real, self-evident duty that holds in every case unless overridden by a weightier duty. Ross lists seven: fidelity (promise-keeping and truthfulness), reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, and non-maleficence. The actual duty — what we ought to do, all things considered — is the prima facie duty that is most incumbent in the circumstances. Ross also introduces the distinction between the "right" (what we ought to do, a property of acts) and the "good" (what is worth having, a property of states of affairs), and he defends an intuitionist epistemology: we know the prima facie duties directly, as self-evident principles, even though judging which duty wins in a particular case requires experience and judgment.

Legacy & Influence

The Right and the Good defined the agenda of analytic ethics for a generation. Its doctrine of prima facie duties became the standard pluralist alternative to utilitarianism and Kantianism, and its method — testing theories against considered moral judgments — became the default method of normative ethics. The book was the principal target of the consequentialist revival led by J.J.C. Smart and later Shelly Kagan, whose The Limits of Morality (1984) is a sustained attempt to defeat Rossian pluralism. It also nourished the revival of intuitionism in meta-ethics and the resurgence of deontological ethics in the late twentieth century. Contemporary philosophers still debate whether Ross's list of duties is complete, whether prima facie duties can be systematized, and whether his intuitionism survives the challenges of moral psychology. Few books have had so long a shelf life.

Reading Guide

The Right and the Good is short but demanding. Chapter 1, "The Meaning of 'Right'," presents the doctrine of prima facie duties; Chapter 2, "What Makes Right Acts Right?," contains the famous list of duties and the argument against utilitarianism; Chapters 3–5 examine the concepts of good, value, and moral goodness. The 2002 Oxford edition, edited by Philip Stratton-Lake, includes a helpful introduction and a bibliography of the subsequent literature. Readers new to the book should read Chapters 1–2 first, then the critical literature on "Rossian pluralism" before returning to the later chapters. The book pairs naturally with its companion texts in intuitionist ethics: Moore's Principia Ethica and Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics.

Related Works

• Principia Ethica by G.E. Moore (1903): the intuitionist classic Ross criticizes and revises.
• The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick (1874): the utilitarian system Ross argues against.
• Foundations of Ethics by W.D. Ross (1939): Ross's own defense and development of the doctrine.
• The Right and the Good connects to Ross's ethics and deontology, and to the promise to a dying man.