W. D. Ross on Prima Facie Duties

Quote

"I suggest 'prima facie duty' or 'conditional duty' as a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind (e.g., the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant."

— W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good, Chapter II (1930)

Historical Context

W. D. Ross, a Scottish moral philosopher and Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, published The Right and the Good in 1930. The book was written against the two dominant theories of his day. Against utilitarianism — still influential in the version inherited from Bentham and Mill and defended in Ross's own generation by Henry Sidgwick — Ross argued that rightness is not reducible to the production of good consequences; some acts are right independently of their utility. Against the newer forms of subjectivism and naturalism in ethics, he defended a form of moral realism: we have immediate, non-inferential knowledge of moral principles, as we have of mathematical truths. His theory is called intuitionism, though Ross was careful to insist that intuition here does not mean a mysterious faculty but the ordinary capacity to see that certain kinds of acts are prima facie obligatory.

The passage quoted comes from the second chapter, "What Makes Right Acts Right?", which is the philosophical core of the book. Ross needed a way to describe the fact that a single act can fall under many moral descriptions — it may be the keeping of a promise, and also the telling of a lie, and also an act that will cause suffering. Each description makes a moral claim on the agent, and the claims can conflict. Ross's term for the standing of such claims is "prima facie duty": the act has the characteristic of being, say, a promise-keeping act, and that characteristic makes it the sort of act that would be a duty, all else being equal. The actual or duty proper is what remains after all the prima facie considerations are weighed together. The term, borrowed from law where "prima facie" means "on the face of it," gave moral philosophy one of its most durable pieces of vocabulary.

Philosophical Interpretation

The idea of a prima facie duty is Ross's answer to the problem of moral conflict. A strict deontologist like Kant holds that duties are categorical and exceptionless — but then what happens when duties conflict, as when keeping a promise requires telling a lie? Ross's solution is to distinguish the prima facie from the actual. A prima facie duty is not a duty that is merely apparent; it is a real moral consideration with genuine force. But when prima facie duties conflict, one of them may be outweighed. The act that results — the duty proper — is what we ought, all things considered, to do. This is not consequentialist weighing, because the prima facie duties are not ranked by their expected utility; they are ranked by their moral salience in the situation.

Ross offered a list of prima facie duties that has become canonical: fidelity (promise-keeping and truth-telling), reparation (making amends for wrongs), gratitude (returning benefits), justice (distributing pleasure and happiness according to merit), beneficence (improving the condition of others), self-improvement, and non-maleficence (not injuring others). The list is pluralist: no single principle, whether utility or the categorical imperative, generates all of them. Ross claimed we know these duties by intuition — not in the sense of a sixth sense, but in the sense that, once the relevant facts are clear, we see directly that promise-keeping is prima facie obligatory, as we see that two plus two is four. The theory is an alternative both to monistic consequentialism and to monistic deontology, and its pluralism is one of the reasons it has been so widely adopted as a framework for thinking about moral life.

Related Concepts

The passage introduces the distinction between prima facie duty and duty proper, which is Ross's solution to moral conflict. It belongs to the tradition of deontology — the view that some acts are right or wrong in virtue of their kind, not their consequences — and to moral non-naturalism, the claim that moral properties are real but not reducible to natural facts. Ross's pluralism stands against the monism of utilitarianism and Kantianism. The list of prima facie duties connects the theory to promise-keeping, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence, and to the modern revival of intuitionism in moral epistemology.

Learning Path

Begin with the site's answers on what deontological ethics is and on what ethics is, to place Ross in the wider map. Then read the site's answer on what morality is and the discussion of moral conflict. Explore Ross's theory of The Right and the Good in the companion book page, and compare his pluralism with the monism of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Mill's Utilitarianism. For the contemporary debate, examine how Ross's prima facie duties have been revived in applied ethics as a framework for balancing conflicting moral considerations.