ROSSIAN ETHICS
W.D. Ross and Contemporary Moral Theory
DAVID PHILLIPS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Phillips, David (David K.), author.
Title: Rossian ethics : W.D. Ross and contemporary moral theory / David Phillips.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018051609 (print) | LCCN 2019015034 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190602192 (updf) | ISBN 9780190602208 (online content) | ISBN 9780190054656 (epub) | ISBN 9780190602185 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Ross, W. D. (William David), 1877–1971.
Classification: LCC BJ654. R673 (ebook) | LCC BJ654. R673 P45 2019 (print) | DDC 171/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051609
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To Susan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been extremely fortunate in the help I have received with this project. Peter Ohlin and his colleagues at Oxford University Press have been characteristically encouraging and professional throughout; and I am particularly grateful for their flexibility as work on the final draft was rescheduled by Hurricane Harvey. The two referees, David McNaughton and Anthony Skelton, provided invaluable feedback which shaped the book in fundamental ways. Two of my colleagues, Justin Coates and Luis Oliveira, read the entire manuscript at different stages and helped me tremendously with many suggestions for improvements and much guidance on contemporary literature. Jonathan Dancy, Jamie Dreier, and George Sher gave acute and helpful comments on drafts of individual chapters and sections. And Ed Sherline and an audience at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in 2015 provided very enlightening feedback on a version of chapter 3. None of them, of course, is responsible for the book’s no doubt numerous remaining flaws.
INTRODUCTION
I HAVE TWO CONNECTED AIMS in this book. The first is to interpret and critically evaluate W. D. Ross’s moral philosophy. The second is to develop a distinctive normative view. The two aims are connected because the normative view can be developed, as I will develop it, as an interpretation of Ross. But they are also separable: it would be perfectly possible to find the normative view attractive in itself but misconceived as a reading of Ross.
Let me say a little more about each aim. As to the first: Ross’s most important works in moral philosophy, The Right and the Good and Foundations of Ethics, contain significant discussions both of metaethics and of moral theory.1 My main focus will be Ross’s moral theory, which I think more important and more distinctive than his metaethics. His metaethics is largely a sophisticated development of views articulated before him by Sidgwick, Moore, and others;2 and insofar as his views in moral epistemology are distinctive, I shall argue that they are mistaken. His moral theory is something new, different both from Sidgwick’s hedonistic utilitarianism and from Moore’s ideal utilitarianism; and I shall argue that what is new in it is importantly right.
As to the second aim: many opponents of consequentialism, from Kant to Anscombe to the present, regard it with
hostility and contempt. But a quite different attitude is possible: the attitude that consequentialism is partly true but not the whole truth; that the reason to promote the good is very important but not our only reason. I think Ross is the best source in the historical tradition for this kind of respectful rejection of consequentialism. And I think a distinctive alternative to traditional consequentialism can be found in and developed from his work, a view that is worth serious consideration in contemporary moral theory.3
It will be helpful to have a name for the distinctive normative view I will find in Ross. The name I will use is “classical deontology.”4 Classical deontology is a view about the nature of the most fundamental normative truths. According to classical deontology the most fundamental normative principles are principles of prima facie duty,5 principles which specify general kinds of reasons. Utilitarians are right to think that reasons always derive from goods; and ideal utilitarians are right, contra hedonistic utilitarians, to think that there are a small number of distinct kinds of intrinsic goods. But consequentialists are wrong to think that all reasons have the same weight for all agents. Instead, there are a small number of distinct kinds of agent-relative intensifiers: features that increase the weight of certain reasons for certain agents. The key problem with consequentialism is that it misses “the highly personal character of duty,” the special agent-relative weight of promises, gratitude, and reparation.
I don’t think the kind of project I am undertaking here is especially novel, either in the history of philosophy in general or in the history of ethics in particular. At the start of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson writes,6
I have tried to present a clear, uncluttered and unified interpretation, at least strongly supported by the text as it stands, of the system of thought which the Critique contains; I have tried to show how certain great parts of the structure can be held apart from each other, while showing also how, within the system itself, they are conceived of as related; I have tried to give decisive reasons for rejecting some parts altogether; and I have tried to indicate, though no more than indicate, how the arguments and conclusions of other parts might be so modified or reconstructed as to be made more acceptable.
In a similar vein, at the start of Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, Gregory Kavka writes,7
Though he has been more than three hundred years in the grave, Thomas Hobbes still has much to teach us. His works identify enduring problems of social and political life and suggest some promising solutions for them. Yet, at the same time, they contain important errors. . . . To learn the most from Hobbes, we must correct or avoid these errors, while preserving and building upon the fundamentally sound philosophical structure they infest.
With that aim in mind, this book offers an explicitly revisionist interpretation of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy. . . . The ultimate goal of this process is to explicate and defend a plausible system of moral and political hypotheses suggested and inspired by Hobbes. Throughout, an attempt is made to indicate clearly which of the views discussed are Hobbes’s and which are proposed alterations or improvements of his position. Because the modifications offered are not trivial, it would be misleading to describe the theory propounded here as that of Hobbes. Even where it departs from his position, however, the theory resembles his in critical respects.
Strawson’s and Kavka’s projects have the same character as mine. But, focused as they are on Kant and Hobbes respectively, they are models, not competitors. One philosophical project, however, is, I take it, both a model for and a competitor with mine: Robert Audi’s defense of “valuebased intuitionism.”8 Value-based intuitionism is a blend of Rossian and Kantian ideas. Audi could (and I take it he does) argue that the best philosophical interpretation of Ross is that Ross is a value-based intuitionist. This is not supposed to be true by definition. And it is not supposed to be true because everything Ross says fits value-based intuitionism—some of what Ross explicitly says conflicts with value-based intuitionism. It is supposed to be true rather because, Audi thinks, the best way to make philosophical sense of Ross—to attribute to Ross a view that matches much of what he says and is independently philosophically plausible—is to understand him as a value-based intuitionist. I will be arguing (contra Audi) that the best philosophical interpretation of Ross is as a classical deontologist. Like Audi, I will not take my interpretive claim to be true by definition. Rather, I will be arguing that the best way to make philosophical sense of Ross—to attribute to him a view that matches much of what he says and is independently philosophically plausible—is to understand him as a classical deontologist.
Any philosophical project like Audi’s, Kavka’s, Strawson’s, or mine involves two potentially conflicting prima facie philosophical duties—to interpret the texts faithfully, and to develop the most plausible philosophical view. A Rossian might well deny that there is any helpful general rule about how to balance these prima facie philosophical duties against one another.
Ross’s distinctive philosophical views did not arise in a vacuum. They developed by acquaintance with and reflection on the ideas of earlier central figures in the British intuitionist tradition, which stretches, as Thomas Hurka has persuasively argued, from Sidgwick to Ewing.9 Prichard and Moore were particularly important to him. They are the two influences he mentions by name in the preface to The Right and the Good. Of Prichard he says:
My main obligation is to Professor H. A. Prichard. I believe I owe the main lines of the view expressed in my first two chapters to his article “Does Moral Philosophy rest on a Mistake?”10 (RG v)
He goes on to say:
I also wish to say how much I owe to Professor G. E. Moore’s writings. A glance at the index will show how much I have referred to him. (RG v)
And indeed there are more references to Moore in the index of The Right and the Good than there are to any other philosopher.
There is also a particularly close relationship between Ross’s work and some of C. D. Broad’s. In Five Types of Ethical Theory, 11 published in the very same year as The Right and the Good, Broad arrived independently at views strikingly like Ross’s. In the later Foundations of Ethics (1939), Ross noted this similarity:
In the main, Professor Broad’s view is just that which I wish to advocate, viz. that among the features of a situation that tend to make an act right there are some which are independent of
the tendency of the act to bring about a maximum of good. To say this is to hold an intuitionistic view of one kind. (F 82)
And Broad responded enthusiastically to Ross’s work, observing in his review of the Foundations,
The Provost of Oriel’s book, The Right and the Good, published in 1930, was much the most important contribution to ethical theory made in England for a generation, and concluding,
I hope that generations of undergraduates, in the intervals between making the world safer and safer for democracy, will come to know and appreciate this book under the affectionate and accurate nickname of “The Righter and the Better.”12
My interpretive target here is Ross, not Prichard or Broad (or Moore). But I will draw freely on Prichard and Broad in developing my interpretation of Ross.
I hope, of course, to make a convincing case for interpreting Ross as a classical deontologist. But I hope that those who are not convinced will still find the discussion of Ross illuminating: that they will think the questions I raise about how to place Ross within contemporary moral theory and how to understand the core of his opposition to consequentialism are important questions, even if they think I give them the wrong answers.
This study will have four further substantive chapters. In the first three I consider in turn the three central elements of Ross’s normative view: the concept of prima facie duty, the moderate pluralism about the right, and the moderate
pluralism about the good. I begin in chapter 2 with the concept of prima facie duty. Ross introduces it to address the objection that deontology is rendered incoherent by conflicts of duty. I raise two central interpretive issues, about the characterization of prima facie duty and the structure of an ethics based upon it, and about whether Ross’s central normative claims are best understood as claims about morality or as claims about normative reasons. And I argue that Ross was wrong in the Foundations to follow Prichard in prioritizing subjective rather than objective rightness. In chapter 3 I turn to Ross’s moderate pluralism about the right. I focus on his diagnosis of ideal utilitarianism as missing “the highly personal character of duty.” I argue that almost everything on his list of underived prima facie duties consists either (a) of duties to promote the good or (b) of what he calls “special obligations”: reasons to keep promises, repay wrongs, and manifest gratitude. I argue that these special obligations are (what I call) “agent-relative intensifiers” of reasons to promote goods. I argue that if we understand deontological reasons as consisting only of (b) we can avoid problems with standard deontology. I argue, following Sidgwick, that there are other agent-relative intensifiers Ross himself does not recognize. And I argue that the normative theory that all reasongiving features are either goods or agent-relative intensifiers of reasons to promote goods is distinctive and attractive. In chapter 4 I turn to Ross’s moderate pluralism about the good. I begin with aspects of his view with which I am sympathetic: his provisional list of intrinsic goods, virtue, knowledge, pleasure, and the proportioning of pleasure to virtue; and his appeal to intuitions about the relative goodness of quite abstractly described possible worlds to defend the list. But I argue against his position on the relative value of
different goods. In different ways in The Right and the Good and the Foundations Ross is a radical antihedonist, arguing that virtue is in some way systematically more valuable than pleasure. I reject both his (excessively negative) treatment of pleasure and his (excessively positive) treatment of virtue. Finally I ask whether Ross’s list of intrinsic goods is exhaustive. I argue that it is at the least a very plausible core list and that Ross’s explanation of its unity is helpful in assessing possible additions. In chapter 5 I consider the metaethical and epistemological framework within which Ross develops his normative views. I argue that the metaethical framework is plausible and defensible on the whole, though problematic in various important details. But I argue that Ross’s distinctive views in moral epistemology should be rejected. My interpretation of Ross is the product of a range of specific judgments of interpretive and philosophical plausibility. But it is also, as I indicated above, shaped by a guiding idea: that Ross develops a version of deontology that is close to consequentialism and a product of important modifications to consequentialism. One way to approach that guiding idea is historical. Ross is the clearest and most articulate opponent of consequentialism and utilitarianism in the Sidgwickto-Ewing school; so of course we should look to him for reasons to reject consequentialism. But he doesn’t show the hostility to consequentialism characteristic of Kantians and some other more recent deontologists. What we should look for in reading him is a theory that is consequentialism plus: that allows that consequentialists are right that there are goods, and that we have a duty to promote them, and that this is one crucial truth about the normative; but denies that it is the whole truth. If (as the title of a paper by Hurka has it) Audi offers “a marriage of Ross and Kant,” what I suggest
by contrast might be characterized as “a marriage of Ross and Sidgwick.”13 For not only do I emphasize in general the ways in which Ross is a friendly rather than a hostile critic of consequentialism; the ways in which I suggest a revisionary reading of Ross all bring him closer to Sidgwick.
NOTES
1. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). I will refer to it as “RG”; page references will be placed in the text. W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939). I will refer to it as “F”; page references will be placed in the text. While at least chapter 2 of The Right and the Good has long been quite widely read, the Foundations was till recently much less studied. I think both are essential for understanding and evaluating Ross’s contribution to moral philosophy. Ross also published other work in moral philosophy, in chronological order: a chapter (chapter 7) in Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1923); four articles leading up to The Right and the Good: “The Basis of Objective Judgments in Ethics,” International Journal of Ethics 37.2 (1927): 113–27; “Is There a Moral End?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 8 (1928): 91–98; “The Nature of Morally Good Action,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, new series, 29 (1928–29): 251–74; “The Ethics of Punishment,” Journal of Philosophical Studies 4.14 (April 1929): 205–11; one article between The Right and the Good and the Foundations: “The Coherence Theory of Goodness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 10 (1931): 61–70; and the later Kant’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). In my judgment none of this other work is nearly as important as The Right and the Good and the Foundations.
2. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907). I will refer to it as “ME”; further page references will be placed in the text. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). I will
refer to it as “Principia”; further page references will be placed in the text.
3. Some remarks on terminology are called for. By “consequentialism” I will mean what might also be called “traditional consequentialism”: the agent-neutral thesis endorsed both by hedonistic utilitarians and by ideal utilitarians like Moore according to which, as Ross puts it (RG 17), “what produces the maximum good is right.” Ross himself has no name for this thesis. In Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Kegan Paul, 1930), Broad does introduce a name. He calls theories according to which “the rightness or wrongness of an action is always determined by its tendency to produce certain consequences which are intrinsically good or bad” teleological theories (206–7). He contrasts them with deontological theories. In so doing, he introduces the term “deontology” in its now standard philosophical sense: “I would first divide ethical theories into two classes, which I will call respectively deontological and teleological. Deontological theories hold that there are ethical propositions of the form: ‘Such and such a kind of action would always be right (or wrong) in such and such circumstances, no matter what the consequences might be’ ” (206). While “deontological” and “deontology” stuck, “teleological” and “teleology” were replaced by “consequentialist” and “consequentialism,” terms introduced by Anscombe in “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1–19. For discussions of the history of the term “deontology,” see Robert Louden, “Towards a Genealogy of ‘Deontology,’” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34.4 (1996): 571–92 and Jens Timmerman, “What’s Wrong with ‘Deontology’?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2015): 75–92.
In recent years a sophisticated literature has developed focused on the possibility of “consequentializing” supposedly nonconsequentialist moral and normative theories. Important work in this literature includes Jamie Dreier, “In Defense of Consequentializing,” in Mark Timmons, ed., Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 97–119; Douglas Portmore, “Consequentializing Moral Theories,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2007): 39–73,
and Commonsense Consequentialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) (especially chapter 4); and Campbell Brown, “Consequentialize This!,” Ethics 121.4 (2011): 739–
71. A key claim in this literature is what Portmore calls “the deontic equivalence thesis” and Dreier “the extensional equivalence thesis”: that all plausible moral theories can be represented as forms of consequentialism. Unless I specify otherwise, I will not be using “consequentialism” and cognate terms in this broad way. I say more about consequentializing and its implications for the project of this book in chapter 3.
4. My justification for “classical” is that the form of deontology in question was suggested by the philosopher—Broad—who introduced the term “deontology” in its now standard philosophical sense. I also considered “Rossian deontology,” but thought it too likely to suggest that the question how to interpret Ross was not substantive. As I say in what follows, I do intend it to be a substantive question whether Ross is best interpreted as a classical deontologist or as (for example) a value-based intuitionist.
5. Unlike Ross, who standardly italicizes “prima facie,” I will not do so to avoid cluttering the text with italics.
6. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), 11.
7. Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3.
8. See in particular Robert Audi, The Good in the Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
9. For these ideas, see in particular Thomas Hurka, “Moore in the Middle,” Ethics 113 (2003): 599–628; “Introduction” and “Common Themes from Sidgwick to Ewing,” in Thomas Hurka, ed., Underivative Duty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and, for the fullest presentation, Thomas Hurka, British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Hurka initially presented his view as a corrective to the idea that Moore’s work represented a “clean break” from earlier ethical theorizing. (Interestingly, though of course she is much less of a fan than Hurka, Anscombe also identifies something like a Sidgwick-to-Ewing school in
“Modern Moral Philosophy.” The difference between her and Hurka is that she includes the postwar “Oxford Moralists,” including Hare and Nowell-Smith, as well as the prewar “Oxford Objectivists” like Ross.) For a brief expression of skepticism about whether the philosophers Hurka includes constitute a school see Bart Schultz’s review of Underivative Duty, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20.6 (2012): 1223–26. One might object, as Schultz there does, that Hurka’s conception of the dimensions of the school is too expansive. One might alternatively object that his conception is too restrictive, and that earlier important rational intuitionists like Clarke and Price should be included too. Ross refers to Clarke and Price only once in RG and the Foundations: in a note on page 54 of the Foundations about defining rightness in terms of fitness or suitability. The eighteenth-century figure he cites more and seems more deeply influenced by is Butler. He quotes at length from the Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue on pages 78–79 of the Foundations in arguing against utilitarianism; and (as I discuss in chapter 4), the differences between his treatment of moral goodness in The Right and the Good and the Foundations are to a large extent the product of complicating the psychological picture by incorporating Butler’s distinction between general and particular desires.
10. H. A. Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Mind 21 (January 1912): 21–37.
11. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930). I will refer to it as Five Types; further page references will be placed in the text.
12. C. D. Broad, “Critical Notice of W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1939),” Mind, new series, 49 (April 1940): 239.
13. Thomas Hurka, “Audi’s Marriage of Ross and Kant,” chapter 6 in Mark Timmons, John Greco, and Al. Mele, eds., Rationality and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
