The Right and the Good

W. D. Ross's The Right and the Good is clearly one of the preeminent works of twentieth-century ethical theory. Indeed, I'm not sure that any other book I've read provides a more plausible account of the nature of everyday moral thinking. (While I'm not sure that everyday moral thought is predicated upon the more recherche elements of Ross's meta-ethical views--namely his intuitionism and his non-naturalism--it seems to me that his pluralism and his deontological theory of rightness are supported by common-sense moral thinking.)Here Ross gives the first fully developed statement of his intuitionism, which is significantly influenced by the views of G. E. Moore and H. A. Prichard. Ross tends to set up his longer chapters as responses to the views of others, and often his sparring partner is Moore. This makes Ross's work invaluable to anyone trying to work their way through Moore's Principia. While Ross agrees with Moore on many of the central issues in ethics--with the very important exception of his repudiation of Moore's consequentialism--he's quick to take Moore to task when they disagree about details or about how best to formulate certain arguments. Actually, it seems to me that this book is much better than Moore's more famous work. Of central importance to philosophers are the facts that Ross's prose is clearer and less convoluted, and that his arguments are often more convincing. It's also clear that he benefited from debate about Moore's work, as he's careful not to make the sorts of glaring errors that Moore often seems to make. Moreover, Ross is somewhat less elusive about epistemological issues concerning ethics than Moore was. While his intuitionism doesn't leave room for much to say about ethical epistemology, he says more than Moore did and what he does say is somewhat more plausible. Still, this is a book that requires some work. Ross tends to present his arguments--and there are lots and lots of arguments here--in an extremely compressed form. This is a patient and painstaking book, and the reader should know that going in. The first two chapters of Ross's book are concerned with the term 'right'. This is term that we use to pick out what we ought to do, what our moral obligations are. This part of Ross's book draws on and extends Prichard's work while arguing against Moore's ideal utilitarianism. The first chapter concerns the definition of the term 'right.' Against Moore's view that right actions were, by definition, those that produced the greatest amount of intrinsic goodness in the universe, Ross argues that 'right' is indefinable. However, unlike Prichard, Ross doesn't conclude from this that there is nothing much to be said about what makes right acts right. And in the justly famous second chapter, Ross goes on to say something about the nature of rightness. Here Ross introduces his notion of prima facie duties. Being a prima facie duty is "the characteristic ... which an act has, in virtue of

Sir David Ross's _The Right and the Good_, first published in 1930, is a classic statement of modern deontological ethics. The question at issue here is: Which ethical term is primary -- "right" or "good"? And Ross's answer is that "right" is primary.His own statement of his thesis is as follows: "An act is not right because it, being one thing, produces good results different from itself; it is right because it is itself the production of a certain state of affairs. Such production is right in itself, apart from any consequence."Not that we must perform "right" acts even though the heavens fall. What Ross argues is that certain sorts of "right" act are _prima facie_ duties, with morally binding _claims_ on our attention that may nevertheless be overruled by other considerations/duties.In short, this volume is a clear and succinct statement of a twentieth-century development of Kantian deontological ethics, of interest to readers of (say) Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, and Alan Gewirth -- and also to ethical consequentialists and teleologists who want to understand what the opposition is all about. (Brand Blanshard, himself a teleologist, offers a nice critique of Ross's views in _Reason and Goodness_.)It's also, by the way, a nice cure for the misrepresentations of pseudophilosopher Ayn Rand, who tried her darnedest to give "duty" a bad name in order to make room for a more-or-less-Nietzschean ethical subjectivism she called (chuckle) "Objectivism."(I mention that because somebody is going through all my reviews and clicking "Not helpful" on any in which I say anything negative about Rand. Click away, you rational Objectivist, you!)