Ross was a
moral realist, a non-naturalist, and an
intuitionist. He argued that there are moral truths. He wrote: Thus, according to Ross, the claim that something is good is true if that thing really is good. Ross also agreed with
G. E. Moore's claim that any attempt to define ethical statements solely in terms of statements about the natural world commits the
naturalistic fallacy. Furthermore, the terms
right and
good are "indefinable". This means not only that they cannot be defined in terms of natural properties but also that it is not possible to define one in terms of the other. Ross rejected Moore's
consequentialist ethics. According to consequentialist theories, what people ought to do is determined only by whether their actions will bring about the best. By contrast, Ross argues that maximising the good is only one of several
prima facie duties (prima facie obligations) which play a role in determining what a person ought to do in any given case.
Duties In
The Right and the Good, Ross lists seven
prima facie duties, without claiming his list to be exhaustive: fidelity; reparation; gratitude; justice; beneficence; non-maleficence; and self-improvement. In any given situation, any number of these prima facie duties may apply. In the case of ethical dilemmas, they may even contradict one another. Someone could have a prima facie duty of reparation, say, a duty to help people who helped you move house, move house themselves, and a prima facie duty of fidelity, such as taking one's children on a promised trip to the park, and these could conflict. Nonetheless, there can never be a true ethical dilemma, Ross argued, because one of the prima facie duties in a given situation is always the weightiest, and over-rules all the others. This is thus the
absolute obligation or
absolute duty, the action that the person ought to perform. It is frequently argued, however, that Ross should have used the term
pro tanto rather than
prima facie.
Shelly Kagan, for example, wrote: Explaining the difference between pro tanto and prima facie, Kagan wrote: "A
pro tanto reason has genuine weight, but nonetheless may be outweighed by other considerations. Thus, calling a reason a pro tanto reason is to be distinguished from calling it a
prima facie reason, which I take to involve an epistemological qualification: a prima facie reason
appears to be a reason, but may actually not be a reason at all." Virtue refers to actions or dispositions to act from the appropriate motives, for example, from the desire to do one's duty. He goes so far as to suggest that "
no amount of pleasure is equal to any amount of virtue, that in fact virtue belongs to a higher order of value". This ability is not inborn but has to be developed on the way to reaching mental maturity. But in its fully developed form, we can know moral truths just as well as we can know mathematical truths like the axioms of geometry or arithmetic. This self-evident knowledge is limited to general principles: we can come to know the
prima facie duties this way but not our
absolute duty in a particular situation: what we should do all things considered. Additionally there is no consideration of the consequence of the action undertaken, as with all deontological approaches. Ross's deontological pluralism was a true innovation and provided a plausible alternative to
Kantian deontology. His ethical intuitionism found few followers among his contemporaries but has seen a revival by the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Among the philosophers influenced by
The Right and the Good are Philip Stratton-Lake,
Robert Audi,
Michael Huemer, and
C. D. Broad. ==Selected works==