"What Makes Right Acts Right" Article Review

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Right Acts Right?" By W.D Ross

Ross shuns Mill's utilitarianism as well as Kant's deontology, asserting that ethics can't be reduced to any single good, as is claimed by these theories. Instead, he writes that moral acts are those that generate the greatest good; 'good', here, can imply many, diverse things, including pleasures and duties. He starts off the essay by assessing what individuals take into consideration while deliberating about what action to take. When an individual reflects on a promise he/she made, the individual normally doesn't consider it with regard to its consequences. Furthermore, keeping the promise isn't thought of as good because it results in the best outcomes (What makes right acts right, n.d.). Under ordinary circumstances, the word 'promise' itself suffices to demand that the promise be kept; however, this obligation can be annulled if breaking of the promise does more substantial good. Ross contends that, instead of any one simple principle of how one must act, there are numerous ethically relevant facts (like, one's will, relationships, consequences, etc.) that create a conditional or prima facie duty. Therefore, in the absence of any significant countervailing concern, an individual has a conditional duty to abide by the promise, be truthful, be nice to friends, etc. To ascertain whether one has an actual (or proper) duty, one must consider all the morally relevant particulars of one's situation (What makes right acts right, n.d.).

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The author has come up with a number of conditional duties (i.e. duties arising from promises, from previous relationships, from outcomes, from one's wrongdoings, etc.), to compare his approach with utilitarianism. While the latter is an essentially simple theory, compared to his list of duties, he believes that it doesn't possess adequate explanatory power. One could, for instance, create the same amount of overall happiness through aiding a stranger, rather than a friend; utilitarian theories don't offer any reason for choosing to aid a friend. Ross, however, writes that one, obviously, must help the friend, his conditional-duties list accounting for this choice; according to Ross, this is a more explanatorily-strong principle than utilitarianism. As no theoretical reason exists to presume that moral values need to be reduced to any one good (e.g. pleasure), he believes that the right act can best be understood when considering a number of goods (What makes right acts right, n.d.).

Ross's essay arrives at a concept of prima facie (conditional) duty; his essay has been deemed by some modern authors as worthy of being integrated with a revised version of some of Kant's deontology aspects.….....

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