Ross is an interesting case. Basically, he defines what I would call moral intuitions as “prima facie duties.” (I am not sure what ontological standing he thinks these duties have.) He then lists six important ones: beneficence, honour, non-maleficence, justice, self-improvement and… goodness, I forget the 6th. But essentially, all of these duties are important, and one determines the rightness of an act by reflection—the most stringent duty wins and becomes the actual moral duty.
E.g., you promised a friend that you would meet them, but on the way you come upon the scene of a car crash. A person is injured, and you have first aid training. So basically Ross says we have a prima facie duty to keep the promise (honour), but also to help the motorist (beneficence), and the more stringent one (beneficence) wins.
I like about it that: it adds up to normality, without weird consequences like act utilitarianism (harvest the traveler’s organs) or Kantianism (don’t lie to the murderer).
I don’t like about it that: it adds up to normality, i.e., it doesn’t ever tell me anything I don’t want to hear! Since my moral intuitions are what decides the question, the whole thing functions as a big rubber stamp on What I Already Thought. I can probably find some knuckle-dragging bigot within a 1-km radius who has a moral intuition that fags must die. He reads Ross & says: “Yeah, this guy agrees with me!” So there is a wrong moral intuition. On the other hand, before reading Peter Singer (a consequentialist), I didn’t think it was obligatory to give aid to foreign victims of starvation & preventable disease; now I think it is as obligatory as, in his gedanken experiment, pulling a kid out of a pond right beside you (even though you’ll ruin your running shoes). Ross would not have made me think of that; whatever “seemed” right to me, would be right.
I am also really, really suspicious of the a priori and the prima facie. It seems very handwavy to jump straight to these “duties” when the whole point is to arrive at them from something that is not morality—either consequences or through some sort of symmetry.
“The whole thing functions as a big rubber stamp on What I Already Thought”
Speaking as a (probably biased) consequentialist, I generally got the impression that this was pretty much the whole point of Deontology.
However, the example of Kant being against lying seems to go against my impression. Kantian deontology is based on reasoning things about your rules, so it seems to be consistent in that case.
Still, it seems to me that more mainstream Deontology allows you to simply make up new categories of acts (ex. lying is wrong, but lying to murderers is OK) in order to justify your intuitive response to a thought experiment. How common is it for Deontologists to go “yeah, this action has utterly horrific consequences, but that’s fine because it’s the correct action”, the way it is for Consequentialists to do the reverse?
(again noting that I’ve now heard about the example of Kant, I might be confusing Deontology with “inuitive morality” or “the noncentral fallacy”.)
Ross is an interesting case. Basically, he defines what I would call moral intuitions as “prima facie duties.” (I am not sure what ontological standing he thinks these duties have.) He then lists six important ones: beneficence, honour, non-maleficence, justice, self-improvement and… goodness, I forget the 6th. But essentially, all of these duties are important, and one determines the rightness of an act by reflection—the most stringent duty wins and becomes the actual moral duty.
E.g., you promised a friend that you would meet them, but on the way you come upon the scene of a car crash. A person is injured, and you have first aid training. So basically Ross says we have a prima facie duty to keep the promise (honour), but also to help the motorist (beneficence), and the more stringent one (beneficence) wins.
I like about it that: it adds up to normality, without weird consequences like act utilitarianism (harvest the traveler’s organs) or Kantianism (don’t lie to the murderer).
I don’t like about it that: it adds up to normality, i.e., it doesn’t ever tell me anything I don’t want to hear! Since my moral intuitions are what decides the question, the whole thing functions as a big rubber stamp on What I Already Thought. I can probably find some knuckle-dragging bigot within a 1-km radius who has a moral intuition that fags must die. He reads Ross & says: “Yeah, this guy agrees with me!” So there is a wrong moral intuition. On the other hand, before reading Peter Singer (a consequentialist), I didn’t think it was obligatory to give aid to foreign victims of starvation & preventable disease; now I think it is as obligatory as, in his gedanken experiment, pulling a kid out of a pond right beside you (even though you’ll ruin your running shoes). Ross would not have made me think of that; whatever “seemed” right to me, would be right.
I am also really, really suspicious of the a priori and the prima facie. It seems very handwavy to jump straight to these “duties” when the whole point is to arrive at them from something that is not morality—either consequences or through some sort of symmetry.
“The whole thing functions as a big rubber stamp on What I Already Thought”
Speaking as a (probably biased) consequentialist, I generally got the impression that this was pretty much the whole point of Deontology.
However, the example of Kant being against lying seems to go against my impression. Kantian deontology is based on reasoning things about your rules, so it seems to be consistent in that case.
Still, it seems to me that more mainstream Deontology allows you to simply make up new categories of acts (ex. lying is wrong, but lying to murderers is OK) in order to justify your intuitive response to a thought experiment. How common is it for Deontologists to go “yeah, this action has utterly horrific consequences, but that’s fine because it’s the correct action”, the way it is for Consequentialists to do the reverse? (again noting that I’ve now heard about the example of Kant, I might be confusing Deontology with “inuitive morality” or “the noncentral fallacy”.)