Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T00:52:46.991Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ross on Self and Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2014

ROBERT SHAVER
ROBERT SHAVER*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Ross suggests a trilemma:

  1. (i) Innocent pleasure is good as an end.

  2. (ii) I have a prima facie duty to produce what is good as an end.

  3. (iii) I have no prima facie duty to produce innocent pleasure for myself.

In The Right and the Good, he denies (iii). In Foundations of Ethics, he denies (i). Neither of these solutions is satisfactory. One ought instead to deny (ii). I close by considering a similar trilemma concerning justice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 303 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Parenthetical references are to Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Oxford, 2002 [1930]) (RG)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1939) (FE); ‘The Nature of Morally Good Action’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 29 (1928–29), pp. 251–74 (MGA).

2 In what follows, I omit the restriction to innocent pleasures and take as understood that the good in question is good as an end, since nothing here turns on these restrictions. Ross's expression ‘prima facie good’ in effect restricts the pleasures to innocent ones, but is itself problematic. For the problems, see Stratton-Lake, Philip, ‘Pleasure and Reflection in Ross's Intuitionism’, Ethical Intuitionism, ed. Stratton-Lake, (Oxford, 2002), pp. 125–7Google Scholar.

3 In this context, Stratton-Lake suggests guilt as a test for the presence of a prima facie duty (Introduction to The Right and the Good, p. xli; ‘Pleasure’’, p. 130). Ross adds, as a further test, that we feel ‘that it is our duty to make up somehow’ for the failure to discharge the overridden duty (RG 28). Presumably this test does not apply to duties to ourselves. Even for virtue and knowledge, I do not think I have a duty to myself to make up for missing out on them.

4 Joseph Butler, A Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue, in Butler, Five Sermons (Indianapolis, 1983), para. 6.

5 This case is given against Ross's Foundations account by Ewing, A. C., ‘A Suggested Non-Naturalistic Analysis of Good’, Mind 48 (1939), pp. 1–22, at 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stocker, Michael, ‘Agent and Other: Against Ethical Universalism’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 54 (1976), pp. 206–20, at 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurka, Thomas, Virtue, Vice, and Value (New York: 2003), p. 209Google Scholar; Thomas Hurka and Esther Shubert, ‘Permissions To Do Less Than the Best: A Moving Band’, forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, p. 11. Carritt, E. F. (Ethical and Political Thinking (Oxford, 1947), p. 114)) and Ewing (‘Utilitarianism’, Ethics 58 (1948), pp. 100–11, at 107) give the case while not mentioning RossGoogle Scholar. (Stocker claims that if I take the great pleasure for myself, I am ‘not failing to fulfil any duty’, and that if I produce the tiny pleasure in another, I am ‘not fulfilling a duty, but rather doing more than duty’. Since Ross can plausibly claim that there is a prima facie duty to produce pleasure in others, this is contentious. But this Stocker claim can be separated from his more persuasive point that I am permitted to take the great pleasure for myself.)

6 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis, 1981 [1907]), p. 432. For the same point, see Ewing, ‘Utilitarianism’, p. 108.

7 Sidgwick, Methods, p. 432.

8 Broad, C. D., ‘Self and Others’, Broad's Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Cheney, David (London, 1971), pp. 262–82, at 274–5Google Scholar. (Earlier, Broad agreed with Ross: ‘I understand Ross to hold that no one has any obligation to give himself pleasures, and this is certainly in accordance with common sense’ (‘Critical Notice of Foundations of Ethics’, Mind 49 (1940), pp. 223–39, at 237).) Carritt also notes, by implication, the difference in our reactions to large and small imprudences: ‘We do sometimes praise a man for sacrificing his own enjoyments to the slightly lesser ones of other people’ (Carritt, Ethical, p. 115, emphasis in original).

9 Carritt, Ethical, p. 114. Carritt might be wrong about the need for a duty to myself, since there could be permissions that override the duty to keep the promise.

10 Butler, Dissertation, para. 6. Price, Richard, in A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (London, 1787)Google Scholar, writes that it ‘is too absurd to be maintained by any one, that no relation which an action may have to our own happiness or misery, can (supposing other beings unconcerned) have any influence in determining whether it is or is not to be done . . . If it is my duty to promote the good of another . . . the same . . . must be my duty with regard to myself . . . It would be contrary to all reason . . . to assert that . . . the advantage an action will produce to another makes it right to be done, but that an equal advantage to myself leaves me at liberty to do or omit it . . . [A]n undue neglect of our own good . . . however hurtful to none but the agent himself, is vicious and criminal: The guilty person deserves the severest reproaches’ (pp. 248–9, 251). Price cites Butler for the explanation of why we do not blame imprudence as much as other vices (pp. 252–3).

11 Hurka, Thomas, ‘Common Themes from Sidgwick to Ewing’, Underivative Duty, ed. Hurka, (Oxford, 2011), pp. 6–25, at 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stratton-Lake, ‘Eliminativism about Derivative Prima Facie Duties’, Underivative, pp. 146–65, at 148 n. 8. I discuss the issue below.

12 Ewing notes a similar case at ‘Utilitarianism’, p. 108; The Definition of Good (New York, 1947), pp. 151, 161–2; Second Thoughts in Moral Philosophy (New York, 1959), p. 112.

13 Prichard, H. A., Moral Writings (Oxford, 2002) pp. 10 n. 4, 135, 171, 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Derek Parfit also thinks the common view is that imprudence is not morally wrong, though he thinks that this view should be corrected once one comes to think, on the basis of adopting his account of personal identity, that imprudence need not be irrational (Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pp. 318–20).

14 Even in The Right and the Good, Ross does not include the duty to produce pleasure in oneself in his summary of prima facie duties (RG 21–2). And he finds no virtue in desiring one's own pleasure, although there is virtue in desiring all other goods (RG 168). (I owe the latter point to Tom Hurka.) Perhaps he was already moving to the Foundations view.

15 In giving ‘sympathetic’ no role, I think I disagree with Stratton-Lake. He presents Ross as requiring that the sympathy be sympathetic to avoid the result that I have a duty to produce pleasure in myself (‘Pleasure’, p. 131). On my view, what avoids this duty is the thought that my pleasure is not a worthy object of satisfaction to me.

16 I owe this worry to Jamie Hebert.

17 Broad, ‘Critical Notice’, p. 237; Stratton-Lake, ‘Pleasure’, p. 132. Stratton-Lake thinks that, to avoid his objection, Ross must deny that there is a prima facie duty to promote the good, by holding the Scanlonian view that promotion is only one response to the good, a response one sometimes should not have (pp. 133–4). (Scanlon argues, for example, that valuing friendship does not involve producing more of it, at least in a case in which I could acquire more friends for myself by ditching my current friend.) Stratton-Lake thinks we should ‘reject . . . any modified version of this duty [to promote the good]’ (p. 134). But (a) it is not clear why the modification to (ii) I suggest does not work. (b) Since the duty is prima facie, the issue is whether, in the friendship or pleasure examples, there is a reason to acquire more friends or pleasure; there might be such a reason, even if it is outweighed by other, non-producing reasons. (c) Whether Scanlon does show that valuing friendship is not a matter of producing more of it is controversial (see, for example, Pettit, Philip, ‘A Consequentialist Perspective on Contractualism’, Theoria 66 (2000), pp. 228–36, at 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shaver, Robert, ‘Principia Then and Now’, Utilitas 15 (2003), pp. 261–78, at 271–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurka, Thomas, ‘Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View’, Utilitas 18 (2006), pp. 603–17)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (d) As Scanlon notes, pleasure does seem properly valued by producing it. If my own pleasure is an exception, the explanation will rest on something special about my relation to my pleasure, as Ross thinks. Rejecting the view that promotion is the only correct response to the good will not suffice.

18 Ross stipulates that the pleasure is ‘widespread’ (RG 135), so he might reply that there is no inconsistency. But I think Ross's thought experiment works even when the extra pleasure is not stipulated to be widespread.

19 Slote, Michael, ‘Morality and Self–Other Asymmetry’, Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), pp. 179–92, at 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Carritt notes that ‘we do find some goodness in the capacity, even among the discontents of age, to prize rather than regret memories of a happy youth’ (Ethical, p. 122). For one account of when I can be criticized, see Hurka, Virtue, pp. 210–11.

21 For one discussion, see Hurka, Virtue, pp. 207–8.

22 When Stocker rejects a duty to produce pleasure or avoid pain in oneself, he too notes that doing so is not ‘obligatory’ and that there is no ‘moral obligation’ to do so (207, 208, 210). But he notes that failing to produce pleasure or avoid pain in oneself can still be criticized as, for example, ‘unreasonable’, or ‘bad to do and good not to do’ (‘Agent’, p. 211).

23 Crisp, Roger, Reasons and the Good (Oxford, 2006), p. 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parfit, Reasons, p. 452.

24 Stratton-Lake, who (very plausibly) favours this interpretation of prima facie duties, associates them with specifically moral reasons. He notes that ‘not all reasons are such as to ground duties. For instance, the fact that my act will benefit me may make it the case that I ought to do this act, but cannot, I think, plausibly be said to make it the case that I have a duty to do this act’ (‘Eliminativism’, p. 149). But he also notes that Ross thinks only moral ‘oughts’ are normative (see below), and so implies that Ross could not say (in a normative sense) that the fact that my act will benefit me makes it the case that I ought to do that act (‘Eliminativism’, p. 148 n. 8).

25 Hurka, ‘Common Themes’, pp. 9–11.

26 Sidgwick, Methods, pp. 25, 119.

27 For the same charge against Prichard, see Shaver, Robert, ‘H. A. Prichard’, International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. LaFollette, Hugh (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.

28 Hurka, ‘Common Themes’, p. 9. I say ‘might’ because if ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, and I cannot give up the end, it seems that even the wide-scope reading has the consequence that I ought to adopt the bad means. (I owe this worry to Damian Melamedoff.) For one recent discussion, with references to the literature, see Way, Jonathan, ‘Defending the Wide-Scope Approach to Instrumental Reason’, Philosophical Studies 147 (2010), pp. 213–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Hurka suggests that Ross might treat epistemic ‘oughts’ as hypothetical imperatives, and so as not making ‘ought’ claims (‘Common Themes’, p. 9 n. 11). Ross seems to suggest instead treating epistemically desirable states of affairs as good, adding that there is a moral duty to produce them.

30 Ewing, Definition, p. 160; also Definition, pp. 133, 162–3, 194; ‘Suggested’, pp. 3, 8; Second Thoughts, pp. 92, 111–14.

31 Ewing, Definition, p. 151; also ‘Utilitarianism’, p. 108 and The Morality of Punishment (Montclair, NJ, 1970 [1929]), p. 3n. Since the last was published well before Foundations, derives from a thesis Ross examined and contains a foreword by Ross, it is surprising that Ross did not pay attention to Ewing's view.

32 Ewing, ‘Suggested’, p. 20. For the same point as Ewing makes, see Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford, 2011), vol. 1, p. 372. Ewing sometimes suggests that the ‘ought’ of moral obligation can be analysed in part by the ‘ought’ of fittingness, but later rejects this possibility (see ‘Suggested’, p. 14; Definition, pp. 168–9; Definition, pp. 170–1, 184; Second Thoughts, pp. 90, 95–6; Value and Reality (New York, 1973), pp. 189–90).

33 Ewing, ‘Suggested’, pp. 13–14; Definition, pp. 133, 150–1, 165, 171; Second Thoughts, p. 92.

34 For authority, see Definition, pp. 170–1; Value, pp. 189–91. Ewing also seems to hold, at least in Definition, that one violates a moral obligation only when one acts in a way contrary to what one takes to be most fitting (pp. 120–1, 130–33, 135, 168, 189–90). One could give the reply to Ross noted in the text without believing this.

35 Ewing also suggests (especially in later works) that there is a moral obligation to produce pleasure in oneself (Definition, pp. 161–2, 194; Second Thoughts, pp. 112–14). His overall position, then, seems to be that there is a moral obligation to produce pleasure in oneself – and that even those who deny this obligation must admit that it is fitting to produce pleasure in oneself. He sometimes describes his position as capturing a prima facie duty to produce pleasure in oneself (e.g. ‘Suggested’, p. 20). Similarly, he argues that his analysis of ‘good’ in terms of fittingness collapses the distinction between Ross and consequentialists (e.g. ‘Suggested’, p. 10). But this is true only if prima facie duties are not restricted to (what Ewing calls) moral obligations. Thanks to Tom Hurka for pressing me on Ewing's overall position.

36 Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 1, pp. 137–41. An alternative, favoured by Hurka and Shubert, is to think the permission is brute. They note that it cannot be explained on the basis of conflict between a reason to produce pleasure in oneself and a reason to produce pleasure impartially (p. 10). In Case I, those reasons both favour my not making the large sacrifice. But Ross, on the suggestion I offer, says there is a reason to produce pleasure in others, not impartially (as Hurka and Shubert note in a different context, p. 18). (Hurka and Shubert (and others) do raise further worries about justifying permissions on the basis of reasons. These would need to be addressed.)

37 See Definition, pp. 189, 193–4. Since Ewing downplays fittingness in favour of moral obligation in Second Thoughts, this may not be his final view. He also sometimes states ideal utilitarianism in terms of prima facie duties (‘Suggested’, p. 10; Definition, pp. 188–9; Ethics (New York, 1953), p. 77), perhaps because he does not identify prima facie duties with moral obligation (e.g. ‘Suggested’, p. 20; Definition, pp. 119–20, 189).

38 Howard-Snyder, Francis, ‘The Heart of Consequentialism’, Philosophical Studies 76 (1994), pp. 107–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Norcross, Alastair, ‘The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism’, Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, ed. West, Henry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 217–32; Crisp, Reasons, ch. 1Google Scholar.

39 This suggests that only activities are worthy objects of admiration. But since Ross thinks knowledge is a worthy object of admiration, he cannot restrict worthy admiration to activities. Perhaps his tendency in Foundations to value the ‘activity of the mind which leads to knowledge’ more than the knowledge itself shows that, in the end, Ross would say that knowledge is not a worthy object of admiration (e.g. FE 270; also 266, 267, 269, 282–3, 284).

40 Thanks to Tom Hurka, Joyce Jenkins, Jeff Verman, Sandy Vettese, Andrew Webb, and an audience at Manitoba.