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In The Right and the Good, Ross lists seven prima facie duties, without claiming his list to be all-inclusive: 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.
The Right and the Good is a 1930 book by the Scottish philosopher David Ross.In it, Ross develops a deontological pluralism based on prima facie duties.Ross defends a realist position about morality and an intuitionist position about moral knowledge.
The phrase prima facie is sometimes misspelled prima facia in the mistaken belief that facia is the actual Latin word; however, faciē is in fact the ablative case of faciēs, a fifth declension Latin noun. In policy debate theory, prima facie is used to describe the mandates or planks of an affirmative case, or, in some rare cases, a negative ...
Moderate objectivism adheres to basic notions of the Natural Law Theory. W. D. Ross refers to these moderate objectivists' accounts of moral principles as "prima facie principles" which are valid rules of action that one should generally adhere to but, in cases of moral conflict, may be overridable by another moral principle, hence the moderation.
He contends that there is a plurality (7, although this number is seen to vary to interpretation) of prima facie duties determining what is right. [19] [20]: xii These duties are identified by W. D. Ross: the duty of fidelity (to keep promises and to tell the truth) the duty of reparation (to make amends for wrongful acts)
[2]: 8 In spite of their neglect of the period of British moral philosophy between Sidgwick and the Second World War, Prichard's "Mistake" was among the few works of that period (alongside Moore's Principia Ethica and the chapter of Ross's The Right and the Good on prima facie duties) which continued to be read. [2]: 2
A prima facie right is a right that can be outweighed by other considerations. It stands in contrast with absolute rights , which cannot be outweighed by anything. Some authors consider an absolute right as a prima facie right, but one that cannot be outweighed in any possible situation. [ 1 ]
This consideration has led ethicists to agree in a general way that positive obligations are usually junior to negative obligations, as they are not reliably prima facie. Some critics of positive rights implicitly suggest that because positive obligations are not reliably prima facie, they must always be agreed to through contract. [1]