W. D. Ross

William David Ross
Born	(1877-04-15)15 April 1877 Thurso, Scotland
Died	5 May 1971(1971-05-05) (aged 94) Oxford, England
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh Balliol College, Oxford
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Ethics, Greek philosophy
Notable ideas	Deontological pluralism (ethical non-naturalism / ethical intuitionism / ethical pluralism), prima facie moral duties, criticism of consequentialism
Influences Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, G. E. Moore, H. A. Prichard
Influenced Robert Audi, Tara Smith, Bernard Gert

Sir William David Ross, KBE, FBA (15 April 1877 – 5 May 1971), known as David Ross but usually cited as W. D. Ross, was a Scottish philosopher who is known for his work in ethics. His best-known work is The Right and the Good (1930), and he is perhaps best known for developing a pluralist, deontological form of intuitionist ethics in response to G. E. Moore's intuitionism. Ross also critically edited and translated a number of Aristotle's works, in addition to writing on Greek philosophy.

His accomplishments include his work with John Alexander Smith on a 12-volume translation of Aristotle.

Life

William David Ross was born in Thurso, Caithness in the north of Scotland the son of John Ross (1835-1905).

He spent most of his first six years as a child in southern India. He was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and the University of Edinburgh. In 1895, he gained a first class MA degree in classics. He completed his studies at Balliol College, Oxford, with a First in Classical Moderations in 1898 and a First in Literae Humaniores ('Greats', a combination of philosophy and ancient history) in 1900. He was appointed to a lectureship at Merton College in 1900, and elected to a tutorial fellowship at Oriel College in October 1902.

Ross joined the army in 1915. During World War I, he worked in the Ministry of Munitions and was a major on the special list. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 in recognition of his services during the war, and was promoted to a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1938.

Ross was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy (1923–1928), Provost of Oriel College, Oxford (1929–1947), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1941 to 1944 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1944–1947). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1939 to 1940. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and was its President 1940–1944. Of the many governmental committees on which he served was as chair of the Civil Service Tribunal, on which one of his two colleagues was Leonard Woolf, who thought that the whole system of fixing governmental remuneration should be done on the same basis as the US model (of dividing the civil service into a relatively small number of pay grades). Ross did not agree with this radical proposal. In 1947 he was appointed chairman of the first Royal Commission on the Press, United Kingdom.

The Ross family grave, Grange Cemetery

He died in Oxford on 5 May 1971. He is memorialised on his parents grave in the Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh.

Family

His younger brother was Rev Donald George Ross (1879-1943).

He married Edith Ogden in 1906 and they had four daughters, Margaret (who married Robin Harrison), Eleanor, Rosalind (who married John Miller Martin), and Katharine. Edith died in 1953.

He was a cousin of Berriedale Keith.

Ross's ethical theory

W. D. Ross was a moral realist, a non-naturalist, and an intuitionist. He argued that there are moral truths. He wrote:

The moral order...is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and...of any possible universe in which there are moral agents at all) as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.

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.

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 most good. 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.

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. 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 your children on a promised trip to the park, and these could conflict. Nonetheless, there can never be a true ethical dilemma, Ross would argue, 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:

It may be helpful to note explicitly that in distinguishing between pro tanto and prima facie reasons I depart from the unfortunate terminology proposed by Ross, which has invited confusion and misunderstanding. I take it that – despite his misleading label – it is actually pro tanto reasons that Ross has in mind in his discussion of what he calls prima facie duties.

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".

Selected works

• 1908: Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1923: Aristotle
• 1924: Aristotle's Metaphysics
• 1927: 'The Basis of Objective Judgments in Ethics'. International Journal of Ethics, 37:113–127.
• 1930: The Right and the Good
• 1936: Aristotle's Physics
• 1939: Foundations of Ethics
• 1949: Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics
• 1951: Plato's Theory of Ideas
• 1954: Kant's Ethical Theory

Further reading

• Cooley, Ken. Sir David Ross's Pluralistic Theory of Duty (The Beginnings) (includes biographical details).
• Stout, A. K. 1967. 'Ross, William David'. In P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan: 216–217.
• Stratton-Lake, Philip. 2002. 'Introduction'. In Ross, W. D. 1930. The Right and the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Timmons, Mark. 2003. 'Moral Writings and The Right and the Good'. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

External links

• Skelton, Anthony. "William David Ross". In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "William David Ross" by David L. Simpson in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012
• William David Ross a biography and online lectures at the Gifford Lectures website
• L’ordine del bene, l’ordine del giusto e il soggetto pratico. Visione e opacità in etica tra Moore, Ross e Murdoch di Riccardo Fanciullacci, essay from [ Diapsalmata]

Academic offices
Preceded by Lancelot Ridley Phelps	Provost of Oriel College, Oxford 1929–1947	Succeeded by George Clark
Preceded by George Stuart Gordon	Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University 1941–1944	Succeeded by Richard Winn Livingstone