William David Ross

Sir William David Ross KBE (15 April, 1877– 5 May, 1971) was a Scottish philosopher, known for work in ethics and for his work on Aristotle. He also published a book on Plato that understands and presents Plato from the point of view of an Aristotelian. His best known work is The Right and The Good (1930). His ethics is a form of deontology which sprang from a response to G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. Ross's ethics also provides a response to the limitations of and even some possible perversities within Immanuel Kant's deontological system.

Life

William David Ross was born in Thurso, Caithness, in the north of Scotland. 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, and gained a lectureship at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1900, followed by a fellowship in 1902.

Ross was 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 knighted in 1928.

He married Edith Ogden in 1906 and they had four daughters (Margaret, Rosalind, Eleanor, Katharine). Edith died in 1953 and he died in Oxford in 1971.

Ross's Ethics

The relationship of Ross's ideas with Moore's stems from Ross's agreement with Moore that any attempt to define ethical predicates wholly in terms of natural predicates commits the naturalistic fallacy. But, Ross argues, Moore's consequentialist ethics actually commits its own fallacy in positing good-maximization as the only content of the moral ought.

Instead, Ross argued, the maximization of good is only one of several prima facie (ostensive) obligations which play a role in determining the content of the moral ought in any given case. Ross gives a list of other such obligations, which he does not claim is all-inclusive. In any given situation, any number of prima facie obligations may apply, and in the case of ethical dilemmas, they may even contradict one another. Nonetheless, there can never be a true ethical dilemma, Ross would argue, because one of the prima facie obligations in a given situation is always the weightiest, and overrules all the others. This is thus the absolute obligation.

Immanuel Kant's ethics, based on the categorical imperative, did not admit that one ethical duty could be overriden by another because, in Kant's view, ethical duties are categorical, meaning without exceptions. Thus Kant argued that it is always wrong to tell a lie. That ethical stance or principle, however, could lead to perverse consequences, as in the case, for example, where you are hiding an innocent person in your house, and his enemy who is trying to hunt him down and kill him comes to your door and asks whether he is there. By Kant's ethics you could not tell the questioner a lie and say that the person being sought is not in your house. But Ross's ethics, based on prima facie duties, can create—even within the context of deontological ethics and without resorting to utilitarianism—a hierarchy of duties, so that the prima facie duty not to tell a lie is overridden by a higher duty, namely to protect the innocent person from his enemy who wants to kill him.

Ross's Work on Aristotle

Aristotle's work is frequently difficult for students to grasp for various reasons, not the least of which is the state of the text that comes down to us as the work of Aristotle. Thus students of Aristotle usually need help in undertaking a study of his work, and numerous such works on Aristotle have been produced. Ross's short book—just under three hundred pages—entitled simply Aristotle (first pub. 1923) is one of the best expositions of Aristotle ever produced. In his Preface Ross wrote, "I have ... tried simply to give an account of the main features of his philosophy as it stands before us in his works. I have written little by way of criticism."

Selected works

• Aristotle (1923)
• The Right and the Good (1930)
• Foundations of Ethics (1939)
• Plato's Theory of Ideas (1951)
• Kant's Ethical Theory (1954)

See also

• List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of Oxford

External link

• Sir David Ross's Pluralistic Theory of Duty (The Beginnings) by Ken Cooley (including biographical details)

is:W.D. Ross

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