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Right-Making Characteristics and Morally Right Acts

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Right-Making Characteristics and Morally Right Acts University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-1990 Right-making characteristics and morally right acts. Robert Lewis Frazier University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Frazier, Robert Lewis, "Right-making characteristics and morally right acts." (1990). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 2047. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/2047 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RIGHT-MAKING CHARACTERISTICS AND MORALLY RIGHT ACTS A Dissertation Presented by ROBERT LEWIS LRAZIER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 1990 Department of Philosophy RIGHT-MAKING CHARACTERISTICS AND MORALLY RIGHT ACTS l A Dissertation Presented by ROBERT LEWIS FRAZIER Approved as to style and content by: Fred Feldman, Member Copyright by Robert Lewis Frazier 1990 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my family for the support that they gave me while I was working on this project. Their emotional support, it turns out, was at least as important as their financial support. I am also grateful for my friends’ tolerance and understanding of my occasional preoccupation with this project. Finally, I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee for their help, especially Robert P. Wolff for directing my dissertation and Fred Feldman for his careful review of an earlier version of my dissertation. IV ABSTRACT RIGHT-MAKING CHARACTERISTICS AND MORALLY RIGHT ACTS FEBRUARY 1990 ROBERT LEWIS FRAZIER, B.A., WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIV. M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS Directed by: Robert Paul Wolff An appealing ethical view is that there are a number of different characteristics that make acts obligatory and others that make acts wrong. Being an instance of promise-keeping makes an act obligatory, while being an instance of causing harm makes an act wrong. Another appealing view is that we can do what we are obligated to do. Accepting both of these views poses well-known problems. Imagine that a person makes two incompatible promises. Either the person is not obliged to keep each promise, or the person cannot satisfy both obligations. One of these appealing views must be rejected or modified. W.D. Ross offered a theory with a modification of the first view as its centerpiece. He introduced the term "prima facie duty" to describe the moral status of acts having a characteristic such as being an instance ot promise keeping. He claimed that a person having mutually exclusive most one ot them. prima f acie duties can be morally obligated to satisfy at v the others being "overridden." Ross did not, however, make clear what is involved in one prima facie duty overriding others, or the relationship between prima facie duties and moral obligation. I am sympathetic to Ross’s approach, but realize that it needs closer examination. I begin by stating his view as carefully as possible and laying out the problems with it. Various attempts have been made to explicate the relationship between prima facie duties and moral obligation. These range from arguing that principles expressing prima facie duties are analogous to physical laws with ceteris paribus caveats to defining both concepts by use of a third normative concept such as requirement. I examine some of these attempts and find them flawed. I conclude that it is a mistake to suppose that there is some principle expressing the relationship between primafacie duties and moral obligation. 1 argue that the difficulties with Ross’s view can be traced to Aristotelian elements in it. These elements cause Ross’s theory to be an unfortunate mix of two approaches to ethics: an investigation of the ethical life and an investigation of ethical concepts. vi 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS £age ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABSTRACT Chapter I. INTRODUCTION 1 Notes 25 II. ROSS’S THEORY 28 Introduction 28 Some Features of Ross’s Metaethical View 31 Some Features of Ross’s Normative Ethical View 40 Some Features of Prima Facie Obligations 41 Prima Facie Obligations and RMCs 50 The Relationship Between Prima Facie and Moral Rightness 56 Other Strategies for Characterizing Prima Facie Obligation 63 Conclusion 65 Notes 67 III. THE TENDENCY TO BE RIGHT EXPLANATION 70 P. F. Strawson’s Objection 70 A. C. Ewing’s Response to Strawson 80 Nancy Cartwright, Ceteris Paribus Laws and Prima Facie Obligations 62 Cartwright’s View 64 The Analogy Between Ceteris Paribus Laws and Principles of Prima Facie Obligation 93 What We Can Learn From the Analogy 97 Is the Analogy Good? 99 Conclusion 1^9 Notes 1 1 vii IV. THE MORAL SUITABILITY EXPLANATION 113 Introduction 1 13 Chisholm's "The Ethics of Requirement" 1 15 Objections to Chisholmian Requirement 121 The Too Many Prima Facie Duties Objection 121 The (p <-> Op) Objection 125 The Definition Objection 144 Conclusion 152 Notes 154 V. ETHICAL KNOWLEDGE 157 Introduction 157 Bale’s Argument 158 Decision-Making Guides and Right-Making Characteristics 163 Bale’s Argument Revisited 168 Conclusion 176 Notes 178 VI. THE VIRTUES OF ROSS’S THEORY 180 Introduction 180 Aristotle 187 Aristotle and Ross 192 Ross’s Theory Considered as Aristotelian in Nature 200 Conclusion 202 Notes 204 BIBLIOGRAPHY 206 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Not so long ago I asked my friend Joe to see a movie with me. He told me that he would like to go but could not because he had promised his wife that he would wash and wax the floors. He also said that he really would prefer to go to the movies, but since he had promised he really ought to do the floors. It was clear from our conversation that if he had not promised to do the floors he would have gone to the movies. Equally clear was that he believed he had a moral obligation to do the floors and that he believed he had explained why he had that obligation. His explanation of why he has that obligation is, I believe, fairly typical of how persons account for their obligations. When an ordinary person, like my friend Joe, explains why he is morally obligated to do something he usually picks out certain features of the relevant act and says that he 1 has the obligation because the act has those features . The feature of the act that Joe picked out in giving an account of why he was obligated to stay home and do the floors is that it was something he promised to do. We can say of the act that it was an instance of promise-keeping, as well as one of mopping. 2 There are, of course, features of acts other than being an instance of promise-keeping that are ordinarily thought to be indicative of an obligation to do them. Let us imagine that Joe finds a victim of a hit and run in the middle of the road that fronts his house. This man is grievously injured and Joe administers first aid to him. Now imagine that after the ambulance leaves we ask Joe why he helped this person. What would he say? Knowing Joe, I suspect that he would say that it was his duty to help. He would, in all likelihood, say something about being obligated to help people that are grievously injured. If so, he again would have picked out a feature of his act and said that he had the obligation because the act had that feature. Being an instance of helping someone in dire need is thought to be indicative of an obligation to do it. Some features of acts are ordinarily thought to be indicative of an obligation not to do them. Let us talk about Joe a bit more. His wife does not like him to smoke cigars. One day she noticed avery peculiar odor clinging to his coat and asked him if he had been smoking cigars again. Joe replied, sheepishly, that he had. She refused to talk to him for the rest of the day. When asked why he did not deny that he had been smoking cigars, thereby avoiding his wife s scorn, Joe replied that instance of lying is ordinarily it would have been wrong to lie. Being an thought to be indicative of an obligation not to do an act. 3 Not all features of acts are thought to be significant in accounting for moral obligations. Again consider Joe’s explanation of why he was obligated to do his floors. That he would use his red bucket instead of his white bucket is a feature of the act he would not mention or think important when giving his explanation. Not all features of an obligatory act are ordinarily thought of as significant to its being obligatory. In addition to these aspects of ordinary moral reasoning, there are a few others that I would like to point out. The first is that the way persons reason about and explain their obligations suggests that they can know and sometimes do know what they are obligated to do. The very fact that persons believe they can give adequate explanations of their obligations requires, it seems to me, that those obligations are knowable. In one of the above examples, Joe explains why he is obligated to stay home and do the floors. Most persons, Joe included, giving a similar explanation in a similar situation would find it remarkable to be told that they really cannot know what they are obligated to do.
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