W.D. Ross was an influential 20th-century philosopher. Like his contemporaries, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, Ross specialized in deontological ethics. Although Ross was greatly influenced by Mill and Kant, his ideology was a middle ground between theirs. Specifically, he did not hold strictly to Kantian ethics, but he did not side with utilitarianism either. As Ross and Kant had similar but distinct ideas, it is interesting to compare and contrast their ethical beliefs.
Both Ross and Kant believed that humanity has moral duties of a sort. These duties would apply to life, in specific situations and in general. Kant and Ross also agreed that pleasure was not the only thing to consider when deciding to do something (as in utilitarianism), and that the moral rightness of an action, regardless of its good or bad consequences, was the main thing to examine in each situation. They were not too impressed by net units of good, no matter how many people benefited or how much pleasure they each received. They asserted that people should act rightly out of respect for moral law, so they mutually refuted Mill's supposition. Kant argued that humanity had imperfect (meritorious) and perfect (necessary) duties or moral obligations.
For Kant, a perfect duty would be to abstain from doing things that are too contradictory to be considered universal practices (i.e., lying and making false promises) and to always act out of “good will;” that is, to act rightly just because it is right. Another of Kant's perfect duties would be to help other people for their sake, not to use them as means to an end. On the other hand, an imperfect duty would be donating time to help others; Kant allowed some wiggle room for people to decide how much of their time should be given in acts of service. However, Kant still argued that there was a perfect duty to help other people for their interests. Ross had a more complex concept of moral duty. He argued for prima facie duties and classified them into seven categories: reparation, fidelity, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, and non-maleficence.
According to Ross, the prima facie duties were conditional and rested on the circumstances one was experiencing. For example, one would have a duty of gratitude if someone else did them a favor; one would now have a duty to return the favor. Kant did not always see moral duties as conditional. In his view, perfect duties were universal and absolute. Imperfect duties were a matter of choice, and therefore somewhat conditional. Perfect duties, by virtue of their being universal and absolute, were never conditional and had to be performed regardless of circumstances or preference. In times of moral conflict, Ross believed that one prima facie duty could override another, and the more “incumbent” duty would then be one's actual moral obligation during that event. How would we know what duty was “incumbent?” Ross proposed that we would be guided by our moral intuition on which duty carried more “rightness” or “wrongness” with it. In contrast, Kant's perfect duties seemed absolute, without any way to override them. For example, Kant could say that we had a perfect duty not to lie. In one of his arguments, he suggested that one should tell the truth even when one's friend perished at the hands of a killer asking for that friend. Had Ross examined this scenario, he would have proposed that one should lie to save a life, and that the more incumbent moral duty was to preserve life.
Although Ross and Kant had philosophical differences, Kant was an undeniable influence on Ross. Both still pervade ethics and philosophy today. Both serve as exciting case studies of how one ethical system shapes another, and how a variation of one ethical doctrine is just as open to interpretation as the one on which it was based.
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