duty

Ross considers the nature of moral knowledge in different places i.e. The Right and The Good and Foundations of Ethics. He believes that acquiring moral knowledge is comparable with acquiring mathematical knowledge, since both in mathematics and in ethics we have certain crystal-clear intuitions from which we build up all that we can know about the nature of numbers and the nature of duty. (1939, 144)

In what follows, I am going to elaborate the key elements of Rossian moral epistemology i.e. the idea of self-evidence, fallibility, justification and their relation will be investigated in details. To clarify the notion of self-evident, I shall discuss the relation between justification of self-evident moral propositions and “further reflection” in the Rossian framework. I believe, as many contemporary Rossian moral philosophers do as well, that there is no necessary connection between self-evidence and obviousness. There are, as I show, some self-evident propositions that require further reflection to be justified. Also, it does not follow from Ross’s theory that self-evident propositions are infallibly true; rather, some self-evident propositions (prima facie duties) are fallible and can be false. In this way, I use two terms for greater elaboration of this idea; i.e. self-evidently justified and self-evidently true. After that, I shall investigate Ross’s idea about the self-evident and his theory of justification. In order to do so, the idea of modest-foundationalism will be discussed. Finally, I shall address the issue of particularism in actual duties and generalism in prima facie duties.

2.2.1. Belief about Prima Facie Duties and Actual Duties

In this section I am going firstly to discuss about two kinds of beliefs in Rossi...

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...cal process, we understand generality of prima facie moral truth when we see some particular moral cases. But this is not inferential, it is intuitive. In other words, seeing number of times individual cases of prima facie keeping a promise is not important, for this method is not enumerative.

To end with, as Stratton-Lake says Ross does not say clearly what it means to say that moral principles are self-evident, rather it is somehow clear what he does not want to say. He maintains that a self-evident proposition is not necessarily one that is obviously true (1930, 2002, 29). Also, he does not say that a self-evident principle is one about which there is no serious debate. He thinks that we have direct knowledge about self-evident moral principles, i.e. knowledge which is often not derivable, however, in some cases might be derived from an even more basic belief.