Background
Ross, Willlam David was born in 1877 in Thurso.
Ross, Willlam David was born in 1877 in Thurso.
University of Edinburgh and Balliol College, Oxford.
Ross held that certain ethical truths were selfevident: they could be ‘intuited’ by any person ot educated moral sensibilities. First, we could intuit that a number of things are intrinsically good, namely knowledge, virtue and pleasure. Second, we could also intuit that certain actions are right or wrong. But unlike H. A. Prichard, who influenced him greatly, he did not hold that we could intuit the truth of judgements about particular actions unmediated by general principles. It was certain kinds of actions—such as keeping promises or murdering—whose rightness or wrongness we could intuit. Although, according to Ross, we could intuit that certain kinds of action are wrong, there is, he thought, probably no kind that is always wrong to do, since our duties may, in certain circumstances, conflict. To deal with the problem of conflicting duties Ross held that what we intuit are printa facie obligations. By prirna facie he meant, roughly, that they hold unless they conflict with other, stronger duties. However, what, more precisely, the notion of a prirna facie duty comes to has been much debated. Ross held that rightness was an objective property of our actions, one which, although we could intuit its presence, was indefinable. Although it was an objective property it was one that, in some way, depended upon the presence of other properties, such as the tendency to cause pain. In the aftermath of logical positivism, intuitionism was largely rejected. It was, and is, generally felt that Ross could give an adequate account neither of the idea of intuition nor of the action-guiding force of ethical beliefs. It is also generally felt that he failed to explain adequately how moral rightness ‘depends' upon other properties. Ross was General Editor of the important series of Oxford translations of the works of Aristotle, and he produced editions with commentaries of a number of Aristotle's works. From 1947 to 1949 he was Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Press, whose report in 1949 led to the creation of the Press Council.