The Right and the Good by David Ross (2002) - British Moral Philosophy Paperback Book for Ethics Studies & Philosophy Classroom Discussions

Sir David Ross's _The Right and the Good_, first published in 1930, is a classic statement of modern deontological ethics. The question at issue here is: Which ethical term is primary -- "right" or "good"? And Ross's answer is that "right" is primary.His own statement of his thesis is as follows: "An act is not right because it, being one thing, produces good results different from itself; it is right because it is itself the production of a certain state of affairs. Such production is right in itself, apart from any consequence."Not that we must perform "right" acts even though the heavens fall. What Ross argues is that certain sorts of "right" act are _prima facie_ duties, with morally binding _claims_ on our attention that may nevertheless be overruled by other considerations/duties.In short, this volume is a clear and succinct statement of a twentieth-century development of Kantian deontological ethics, of interest to readers of (say) Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, and Alan Gewirth -- and also to ethical consequentialists and teleologists who want to understand what the opposition is all about. (Brand Blanshard, himself a teleologist, offers a nice critique of Ross's views in _Reason and Goodness_.)It's also, by the way, a nice cure for the misrepresentations of pseudophilosopher Ayn Rand, who tried her darnedest to give "duty" a bad name in order to make room for a more-or-less-Nietzschean ethical subjectivism she called (chuckle) "Objectivism."(I mention that because somebody is going through all my reviews and clicking "Not helpful" on any in which I say anything negative about Rand. Click away, you rational Objectivist, you!)