PRIMA FACIE DUTIES

Moral rules may conflict
W. D. Ross and prima facie duties
Resolving conflicting rules and the mutuality principle Return to contents

Moral rules may conflict

Rule morality typically involves a fairly long list of moral rules. A theorist who proposes such rules must face the eventuality that rules will conflict.
The following list of rules is taken from Sir William David Ross, the Oxford philosopher who died in 1971, who, as we shall see, attempts to solve the problem of conflicting rules. He proposes six basic, or independent, types of duties:

Duties to behave according to our agreements or in reaction to our previous wrongdoing. These rules state obligations that we create by our past actions: we are morally required to keep promises and make proper reparations.
When others help us, we are sometimes morally required to do something for them in return, to reciprocate in order to show proper gratitude.
We must be just. For example, people should be rewarded according to their merits.
We are also duty bound to help others in need. This is the moral requirement to act with beneficence.
We are all under the moral obligation to perfect ourselves, intellectually and morally.
Finally, we should not harm another person.

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W. D. Ross and prima facie duties

Ross believes that rules are not absolutely binding; they couldn't be because they might conflict. Instead, they are binding unless there is conflict or unless good reasons can be found to act against them. They are, in short, binding prima facie. This means they are binding at first sight, without taking into consideration conflicting circumstances; but when the time comes to follow the rules, we need to be aware of the ways our obligations may be mitigated or overruled.
Ross's rules are less precise, or cover more types of actions, than other lists of rules, such as the Ten Commandments and Gert's rules (there is a link below to a relatively full account of Gert's system under "See also"); for that reason they better account for more of moral experience. But in their vagueness they are more difficult to evaluate. Do we really have a duty to improve ourselves intellectually? Why not make it a duty to improve our social graces, or our looks, our musical ability, or our ability ride horseback? Ross and his colleagues at Oxford spent considerable time and energy improving themselves intellectually, but is that a prima facie moral requirement? Aren't we morally free to decide how to improve ourselves, or whether to improve ourselves? Such freedom is as much a part of moral experience as is the way we morally praise those who do try to improve themselves. Top

Resolving conflicting rules and the mutuality principle

Ross has little to say about what we should do when moral rules conflict. An adequate moral theory should instruct us on the resolution of moral conflicts. This means that we should have a sense of a priority order among rules telling us which rules tend to be followed when conflict arises. Perhaps we would have priorities dictated by circumstances, claiming that certain rules make better sense in certain circumstances. For example, deceit may be worse among friends than among strangers. We might say that a medical practitioner has more obligation to give proper care to a patient than to keep a promise.
Better yet we may also decide that when conflict arises, we should attempt to find ways to mediate it. This is a mutuality principle:

seek ways to fulfill as many obligations as possible, or, seek to avoid conflict among duties.

Socially we should, for example, try to find ways to avoid conflicting duties. For example, proper day care may help a parent to fill the role of a teacher and to raise a child properly. This mutuality principle may seem like part of a list of moral rules because rules implicitly demand that we attempt to obey all of them. But this is mistaken. Conflicts are often socially caused, based on social structures, or individually caused, based on prior choices. The mutuality principle insists that before particular conflicts arise, we try to find ways that tend to reduce conflict in general as much as possible. This sort of action, designing social structures and choosing in advance to avoid moral conflict, is not typically presented as an aspect of rule morality.
Moral rules, by themselves, cannot tell us which takes priority over the others. Once we take seriously the need to order moral rules, we must rely on other aspects of the moral experience to help us set up priorities. These other aspects, principles, social roles, ideals, and the like will then stand on at least an equal footing with moral rules. In this way, in order to set priorities, a fuller morality is required. If this claim about setting priorities among rules is correct, then a rule morality, by itself, is inadequate; the use of moral rules needs to be supplemented. Top