Assignment # 1

Sir William David Ross is a Scottish Philosopher who is best known for his work on ethical principles, especially The Right and the Good written in 1930. He developed a pluralist, deontological form of intuitionist ethics, that is mostly in response to G.E. Moore's intuitionism.

According to David Ross, any claim that something is good is true if it is really good. Logically, this makes sense since anything that a person perceives to be good is assumed to be good, otherwise, that person would only be lying about it. However, this is relative. Not all people have the same "taste" in life. Whatever one person thinks is good is not necessarily good in the eyes of others. Generally, this is where conflicts usually come in.

But this is not the main ethical principle that David Ross has shared to the world. For him, the good is only one of several prima facie obligations which play a role in determining what a person ought to do in any given situation. This would reject Moore's consequentialist ethics. Ross claimed that consequentialism is false because in this principle, what people ought to do can only be determined by whether their actions will bring about the most good. In short, in consequentialism, the end justifies the means. I would agree with Ross here. The consequence of one's actions should not be the sole basis in judging whether the action was right or wrong. The motives of the actions should also be taken into account so that whether the end result would not go as planned, if we know that the intentions were sincere, then we can not entirely fault the person for the way he acted.

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Ross