Conflicting duties › What makes a right act right?

You have promised to help a friend move on Saturday. Before you leave, someone close to you needs urgent assistance that you can provide only by missing the move. Suppose the situation gives you a sufficiently strong reason to help the person in danger. Something can still be owed to the friend: an explanation, an apology, or an effort to arrange replacement help. Choosing what you ought to do does not require pretending that the promise never mattered.

This is a hypothetical illustration of the problem W. D. Ross addresses in The Right and the Good, published in 1930. Different features of a situation can supply genuine moral claims that point toward incompatible actions. Ross distinguishes these contributory claims from what a person ought to do when the whole situation is considered. His account gives a way to identify the conflict while acknowledging how difficult its resolution can be.

Ross's central discussion begins with a question about the grounds of rightness. When an action is right, which features make it so? A promise might matter because the agent undertook it. Helping a stranger might matter because the stranger needs help. Making amends might matter because the agent has already caused a wrong.

Ross resists reducing all such reasons to the production of the greatest good. In particular, a past undertaking can matter in its own right. The relationship created by a promise is different from the relationship a person has to anyone whose situation they could improve.

Imagine that two actions would produce similar benefits, but only one fulfills an undertaking the agent made. A theory that counts only the benefits needs an explanation of why the promise makes any difference. Ross's proposal makes the past undertaking part of the explanation from the beginning.

This does not show that consequences are irrelevant. His account includes duties to benefit others and avoid harm. The disagreement concerns whether those considerations exhaust what makes an action right. A theory can recognize the moral importance of outcomes without treating every other consideration as a route to improving them.