¹ The Right and the Good (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1930)Google Scholar and Foundations of Ethics (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1939)Google Scholar. These books will be referred to by the abbreviations R.G. and F. E.

² This summary is meant to suggest the “ideal” content of ideal utilitarianism rather than to be a literal exegesis of Moore. I assume below that Ross accepted a) and b) without the “and only” clauses, and implicitly also c). (Cf. Section f) below). The term “optimific” is taken from Ross rather than Moore. For a) and b) cf. Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1948) p. 148Google Scholar. For c) cf. Ethics (Galaxy Book edition, New York, 1965) p. 75Google Scholar.

³ Cf. Principia Ethica, p. 149: “Accordingly it follows that we never have any reason to suppose that an action is our duty: we can never be sure that any action will produce the greatest value possible.” (My italics)

⁴ Ibid., pp. 152-8.

⁵ See especially Principia Ethica, pp. 162-4.

⁶ I was led to see the great importance of this methodological distinction by hearing some lectures given by W. K. Frankena in 1967. He used the terms “descriptive” and “normative” to mark the distinction.

⁷ This criticism of Moore's theory was made in passing by Urmson, J. O. in “Saints and Heroes”, in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Melden, A. I. (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1958), p. 198Google Scholar. He did not make much of it however, no doubt because his major concern was to insist that the required/for-bidden/indifferent trichotomy is not sufficient to make all of conventional morality intelligible and needs to be supplemented by a fourth category of supererogatory actions — saintly or heroic actions which go beyond what is morally required. Ideal utilitarianism has no more room for this category than its does for the indifferent category, as Urmson also pointed out (p. 206). He held that this latter criticism also applied to intuitionism.

⁸ “The second difficulty moral philosophy can relieve by an examination of the moral rules current in a given society, with a view to dividing them into their different classes …. There are, or may be, some whose correctness is self-evident (as, for instance, the rule that we should produce as much good as we can)” (F.E., p. 313). By implication, this passage gives the optimific principle the status of a moral rule “current” in our society. Again, “For while all men are probably at bottom agreed in thinking we ought to produce as much that is good as we can …” (F.E., p. 19). Obviously the interpretation to be given depends on the significance of the qualification “at bottom” in this passage.

⁹ Ewing, A.C., “Recent Developments in British Ethical Thought” in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed. Mace, C. A. (Allen and Unwin, London, 1966), p. 69Google Scholar, my italics.

¹⁰ Cf. R. G., p. 21 and F. E., pp. 112-3.

¹¹ Cf. e.g. R. G., p. 27: “[Justice], therefore, with beneficence and self-improvement, comes under the general principle that we should produce as much good as possible, though the good here involved is different in kind from any other.”

¹² This is maintained somewhat more tentatively in his later book. Compare F. E., pp. 73 and 319, to R. G., pp. 138 and 140.

¹³ Ethical and Political Thinking (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1947), p. 99Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Op. tit., p. 74.

¹⁵ Baier, K., The Moral Point of View (paperback edition, Random House, New York, 1967), p. 109Google Scholar.

¹⁶ “I suggest ‘prima facie duty’ or ‘conditional duty’ as a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind (e.g. the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant.” (R. G., p. 19) Again, “I accept the principle that if something is good there is a prima facie obligation to produce it, and an actual obligation unless some more stringent prima facie obligation intervenes.” (F. E., p. 271).

¹⁷ Cf. R. G., p. 41.

¹⁸ These examples are taken from Eric D'Arcy. His Human Acts (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963) has an excellent analysis of the manner in which actions are conceived and described in our ordinary thought and language. The relativity of the act/consequence distinction has been exploited recently by Andrew Oldenquist. In “Rules and Consequences” (Mind, April 1966, pp. 180–192), he argued that the deontological/teleological dispute is a bogus one because the two positions only amount to preferences in regard to equally legitimate ways of describing actions; deontologists, e.g. always prefer to absorb consequences into their action descriptions. Thus, the two theories in the end amount only to two different languages for saying the same things in substance.

¹⁹ In “Doubts About Prime Facie Duties” (Philosophy, January 1970, pp. 39-54), Peter Jones has also pointed to the difficulties in Ross's account of prima facie and actual duties. He traced these to confusions in Ross's concepts of the individuation of particular actions and of the descriptions of types of actions. While I have followed Jones in this, my main emphasis has been upon the distorting influence on his theory of Ross's acceptance of the optimific principle.