Border-Crossing: Immigration Law, Racism and Justified Resistance

Aside from the case of refugees under international law, are non-citizen outsiders morally justified in unlawfully entering another state? Recent answers to this question, based on a purported right of necessity or civil disobedience, exclude many cases of justified border-crossing and fail to account for its distinctive political character. I argue that in certain non-humanitarian cases, unlawful border-crossing involves the exercise of a remedial moral right to resist the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. The case accepts, for the sake of argument, two conventional assumptions among defenders of immigration restrictions: that states have a ‘right to exclude’ and that migrants have a prima facie duty to respect borders. Nonetheless, where immigration law is racist or otherwise discriminatory, it violates the egalitarian standards at the core of any authority it can plausibly claim over outsiders. In such cases, it may be resisted even where the law is facially non-discriminatory.

Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties

This paper follows a path that takes us from utilitarianism to particularism. Utilitarianism is the leading one-principle theory; its falsehood is here simply asserted. W. D. Ross’s theory of prima facie duty is offered as the strongest many-principle theory. Ross’s two accounts of his notion of a prima facie duty are considered and criticized. But the real criticism of his view is that being a prima facie duty is a context-sensitive notion, since a feature that is a prima facie duty-making feature in one case may be prevented from playing that role in another. Since the strongest many-principle theory is therefore false, the only conclusion is a no-principle theory: a theory that allows moral reasons but does not suppose that they behave in the regular way required for there to be moral principles—namely, moral particularism.

The Role of Imaginary Cases in Ethics

This paper examines the rationale for the standard practice in ethics of arguing from imaginary cases to real ones. Challengeable aspects of this practice are exposed. One question is whether an imaginary case is being taken to establish a Rossian prima facie duty or a duty proper. Another is whether, once we have established the correct account of an imaginary case, we can be sure that another case similar to the first in all respects relevant to our account of the first must be given the same account, irrespective of other differences. A generalist will try to extract principles from the imaginary case and apply them to the real case. This paper argues that this is hopeless. Is particularism in a better situation? A possible line is that what the imaginary case reveals is the importance that certain features can have and may have in the real case before us. No more can be expected.

More Right than Wrong

This paper argues that Ross, despite the importance and innovativity of his conception of a prima facie duty, fails entirely to make sense of the relation between prima facie duty, as he understands it, and duty proper. He thus fails to make any sense of what it is to be a moral reason for action, and of right-making and wrong-making properties. Basing my approach on some suggestions of Prichard’s, I suggest that the only way to do this is to abandon any distinct conception of duty proper, restricting ourselves to the idea of what we have most duty to do – what we most ought to do. This retains, but reframes, Ross’s focus on something that is a matter of degree.

On Moral Properties

This paper is about the relation of resultance, signalled by the ‘because’ in ‘that was wrong because it was dishonest’. It distinguishes resultance from supervenience and uses that distinction to criticize R. M. Hare’s account of the logic of moral judgement in terms of his notion of universalizability. It considers the strengths and weaknesses of Ross’s novel notion of a prima facie duty and the distinction between prima facie duty and duty proper. And it argues that where one action’s rightness results from its having certain properties, it does not follow that all actions with those properties will be right, because other cases may have further properties acting as ‘defeaters’.

More Supererogatory

If acts can be supererogatory, presumably some can be more supererogatory than others, or further beyond the call of duty. This paper explains how this is possible within a general account of supererogation that sees it arising when a prima facie duty, for example to promote other people’s good, is outweighed by a prima facie permission to promote one’s own good. An act is then more supererogatory when the permission outweighs the duty by more, or when the gap between its strength and that of the duty’s is larger. The paper contrasts its permission-based account of supererogation with a more common one typified by Parfit in On What Matters, which rests it on a conflict between two ‘reasons’ that, despite their differing contents, are of the same deontic type and have the same favouring force. Alongside several other weaknesses, Parfit’s account doesn’t allow differing degrees of supererogation but must treat all supererogatory acts as on a par.

Coercion and the Prima Facie Duty to Obey the Law

This article examines the role of coercion in grounding a prima facie duty to obey the positive law. I argue that there is at least a weak prima facie duty to obey the positive law in a minimally effective and just legal system. The fact that a norm holds positive legal status within a minimally effective and just legal system gives people presumptive reason to believe that the norm is a salient and reasonable means of social coordination and therefore that they have pro tanto reason to follow it. Coercive sanctions may bolster the salience of social norms by giving people incentive to follow them. They also make it more likely that an agent’s decision to follow a particular norm will be reasonable, by creating the prospect that the reasons supplied by the sanctions will override any deficits in the salience or reasonableness of the norm itself. A legal system with strong coercive enforcement is therefore more likely than a less coercive system (other things being equal) to present its subjects with both prima facie and pro tanto moral obligations. This reliance on coercion, however, carries a significant moral hazard, since it may bootstrap inefficient or unreasonable norms into a position of epistemological and moral weight.

Rossian Ethics

This book has two connected aims. The first is to interpret and evaluate W. D. Ross’s ethics, focusing on the key elements of his moral theory: his introduction of the concept of prima facie duty, his limited pluralism about the right, and his limited pluralism about the good. The second is to articulate a distinctive view intermediate between consequentialism and absolutist deontology, “classical deontology.” According to classical deontology the most fundamental normative principles are principles of prima facie duty, principles which specify general kinds of reasons. Consequentialists are right to think that reasons always derive from goods; and ideal utilitarians are right, contra hedonistic utilitarians, to think that there are a small number of distinct kinds of intrinsic goods. But consequentialists are wrong to think that all reasons have the same weight for all agents. Instead there are a small number of distinct kinds of agent-relative intensifiers: features that increase the importance of certain goods for certain agents. It is argued that classical deontology combines the best elements of the moral theories of Ross and of Sidgwick, and that the best philosophical interpretation of Ross is that he is a classical deontologist.

What Are Prima Facie Duties?

This chapter focuses on Ross’s most important conceptual innovation: the idea of prima facie duty. Four main claims are defended: first, contra some of his harsher critics, that though much of what Ross says in introducing and explaining the concept of prima facie duty is problematic or misleading, he nonetheless has a clear and coherent theoretical picture; second, contra Hurka, that Ross lacks the contemporary concept of a normative reason, but that his views should be reframed in ways that do employ that concept; third, that Ross is not and should not be a scalar deontologist; and fourth that he was wrong in the Foundations to follow Prichard in favoring subjective over objective rightness.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the project of Rossian Ethics. The book has two connected aims. The first is to interpret and evaluate W. D. Ross’s ethics, focusing on the key elements of his moral theory: his introduction of the concept of prima facie duty, his limited pluralism about the right, and his limited pluralism about the good. The second is to articulate a distinctive view intermediate between consequentialism and absolutist deontology, “classical deontology.” The introductory chapter includes brief accounts of the kind of project of philosophical interpretation that the book undertakes, and of Ross’s place in the Sidgwick-to-Ewing school recently discussed by Hurka.