Ross and Prima Facie Duties John Atwell Ethics, Vol. 88, No. 3. (Apr., 1978), pp. 240-249.

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-1704%28197804%2988%3A3%3C240%3ARAPFD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 Ethics is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org Tue Apr 24 15:57:47 2007

ROSS A N D PRIMA F A C I E D U T I E S *

John Atwell
Temple University

No concept figures more prominently in the ethical thought of W. D. Ross than that of prima facie duty.l Indeed, it is the theory of prima facie duties which, in the opinion of most people, marks Ross as an important twentieth-century moral philosopher. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to understand what prima facie duties are and how they are to be distinguished from, or related to, actual duties, that is, those acts which in concrete cases an individual ought to do. Very little, if anything, is to be gained by simply announcing that prima facie duties are those things which tend or seem on first glance to be actual duties. Ross certainly did not intend to claim, though this follows one ordinary sense of "tending," that a prima facie duty is something which is usually or generally or for the most part an actual duty-as if inductive generalization or probability were at issue. And he did not mean to say that a prima facie duty is something which merely seems to be, but is not actually, a duty-as if illusion were in question (see Rb-G, p. 20).

What then does Ross mean by 'prima facie duty'? How is prima facie dutifulness or, as I shall often call it, prima facie rightness to be characterized?%nd to what does Ross make the expressions 'prima facie duty' and 'actual (or absolute) duty' applicable? Partial answers to these questions may be gleaned from the following passag?: "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

* For discussing with me the problems of prima facie duties, I wish to thank many people, above all, Elizabeth Beardsley, Joseph Margolis, Charles Dyke, Ellen Gaskell, and Michael Wreen. 1. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1973; originally published in 1930), esp, chap. 2 (hereafter cited as RGG); and Foundations of Ethics (Oxford, 1968; originally published in 1939) (hereafter cited as F E ) . I have consistently deitalicized 'prima facie.' 2. There are good reasons for not identifying rightness and dutifulness, at least on some occasions, but this, I think, is not one of them. By speaking of these two notions interchangeably, I mean to urge no special point but merely to facilitate expression. 0 1978 by The University of Chicago. 0014-1704/78/8803-0005$00.95

241

Discussion

which is morally significant" (RGG, p. 19). The first thing to notice is that prima facie rightness is said to be a characteristic belonging to some individual acts, and it belongs to them in virtue of their being instances of certain kinds of acts. The characteristic to which 'prima facie duty' refers does not belong to such general act-types as keeping promises or helping accident victims or the like; it belongs only to instances or tokens of these, and other, types. The kind or type of act, so to speak, confers onto all its instances or tokens the characteristic of prima facie rightness (or dutif~lness).~ Now, when Ross lists prima facie duties, he does speak of very general types of acts, for example, fidelity, reparation, gratitude, and so on; or he mentions fairly specific types of acts, such as keeping promises, helping people in need, and the like (RGG, p. 21). But when he explains what is meant by 'prima facie duty,' he says that it is an expression referring to a characteristic had by certain individual act-tokens rather than by certain act-types. In sum, the characteristic referred to by 'prima facie duty' belongs only to individual acts (such as my keeping a promise to Jones), and it belongs to them in virtue of their being instances of certain kinds of acts (such as, first, the keeping of a promise and, second, fidelity). This, at any rate, is the picture we get from the passage quoted above. Consequently, it appears appropriate to explicate 'Act X is a prima facie duty,' where 'X' stands for an act-token, by means of the following formula:
1. Act X is a token of a type of act which would make it an actual duty if it were not also a token of another morally significant type of act.

The major problem with this explication is that it leaves unexplicated the crucial phrase, 'another morally significant type of act'; and when this phrase is spelled out, it will no doubt include the use of 'prima facie duty' or perhaps 'prima facie wrong'-with the result that 'Act X is a prima facie duty' is explicated in a circular manner. For the explication will actually come to something like this:
2.
Act X is a token of a type of act which would make it an actual duty if it were not also a token of a type of act which there is prima facie duty (and indeed, an overriding prima facie duty) to e s c h e ~ . ~

In other words, to say that there is a prima facie duty to do act-token X is to say that there is an actual duty to do X provided there is no overriding prima facie duty not
3. It should be pointed out that Ross is a deontologist without a trace of utilitarianism or of any other version of consequentialism. Since this is sometimes denied (e.g., W. P. Alston and R. B. Brandt, eds., The Problems of Philosophy, 2d ed. [Boston, 19741, p. 130), one may deny its truth; so I cite two passages: (1) "An act is not right because it, being one thing, produces good results different from itself; it is right because it is itself the production of a certain state of affairs. Such production is right in itself, apart from any consequence"; and (2) "That which is right is right not because it is an act, one thing, which will produce another thing, an increase of the general welfare, but because it is itself the producing of any increase in the general welfare" ( R h G , pp. 46-47). 4. The expression 'an overriding prima facie duty' must be added; otherwise, act X might still be an actual duty. Moreover, in Ross's view, although a prima facie duty may override another prima facie duty on a given occasion, it may not do so on a different occasion. In other words, we cannot correctly say of a given prima facie duty that it will always override a second prima facie duty.

242

Ethics

to do X. This may be quite true, and it may accurately represent Ross's notion of a prima facie duty (indeed, I think it does), but it does not make clear what a prima facie duty is. Nor, incidentally, do the following statements: "A prima facie duty is an absolute duty if no other prima facie duty conflicts with it,"5 and "This phrase ['prima facie obligation'] is used in a special sense in the writings of Ross to signify an obligation that only holds subject to not being overridden by a superior obligat i ~ n . In " ~any case, the prime difficulty with explicating 'a prima facie duty,' or related expressions, is the avoidance of circularity. Even circularity may not be found fatal to an alleged explication if the circle is large-as with some definitions in some dictionaries-but it will not be found acceptable when the circle is very, very small. And this is the case, I submit, with Ross's first effort to explicate or "define" the expression 'prima facie duty.' Circularity is not really avoided, I think, in the following statement: "Something is a prima facie duty if it is a duty other things being equal, that is, if it would be an actual duty if other moral considerations did not intervene."' For, in effect, this is to explicate 'Act X is a prima facie duty,' as follows:
3. Act X would be an actual duty if other prima facie duties did not intervene, that is, if there were not also some other prima facie duties (at least one) not to do X .

(Once again, act X might still be an actual duty even though other prima facie duties do intervene.) In short, if the notion of a prima facie duty can be explicated only in terms of "another kind [of act] which is morally significant" (Ross) or in terms of "other moral considerations" (Frankena) or the like, and if these expressions can be spelled out only by use of 'prima facie duty' itself-which seems likely-then the resultant explication will always be circular. Moreover, there is something disquieting about attempting to clarify Ross's notion of prima facie duty by use of the expression 'other things being equal.' For, to begin with, one thereby suggests two views which Ross clearly denies: one, that an act is sometimes a token of only one morally significant type of act, and two, that this one morally significant type of act is sometimes sufficient, by itself alone, to make the act an actual duty. For Ross, to put it succinctly, other things never are equal, as the following account shows. Ross tells us quite explicitly that "the theory of prima facie obligations" was "put forth to account for" so-called cases of "conflict of duties" (FE, p. 136) and, therefore, to accommodate justified exceptions to such precepts as "Do not lie" and "Keep your promises" (Rb-G, p. 28). Suppose then that I propose to do something which I determine to be the keeping of a promise and the telling of a lie. According to Ross, in virtue of kind K (keeping my promise), the poposed act is prima facie right; but in virtue of kind T (telling a lie), it is prima facie wrong. And, of course, the act may have additional "morally significant" features, some of which will make it prima facie right and some of which will make it prima facie wrong-all of this being determined, let us grant, by self-evident intuition and noneccentric act-de5. John Hospers, Human Conduct (New York, 1961), p. 302. 6. A. C. Ewing, Ethics (New York, 1965), p. 72. As indicated by Ewing, Ross uses 'prima facie duty' and 'prima facie obligation' interchangeably. 7. William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1973), p. 26.

243

Discussion

scription. Ross holds, in fact, that "every act . . . viewed in some aspects, will be prima facie right, and viewed in others, prima facie wrong . . ." ( R b G , p. 41), which follows, it seems, from his oft-stated beliefs that "any act that we do contains various elements in virtue of which it falls under various categories" (RGG, p. 28; see F E , p. 134), and "any act may be correctly described in an indefinite, and in principle infinite, number of ways" (RbG, p. 42). Ross goes even further, claiming that "moral acts often (as everyone knows) and indeed always (as on reflection we must admit) have different characteristics that tend to make them at the same time In other words, no prima facie right and prima facie wrong . . ." ( R b G , p. act of promise keeping is solely an act of promise keeping; it is always also an act of many other kinds, some of which may be morally indifferent but some of which will be morally significant-and not only morally significant but also morally incompatible with the prima facie rightness of the promise keeping. For Ross, then, every "moral act" involves within itself a so-called conflict of duties, although only a conflict of prima facie duties and not, h e holds, a conflict of actual duties. Consequently, it is rather pointless to explicate 'Act X is a prima facie duty' by saying:
4. Act X is an actual duty, other things being equal

The explication is pointless because the provision about other things being equal is, in Ross's judgment, never satisfied; no act ever fits this explication. Ross explicitly maintains that no one feature of an act, not even promise keeping, is ever sufficient to make an act actually right (see R b G , pp. 40, 46), which might be expressed by saying that to know that someone kept his promise is not to know that what h e did is actually right.g Ross claims that "an act that is right is right in virtue of its whole intrinsic nature and not of any part of it" ( R b G , p. 123; see pp. 19-20). The actual rightness of an act, therefore, is determinable only by considering all of the morally significant kinds of which the act is an instance; and a given act is actually right only when, among all possible acts, it is the one whose prima facie rightness outweighs its prima facie wrongness more than any other act (see R b G , pp. 41, 46).1 This, of course, is the import of Ross's remark that actual rightness is "a toti-resultant attribute, one which belongs to an act in virtue of its whole nature and of nothing less than this" (RbG, p. 28). At this point, it may be objected that what I have been reporting is merely concerned with the determination or "ground" of actual rightness and not with the explication of either actual rightness or prima facie rightness; hence, I have really
8. It seems clear that Ross should say here ". . . characteristics that tend to make them at the same time actually right and actually wrong . . ." (my italics). 9. On the question of knowledge, Ross stresses that we can have only probable knowledge of the actual rightness or actual wrongness of a given act (see RbG, pp. 30-31). 10. In consideration of alternative (and apparently different) acts, Ross writes: ". . . the ground of the actual rightness of that act is that, of all acts possible for the agent in the circumstances; it is that whose prima facie rightness in the respects in which it is prima facie right most outweighs its prima facie wrongness in any respects in which it is prima facie wrong" (RbG, p. 46).

244

Ethics

said nothing which shows formula 4 to be a faulty explication. There is, I think, some validity to this objection. For merely to point out that, in Ross's view, no actual act is ever actually right (or actually wrong) in virtue of one single feature is not to show that there is a mistake in attempting to explicate 'Act X is a prima facie duty' in terms of one single feature of act X . As a matter of fact, to say that a given act is a prima facie duty is precisely to say that it has a feature which, other things being equal, makes the act an actual duty. And even though, according to Ross, no act has only one, say, "morally relevant feature," the explication of prima facie rightness in terms of one such feature is not therefore improper. In short, explication of prima facie rightness is one thing, and the determination of actual rightness is quite another. Nevertheless, I still think that formula 4 is faulty; but, before attempting to show that it is, one rather obvious truth should be noted: The expression 'Act X is an actual duty' must not be explicated by means of, say, 'a balance of prima facie rightness over prima facie wrongness.' The notion of an actual duty must be regarded as a sort of primitive notion, or else clarified without any mention of prima facieness, if it is to be used in explicating prima facie duty. As we have seen in examining Frankena's clarification of 'other things being equal,' formula 4 may simply revert to something like 3, which was found to be circular. But perhaps there is a noncircular way of putting 4, for example, thus:
5. Act X is an actual duty if it is describable solely as a token of the type of act which makes it a prima facie duty.

This explication appears obviously circular, but it is easily alterable so as to remove the apparent circularity.
6. Act X is a token of a type of act which would make X actually right if it were describable solely as a token of this one type.

But this is not what is meant by saying that a given act-token is prima facie right. The act-token need not be describable solely as a token of one single type of act; it may be describable in many ways; all that is required is that it not be describable as a token of another morally significant (and overriding) type of act, which will in turn make mention of "prima facie duty." So, again, circularity results. And it will not do to explicate 'Act X is a prima facie duty' by means of something like 'Act X has at least one of the properties P1, P2, . . . P,.' Frank Snare comments on this sort of procedure: "Such a definition avoids circularity at the cost of generality. A person with a different moral code would reasonably object that he does not at all mean, when he says "a is a prima facie duty" that a has one of these properties."ll What we want is a "morally neutral" explication of prima facie duty, not a list of properties which someone regards as conferring prima facie dutifulness onto various act-tokens. Snare himself, as indicated by the title of his paper, attempts to provide a definition of 'prima facie duty.' It is very complex, and it does not readily translate
11. Frank Snare, "The Definition of Prima Facie Duties," Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 96 (July 1974): 235-36.

245

Discussion

into a definition of 'Act X is a prima facie duty,' which is, of course, the expression I would like to see defined or explicated.12 I believe, however, that the following formula captures the chief features of Snare's definition:
7. Act X is a token of at least one act-type P belonging to a class of act-types C ( P I , P z , . . . P,), such that if not-X is not a token of any act-type P belonging to C, then act X is an actual duty.

This definition is meant to be perfectly general, that is, it is not to make mention of or depend upon which particular act-types belong to class C, and it is meant to be noncircular, that is, the definiens is to be understood without reemploying the notion of prima facie duty or the like. The main problem with Snare's definition, as I have interpreted it,13 concerns the meaning of 'not-X.' Suppose that 'X' stands for 'my keeping a promise to Jones, etc.' What then does 'not-X' stand for? If it stands for 'not keeping my promise to Jones' simpliciter, then clearly there will be no act-type within C of which not-X will be a token. For no one, at least no reasonable person, will list both keeping a promise and not keeping a promise as prima facie duty-making properties. On the other hand, if 'not-X' stands for 'anything other than X,' then not-X will always fall under at least one act-type from class C-provided, of course, that C consists of more than one act-type.14Hence, if X is a token of an act-type within C, then either not-X will never be a token of an act-type within C or not-X will always be a token of an act-type within C. And neither alternative is welcome. At any rate, Snare has failed to make clear the meaning of 'not-X,' and until this is done his definition cannot be taken as adequate. Summary.-In this section I have examined several attempts to explicate 'Act X is a prima facie duty.'15 Every effort has been found wanting in one way or another, usually because of circularity. And this may be no accident, for Ross himself explicates prima facie duty as, roughly, actual duty if not overridden by another prima facie duty. Indeed, there may be no way out of this difficulty, at least as long as one remains even fairly true to Ross's mode of explication. However, there is a rather different line of thought, suggested by Ross, which may prove much more ~rofitable, viz., one which stresses the notion of justified exceptions to prohibitive moral rules such as "Do not lie," "Don't break promises," and so on. Accordingly, the expression to be explicated now will be 'Act X is prima facie wrong,' for X will be conceived as a violation of "Don't X."
12. For Snare's definition, not of 'a prima facie duty' or of 'a given act (or act-token) is a prima facie duty,' but of "there is a prima facie duty to do act-tokens which 'fall under' the act-type P," see ibid., p. 237. 13. I sincerely hope that I have not been unfair to Snare or misunderstood his account 14. If class C did not consist of at least two act-types P , then we could dispense with prima facie duties altogether and instead speak only of one actual duty. 15. It doesn't really do any good to speak of prima facie duties in terms of 'right-making considerations' or the like; for if this means anything, it must mean, roughly, that which would make an act actually right, etc., and attempted explications of this sort have been examined rather thoroughly

246

Ethics

Ross insists that the "validity" of certain moral rules is retained even when cases arise in which they should not actually be observed. He, we might say, wishes to "save" moral rules, despite his belief that any mentionable rule, or at least rule of action (such as "Do not lie" or "Don't break your promises"), may upon some occasion or other be overridden by, for that particular occasion, a more morally stringent rule or set of rules. Even when a valid moral rule is justifiably overridden, it does not, simply because of this, lose its validity. Indeed, to claim that on a particular occasion a certain rule is overridden, that is, that a justified exception to it occurs, is to suggest that the rule is valid, that is, that it needs to be overridden and cannot simply be discarded, either at that time or from then on. This is, I think, a very important element in Ross's theory of prima facie duties, and it is one which he expresses very nicely: "When we think ourselves justified in breaking, and indeed morally obliged to break, a promise in order to relieve someone's distress, we do not for a moment cease to recognize a prima facie duty to keep our promise, and this leads us to feel, not indeed shame or repentence, but certainly compunction, for behaving as we do; we recognize, further, that it is our duty to make up somehow to the promisee for the breaking of the promise" (Rb-G, p. 28; see FE, p. 136).One might then say that although a moral rule may sometimes be overborne it can never be cancelled or dismissed (see FE, pp. 111-12). The idea of needing to justify exceptions to valid moral rules offers us a new approach for explicating (what I shall now deal with) 'Act X is prima facie wrong.' Act X is said tobe prima facie wrong, of course, because doing it involves the doing of something which, as Ross might put it, a certain moral rule deems to be prima facie wrong. Perhaps the following illustration will help clarify this rather puzzling statement. Suppose that Jones has done an act X-a "total act" X-which is describable thus:
Total act X :

A = Jones lied to Smith.

B
C

= = =

he moved his mouth, he uttered a false statement, he induced Smith to leave the premises,

E = he protected Brown's life,

etc

What Jones did (X) is prima facie wrong because his act has the feature A , that is, X is a token of act-type A, and there is a prima facie moral rule which says, "Do not do A (i.e.,do not lie)" or "Lying is wrong." To regard "Do not do A" as a prima facie moral rule is apparently to hold that any exception to it, that is, any case of A-ing, always needs to be justified. Justified exceptions to the rule are possible but always called for. This, at any rate, seems to be the interpretation of Frankena, who speaks of the acts of killing people and lying to them in the following way: "They are, in

247

Discussion

Ross's terms, always prima facie wrong, and they are always actually wrong when they are not justified on other moral grounds. They are not in themselves morally indifferent. They may conceivably be justified in certain situations, but they always need to be justified . . . lying is always prima facie wrong . . . and is always actually wrong unless it is made right by being necessary to avoid a great evil or by some other moral fact about it."16 Something then needs to be justified; and presumably, if it is not justified, then it or something else is actually wrong. For this is, in effect, what it means to say that something is prima facie wrong. These two sentences are deliberately imprecise because it is far from clear what it is that needs to be justified and what it is that will be actually wrong if it (or something) is not justified. Above, immediately following the passage quoted from Ross, I said that the total act X needs to be justified; but now, reflecting on Frankena's statement, I would be inclined to say that it is the lying (the doing of A ) which needs to be justified. Suppose, however, following Ross's suggestion, we were to say that act X is prima facie wrong, hence, that it is that which needs to be justified; and, of course, it needs to be justified, or else it is actually wrong. Indeed, to say 'Act X is prima facie wrong' is to say:
8. Act X is actually wrong unless it is justified

The main problem with putting the matter in this way is that we tend to think, along with Frankena, that it is the lying-and not the total act of which lying is merely one element-which needs to be justified, hence, that it is the lying alone which is prima facie wrong. However, we cannot accurately state Ross's conception of the matter by saying that it is act A, or perhaps partial act A, which is prima facie wrong. For this would apparently mean:
9. Partial act A is actually wrong unless it is justified

The reason we cannot express Ross's view in this manner is simply that the expression 'actually wrong' is not applicable to partial acts or features of acts; it is applicable only to "total acts," being, as noted earlier, "a toti-resultant attribute, one which belongs to an act in virtue of its whole nature and of nothing less than this" (RGG, p. 28). In short, neither formula 8 nor formula 9 seems satisfactory for explicating the notion of prima facie wrongness. What we must do, of course, is find a formula which combines total act X with feature, or partial act, A in such a way that X will be prima facie wrong in virtue of feature A . Hence, 'Act X is prima facie wrong' may be thought to read:
10. Act X, in virtue of feature A , is actually wrong unless it (i.e., act X ) is justified.

Among other problems, two particular ones stand out: one, the formula does not seem to reflect Frankena's sensible suggestion that it is the lying which is in need of justification; and two, which is equally important, once the term 'justified' is spelled out, the entire formula will probably include such a phrase as 'justified in
16. Frankena, pp. 55-56.

248

Ethics

virtue of other, and overriding, prima facie duties7-with the obvious result, again, that the formula is circular. Note, for instance, that Frankena comes close to using these very terms when he writes that lying is "actually wrong unless it is made right [justified, one assumes] by being necessary to avoid a great evil or by some other moral fact about it." And this is tantamount to saying:
11. Act X, in virtue of feature A, is actually wrong unless it (i.e., act X), in virtue of some other prima facie duties, or right-making features, is actually right or at least not actually wrong.

Finding this clearly circular, one may wish to suggest a new, but related formula, viz.:
12. Act X, in virtue of feature A, is actually wrong unless it (i.e., feature A ) is justified.

In other words, feature A would make total act X actually wrong if it were not for the fact that A is necessary for X's being actually right. For example, Jones could not have done what is actually right without doing something which is prima facie wrong. 'Justified' here, since it has reference to A , cannot mean the same as 'actually right,' but only, say, 'necessary for what is actually right,' viz., total act X. Since this begins to look rather promising, let us fill out formula 12 thus:
13. Act X, in virtue of feature A, is actually wrong unless feature A is necessary for X's being
actually right in the situation.

Doing A makes actually wrong the total act of which it is a feature, viz., act X, unless doing A is necessary for the total act's being actually right. Quite clearly, and again, 'actually right' must not be explicated or "defined" by means of anything like 'a balance of prima facie rightness over prima facie wrongness.' The expression 'actually wrong' I take to mean, roughly, 'anything other than actually right,' so that all acts which are not the one which is actually right will be actually wrong. Since formula 13 makes mention of a specific feature A , it appears to lack the generality which Snare rightly finds required. But this difficulty can be overcome, I think, by restating 13 as follows:
14. Act X has a feature which would make it actually wrong unless that feature is necessary
for X's being actually right.

Even more generally, to say that an act is prima facie wrong is to say that it has a feature which makes it actually wrong unless that feature is necessary for the act's being actually right. This explication of prima facie wrongness escapes the difficulties of circularity and lack of generality; moreover, it represents or at least takes into account most of the things Ross says about both prima facie duties and actdescription. There are other advantages to the formula. It allows us to explain what is meant by saying, for example, "Lying is prima facie wrong," viz., that lying is, in a given moral code, one of those features of acts which make an act actually wrong unless

249 Discussion
it is necessary for making the act actually right. The lying, in other words, is justified as being necessary for one's doing the best possible act, that is, the one which is actually right. And this, I think, follows Frankena's conception of prima facie wrongness rather closely. The formula also reflects the way in which we might discover which acts people in a given culture regard as prima facie wrong. If they believe touching one's sister-in-law to be an act-feature which makes an act actually wrong unless doing so is necessary for the act's being actually right, then they regard touching one's sister-in-law as prima facie wrong making. Alternatively, if they believe touching one's sister-in-law to be an act-feature which makes an act actually wrong, period, that is, without regard for any exceptions, then they regard touching one's sister-in-law as "absolutely wrong," that is, as an act-feature which makes any act of which it is a part actually wrong, no matter what the circumstances. Even if we can accept formula 14 as an adequate explication of prima facie wrongness, numerous problems remain. What is an act or a "moral act"? Are all acts moral acts? How are acts to be described? May I say either that "Jones lied and Jones saved his friend's life" or that "Jones lied in order to save his friend's life"? Is one description morally more appropriate than the other? How does our formula help to explicate prima facie rightness? Are we simply to say that it is prima facie right not to do anything which is prima facie wrong? Is there any way to distinguish between actually wrong acts, which are really all the alternatives to the one actually right act, such that some will be deemed worse than others? These and other issues have been left unsettled and, for the most part, untreated. But perhaps the notion of prima facie wrongness, conceived more or less in the manner of Ross, has been clarified a bit.