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Title: Foundations of Ethics: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen, 1935-6 (Oxford Scholarly Classics) by W. D. Ross, W. David Ross ISBN: 0-19-824162-3 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $90.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: A classic in its field.
Comment: In this volume Sir W. David Ross expands on his earlier (and much shorter) work _The Right and the Good_, developing his views and replying to criticisms from e.g. Charlie Dunbar Broad and other contemporary philosophers. Over the course of some three hundred pages, Ross provides penetrating analyses of the concepts of right, obligation, and good, arguing among other things that the meaning of "right" is not simply reducible to "whatever maximizes the good." Probably his best-known contribution to ethical theory is his notion of a _prima facie_ duty, introduced in his earlier work and explicated here with Ross's usual workmanlike thoroughness.

Ross was a solid representative of the rationalist-intuitionist-deontologist axis in twentieth-century ethics; influenced by Prichard and Moore and a first-class Aristotelian scholar to boot, he was a profound and thorough thinker who deserves to be more widely read. For example, his discussion of determinism (and why determinism doesn't undermine ethics) in chapter ten is, to my mind, one of the finest of its kind.

I have occasionally seen Ross's prose style criticized as somewhat plodding and tortuous. I see no foundation for this criticism. Ethical philosophy, at least as Ross himself treated it, is not a flashy affair; like all philosophy, it is a matter of trying to think clearly and well. This Ross does like a master, and readers who prefer clarity and substance in their philosophy will find Ross's style eminently suited to his material. Readers who would rather subject themselves to declamations, rhetoric, and dogmatic asseveration in the service of nothing much are advised to look elsewhere -- to Nietszche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Ayn Rand, for example.