Ross on the Nature of Acts (half-baked thoughts)

Saturday, October 04, 2008

In the second chapter of The Right and the Good, W.D. Ross focuses on the nature of acts in general (and of right acts specifically) in order to answer the question ‘what makes right acts right’? The candidates he considers and rejects include the act’s intended, probable and actual consequences. In so doing he asks how motive and consequence are related to what he takes to be a basic object of moral evaluation: the act itself.
  Ross’ brief investigations into the nature of action lead him to adopt an early version of a view later embraced by G.E.M. Anscombe and developed more fully by Donald Davidson. This is the view that ‘any act may be correctly described in an indefinite, and in principle infinite, number of ways.’ (p. 42). To use Ross’ own favoured example, on such a view my act of packing and posting a book in a certain fashion may be identical to (i)  my act of fulfilling a promise and (ii) my act of securing his possession of what I have promised to return to him. According to Ross these are three different descriptions of the same act, neither of which is more basic than any of the others.
  An act, Ross writes is ‘the production of a certain state of affairs’ (pp. 46-7) and consequently can only be right (or wrong) because it is such a thing and not in virtue of producing good (or bad) results that are ‘different from itself’. My packing and posting a book a certain way is right not because it causes my friend to receive it safely but because it is my securing his possession of it, my fulfilling a promise, etc. Ross thereby not only ensures that entities are not being multiplied beyond necessity but simultaneously (through the same act, as he would have it) also succeeds in discarding both consequentialist and Kantian ethical theories on the grounds that they require the right-making feature(s) of an act to lie beyond it when in truth acts are right in virtue of their own intrinsic properties.
  Neat as this move may be, it is not without its problems. Leaving aside the trouble which this stringent method of individuation must face when it comes to the spatio-temporal location of killings and so on, there is a more immediate difficulty in sight. The worry, is that of relating the ‘acts that we do’ to the events of our doing them. Indeed it is not clear whether or not Ross would wish to identify these two rather different-looking kinds of things.