W.D. Ross on Why Rightness is not Reducible to Goodness

I have always been intrigued by the British moral philosopher W.D. Ross. I mentioned such an interest to a colleague and said I had always been tantalized by Ross's separation of the right from the good. Until Ross, I think, most ethical theorists either made the right depend on the good or the good a function of the right. He simply held that they are independent realms of evaluation. But why?

W.D. Ross

Ross argues that in our most common moral deliberations (not the exceptional cases) whether an act is right tends to be a retrospective rather than projective process of reasoning (and goodness just the opposite). And that the meaning of right cannot be reasonably cashed out in the idea of "productive of so and so." Ross, for instance, argues:

"When a plain man fulfils a promise because he thinks he ought to do so, it seems clear that he does so with no thought of its total consequences, still less with any opinion that these are likely to be the best possible. He thinks in fact much more of the past than the future. What makes him think it right to act a certain way is the fact that he has promised to do so -- that and, usually, nothing more. That his act will produce the best possible consequences is not his reason for calling it right." (The Right and the Good)

So like his contemporaries, e.g. G.E. Moore, Ross turns to an analysis of the meaning of the terms and how they function in ordinary discourse, and concludes that the common morality does not reduce the right to the good (and vice versa).