✍ Scribed by Toni Vogel Carey
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Examples of the phenomenon that I here call contrary-to-duty justification are utterly commonplace, both in ordinary life and in the law. Yet ethical theorists have somehow either failed to see them at all, or they have failed to see them for what they are, supposing that they must exhibit the quite distinct phenomenon of conflict of duty. In an attempt to correct these defects of omission and commission, a natural starting point is a,case, or a version of it (the Paradigm), that has been discussed in the literature, where it has already been shown to have serious undermining effects on both W. D. Ross's theory of prima facie duty and John Searle's proposed derivation of 'ought' from 'is': 1
The Paradigm: Smith and Jones have had no prior dealings, but Jones is known to everyone in the business world, including unscrupulous Smith, to be a 'soft-touch'. Smith is doing moderately well, but he deceives Jones into believing his business is on the verge of collapse; and solely as a result, Jones promises to invest $5000 in Smith's company.
A commonsense intuitive judgment of the Paradigm (the CJP) is that promisor would be justified in not keeping his promise to deceiver-promisee, 2 that he would not do anything wrong if he failed to invest the promised $5000. Smith's deception prevents his having any legitimate moral claim on Jones to do the promised act. And as 'claim', for Ross, is in this kind of case another term for 'prima facie duty', 3 the CJP can be restated as the view that promisor has no duty, even prirnafacie, to keep his promise.
Since Ross characteristically speaks of a prima facie duty as (merely) conditional, or as (merely) something that tends to be our duty, it is somewhat tempting to construe 'm has a prima facie duty to do act A' to mean simply, 'All things being equal, m has an 'actual' or 'absolute' duty to do act A'. And in that case Smith's deception is just one of the things to be 'equal' about
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