What makes an action right · Quiz question 22/35
Breaking a Promise to Prevent Harm (Prima Facie Duties)
Breaking a small promise to a friend could save three strangers. W. D. Ross's theory of prima facie duties explains how to think about it.
If you keep tonight's plans with a friend, they'll be a little happy. If you bail, you could save three strangers from serious danger.
Breaking the promise is the right thing to do.
British philosopher W. D. Ross used almost exactly this example in The Right and the Good (1930): if keeping a trivial promise conflicts with helping accident victims, you should break the promise. To explain this without consequentialism, Ross proposed several irreducible prima facie duties: fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement and non-maleficence.
For a consequentialist, this is easy: saving three people from danger outweighs a friend's mild happiness. What's interesting is that a non-consequentialist like Ross reaches the same answer. The difference is the why.
Ross criticized consequentialism for missing the moral weight of promises. If breaking a promise produced just slightly more good than keeping it, consequentialism says break it — but we don't think that. Promises create reasons by themselves. So for Ross, promises don't just go on the scale like everything else, but they do give way to a weighty enough duty to prevent harm. Which duty wins isn't settled by a formula but by judgment in the situation.
When more people's interests are at stake, promises can be broken. Keeping promises is just a rule for good outcomes.
Key names: Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, Peter SingerPromises create an independent duty, but it yields to a weightier duty.
Key names: W. D. RossA promise gives the other person a right. Breaking it without their okay is wrong even with good results — at least an apology and making amends are owed.
Key names: The Kant tradition, T. M. Scanlon (principle of fidelity)In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey's normative ethics question, answers split fairly evenly: virtue ethics (about 37%), deontology (about 32%), consequentialism (about 31%).