Completing the Rossian Framework — Restored Arguments for C1 and C2
Completing the Rossian Framework — Restored Arguments for C1 and C2
Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). AFR resources: Chisholm (C1 and C2), Plantinga (C1), adapted to the Rossian domain. Prose rendering: Claude. 2026.
Prefatory Note
The CRI run on Ethics established that Ross’s intuitionist framework achieves full restoration of C3 (Moral Realism), C4 (Correspondence Theory of Truth), C5 (Ethical Intuitionism), and C6 (Foundationalism), forming a closed, mutually supporting integration block. Two commitments were Partially Restored: C1 (Substance Dualism) and C2 (Metaphysical Libertarianism). The gap at C1 exposes the integration block’s ontological ground to the naturalist and error-theorist challenge. The gap at C2 weakens the framework’s account of moral responsibility. Ross’s record does not supply the missing arguments; both are present as structural presuppositions without philosophical defense.
What follows supplies those arguments. The arguments are not Ross’s. They are drawn from Chisholm’s account of the self as mental substance and agent causation, and from Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, adapted to the domain of moral apprehension that Ross’s framework requires. Each argument is constructed so that its conclusion is precisely what Ross’s framework presupposes and requires, and so that it integrates directly with the four-commitment block Ross establishes. The result is a completed intuitionist framework in which all six classical commitments are explicitly defended and mutually supporting.
I. Restoring C1 — The Rational Faculty as Apprehending Substance
The Gap the Argument Must Close
Ross’s framework requires that the rational faculty stands in a genuine apprehension relation to non-natural moral properties. The intuitionist claim is that prima facie duties are directly recognized by the mind as genuine moral facts. This claim presupposes that the mind is a cognitive power capable of apprehending non-natural moral reality — not merely a natural system producing responses that can be described in moral vocabulary.
The challenge that Ross’s framework cannot by itself answer is the naturalist challenge in its two forms. The reductive naturalist holds that the knowing mind is a physical system operating by natural processes, and that any putative apprehension of non-natural properties is simply a caused psychological response to which the description “apprehension” is a misleading overlay. The error theorist (Mackie) accepts that moral properties would be non-natural if they existed but concludes that no cognitive faculty of the kind that could apprehend them is available to human beings — and therefore that moral claims, while purporting to state facts, uniformly fail to do so. Both challenges dissolve the intuitionist’s apprehension relation: the first by reducing the apprehending mind to a natural system, the second by denying that a non-natural apprehending faculty exists.
Ross established that moral properties are non-natural. What he did not establish is that the human mind is the kind of thing that can apprehend them. The C1 restoration supplies that argument.
The Argument from Intentionality
The first move draws on Chisholm’s account of intentionality as the irreducible mark of the mental. Mental states are directed toward objects. When the moral agent recognizes a prima facie duty of fidelity, his recognition is of something: it is directed toward the duty as its object. This directedness — what Brentano and Chisholm call intentionality — is not a property of any physical state. Physical states are causally produced by prior physical events; they stand in relations of causal efficacy to other physical states. But no physical state, considered as such, is of or about anything. The gravitational field does not represent the mass it attracts. The neural firing does not, in virtue of being a neural firing, represent the moral obligation it is correlated with. Representation — genuine aboutness — is categorically distinct from causal relation.
This is not merely a terminological point. The intuitionist’s claim is that direct recognition of a prima facie duty is a cognitive achievement: the agent gets something right about the moral structure of his situation. Getting something right requires that the mental state be genuinely about that something — that it stand in a representation relation to its object rather than merely being caused by it. If the mental state were nothing but a physical state, its relation to the prima facie duty would be causal at best, not representational. The physical state that is caused by a morally significant situation does not thereby apprehend that situation as morally significant. The apprehension requires intentionality; intentionality is irreducible to physical causation; therefore the apprehending mind is not merely a physical system.
The naturalist cannot dissolve this by pointing to functional roles. A functional state defined by its causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other functional states inherits the same problem: none of those causal relations constitutes genuine aboutness. The function selects a physical realizer; the physical realizer stands in causal relations; no causal relation is aboutness. Intentionality is not functional; it is categorically irreducible.
The Argument Against Naturalism from Moral Apprehension
The second move adapts Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism to the domain of moral cognition. If the knowing mind is a natural system shaped by evolutionary selection, then its cognitive faculties were selected for fitness, not for truth. A faculty selected for fitness reliably produces responses that enhance reproductive success in the ancestral environment. There is no evolutionary pressure that selects specifically for accurate apprehension of non-natural moral properties: non-natural moral properties, if they exist, exert no causal influence on the physical world and therefore exert no selective pressure on biological systems. A faculty shaped entirely by natural selection has no mechanism by which it could be aimed at non-natural moral truth.
The consequence is this: if naturalism is true, then the moral responses produced by the human cognitive system are selected for their fitness consequences, not for their accuracy as apprehensions of non-natural moral reality. But this gives us a defeater for those responses as moral apprehensions. The evolutionary debunker uses this argument against moral intuitionism. The Rossian framework’s response is that the argument defeats naturalism before it defeats intuitionism.
If the naturalist holds that our cognitive faculties are reliable — that they track truth about the natural world — he must explain how natural selection produced truth-tracking faculties. The standard response is that faculties selected for fitness tend to track truth about the natural environment because accurate representations of the natural environment enhance fitness. This response covers natural facts about the agent’s environment. It does not cover non-natural moral facts, which exert no causal influence on the environment and therefore generate no fitness differential between accurate and inaccurate representations of them.
The argument now runs in the direction that secures C1. The intuitionist claims that prima facie duties are directly apprehended by a cognitive faculty. For this claim to be defensible, the faculty must be the kind of thing that can be aimed at non-natural moral truth. A natural faculty cannot be so aimed, by the argument above. Therefore the apprehending faculty is not a natural faculty in the evolutionary sense — it is a rational faculty whose operation is not exhausted by its natural causal history. This is the C1 claim: the rational faculty is genuinely distinct from and prior to the biological and social conditions in which it operates.
This is not a dualist fantasy. It is a conclusion forced by the combination of two premises the intuitionist already holds: (a) moral properties are non-natural, and (b) the moral faculty genuinely apprehends them. If both premises are true, the faculty cannot be a purely natural system, because purely natural systems cannot be aimed at non-natural truth by any natural mechanism. The only available account of a faculty that genuinely apprehends non-natural moral reality is an account in which the faculty is not reducible to the natural causal system.
Integration with the Four-Commitment Block
The C1 argument integrates directly with Ross’s four restored commitments. C5 (direct recognition) requires a recognizing faculty; the C1 argument specifies what that faculty must be if the recognition is genuine. C3 (moral realism) requires a cognitive faculty capable of apprehending real moral facts; the C1 argument establishes that such a faculty is available. C4 (correspondence truth) requires that moral intuitions either correspond to real moral facts or fail to; the C1 argument establishes that the faculty can stand in the correspondence relation. C6 (foundationalism) requires that foundational moral recognitions are genuine epistemic starting points, not caused responses; the C1 argument establishes that the recognizing faculty is genuinely epistemic rather than merely causal.
The integration is not merely compatible: it is mutually reinforcing. Ross’s four-commitment block establishes that non-natural moral properties are real and directly recognizable as foundational truths corresponding to moral reality. The C1 argument establishes that the faculty doing the recognizing is the kind of thing that can perform genuine epistemic work on non-natural objects. Each set of arguments requires and supports the other. The completed framework is more stable than either set alone: the moral realist block gives the rational faculty something real to apprehend, and the C1 argument gives the moral realist block a faculty adequate to apprehend it.
What the completed C1 restoration makes available in Ethics: the capacity to answer the naturalist and error-theorist challenges that Ross’s framework, as argued, could not address. The moral agent who directly recognizes a prima facie duty is not producing a caused response that mimics apprehension; he is performing a genuine cognitive act of a faculty that is not reducible to the natural causal system. The error theorist’s claim — that no faculty capable of apprehending non-natural moral properties is available to human beings — is answered: the rational faculty is that faculty, and its irreducibility to natural causation is established by the argument from intentionality and the argument against naturalism from moral apprehension.
II. Restoring C2 — Agent Causation as the Ground of Moral Responsibility
The Gap the Argument Must Close
Ross’s framework requires genuine agency at three load-bearing points: the exercise of practical wisdom in adjudicating conflicting prima facie duties, the grounds of praise and blame as genuine responses to originating moral performance, and the structural incompatibilism of his non-naturalism. Each requirement presupposes that the moral agent is the genuine source of his moral judgments and choices — that when he recognizes a prima facie duty and acts on it, or fails to recognize it and acts otherwise, the act is genuinely his own in a sense that grounds real moral accountability.
The compatibilist challenge is that this requirement is satisfied by a weaker account of agency: an agent acts freely, in the sense relevant to moral responsibility, when his action flows from his own desires, reasons, and deliberative processes without external constraint, even if those processes are themselves causally determined by prior events. The compatibilist accepts moral responsibility and moral criticism; he denies that either requires the agent to be the uncaused originator of his acts.
The challenge to Ross’s framework is specific. When an agent fails to recognize the most stringent prima facie duty in a situation of moral complexity — when he attends insufficiently, reasons carelessly, or allows self-interest to distort his moral perception — Ross holds him genuinely culpable. The culpability is not the culpability of a system that produced a suboptimal output; it is the culpability of a rational agent who could have done otherwise and did not. The could-have-done-otherwise is load-bearing for Ross: it is what distinguishes genuine moral failure from mere malfunction. The compatibilist cannot secure this. On the compatibilist account, given the agent’s prior causes, his failure to attend was determined; given the determination, the could-have-done-otherwise, in the sense Ross requires, is not available.
The Argument from Moral Responsibility
Chisholm’s three-part argument establishes agent causation as the only account of agency that grounds genuine moral responsibility. The argument proceeds by elimination.
If determinism is true — if every event, including every human choice and judgment, is the inevitable causal consequence of prior events together with the laws of nature — then no agent is ever the genuine originator of his acts. His acts follow from his prior states, which follow from states prior to those, which trace back to conditions that existed before the agent was born and over which he had no control. The chain of determination passes through the agent; it does not originate in him. In that case, the could-have-done-otherwise is false in the sense required by genuine moral responsibility: given the prior causes and the laws, the agent could not have done otherwise. Praise and blame on the determinist account are, at most, useful social practices that influence future behavior; they are not accurate attributions of genuine authorship.
If indeterminism alone is true — if human choices are not determined by prior causes but are instead the result of random quantum events at the neural level — then the agent is no more the originator of his acts than on the determinist account. The randomness is not his; it is not attributable to him as a rational author; it is simply the absence of causal determination, not the presence of genuine agency. A choice that results from randomness is no more the agent’s own than a choice that results from determination. Neither account gives us what moral responsibility requires.
Therefore, if moral responsibility is real — if it is ever genuinely true that an agent is culpable for a moral failure and could have done otherwise — then there must be a third kind of causation: agent causation. The agent as substance initiates the causal chain without himself being caused to do so by prior events. The agent is a first cause in the Aristotelian sense: a genuine originator whose acts are attributable to him not because they passed through him but because they originated in him.
Agent Causation in the Rossian Domain
The agent causation argument is adapted to the specific domain of Ross’s intuitionist framework as follows.
The moral situation Ross describes is one in which the agent confronts a plurality of prima facie duties, some of which are in conflict in the particular circumstances. The agent must judge which duty is most stringent — which obligation he is, in the actual situation, under an obligation proper to fulfill. This judgment is not a derivation from a single principle (Ross explicitly rejects such derivation); it is an exercise of practical wisdom that draws on the agent’s recognition of the morally relevant features of the situation and his assessment of their relative weight.
Two things are required for this judgment to be genuinely the agent’s own in the sense that grounds moral accountability. First, the judgment must originate in the agent rather than in prior determining causes: if the judgment is the inevitable output of the agent’s prior causal history, then the agent who judges poorly is not culpable for poor judgment but for having a causal history that produced poor judgment — and that history was itself determined. Second, the agent must have been capable of judging otherwise: the possibility of better attention, more careful reasoning, and more accurate moral perception must be genuinely open at the point of judgment, not foreclosed by prior determination.
Agent causation supplies both requirements. The agent as substance is the genuine initiator of his own act of judgment. The act of attending carefully to the morally relevant features of the situation, the act of weighing the competing prima facie duties, the act of assenting to the judgment that one duty is most stringent in these circumstances — each of these is initiated by the agent himself, not by prior events that are beyond his control. This is not an assertion that the agent is uncaused in every respect: the agent has a character, a history of moral formation, a developed capacity for moral perception. But the initiation of the particular act of judgment, at the particular moment of moral decision, is the agent’s own.
The compatibilist’s response — that the agent’s prior character and history are sufficient to ground responsibility — fails on Rossian grounds. For Ross, genuine moral failure is a failure of the rational faculty at the point of recognition and judgment. The agent who is culpable for insufficient attention is culpable for something he could have done otherwise at the point of attending. If the character that produced insufficient attention was itself causally determined by prior causes, the culpability traces back to those prior causes, and the agent who attends insufficiently is not culpable in the sense that Ross requires — the could-have-attended-otherwise is unavailable. Agent causation restores the could-have-done-otherwise at the point of judgment that Ross’s framework requires.
The Threshold Argument
The minimum required for Ross’s framework to function coherently as an account of moral responsibility is more modest than the full agent causation metaphysics. The threshold is this: the agent is capable, at some points in his moral life, of initiating acts of attention, reflection, and judgment that are not fully determined by prior causes, and at those points genuine alternatives are open. This minimum is sufficient to ground the culpability Ross attributes to moral failure: the agent who fails to attend carefully enough could have attended more carefully at the point of failure, because that point was a genuine decision point at which the alternative was available.
The threshold is also sufficient to dissolve the compatibilist challenge in the Rossian context. The compatibilist’s account of agency as action flowing from internal states without external constraint does not secure this threshold: on the compatibilist account, the agent’s acts of attention and reflection are themselves determined by prior internal states, and no genuine alternative was open. The threshold defense establishes the minimum required for Ross’s culpability claims to be genuine rather than merely practical: some acts of moral judgment originate in the agent in the strong sense, at genuine decision points, making the agent the genuine author of those acts.
Integration with the Four-Commitment Block
The C2 argument integrates directly with Ross’s four restored commitments and with the completed C1 argument. C1 establishes that the rational faculty is a genuine substance not reducible to the natural causal system. C2 establishes that this substance is capable of originating its own acts of judgment at genuine decision points. Together, C1 and C2 establish the Rossian moral agent: a rational faculty that is genuinely distinct from natural determination (C1) and genuinely capable of originating its own moral judgments (C2).
The integration with the four-commitment block is as follows. C5 (direct recognition) is the epistemic act by which the agent apprehends a prima facie duty. C2 establishes that the agent’s performance of this epistemic act — his attending, his recognizing, his assenting to the recognition — is genuinely his own origination, not the inevitable output of prior determination. C3 (moral realism) establishes that the prima facie duties the agent recognizes are real moral facts. C2 establishes that the agent’s failure to recognize them accurately is genuinely attributable to him as a moral failure, not to the causal history that determined his failure. C6 (foundationalism) establishes that the basic moral recognitions are foundational starting points. C2 establishes that the agent’s relationship to those starting points — his attending to them, his accepting or refusing their authority — is a genuine act of rational origination.
The completed framework, with all six commitments explicitly defended, is the following. Non-natural moral properties are real features of moral situations (C3). Moral claims are true or false by correspondence to those properties (C4). The rational faculty is a genuine mental substance irreducible to natural causation, capable of apprehending non-natural properties through genuine intentionality (C1). This faculty directly apprehends foundational prima facie duties without derivation from prior premises (C5, C6). The agent who performs this apprehension, or fails to, is the genuine originator of his own act of moral attention and judgment, making him genuinely responsible for the accuracy or inaccuracy of his moral recognition (C2).
What the completed C2 restoration makes available in Ethics: the capacity to answer the compatibilist critic who accepts Ross’s moral epistemology while denying that moral failure is genuinely the agent’s own. The agent who fails to recognize the most stringent prima facie duty in a situation of moral complexity is not the terminal node of a causal chain that was always going to produce this failure; he is the genuine initiator of an act of moral attention that could have been performed more carefully and was not. The culpability is real, the authorship is real, and the moral criticism that Ross’s framework deploys is not merely a useful social practice but an accurate attribution of genuine moral failure to a genuine moral agent.
III. The Completed Framework
The six-commitment integration of the completed Rossian framework is as follows:
C1 — The rational faculty is a genuine mental substance, irreducible to natural causation. Its intentionality — its genuine directedness toward objects — is not a physical relation but a categorical mark of the mental. Its capacity to apprehend non-natural moral properties cannot be accounted for by any faculty shaped entirely by natural selection, because non-natural properties exert no selective pressure and natural selection provides no mechanism for aiming a faculty at non-natural truth. The faculty that apprehends prima facie duties is therefore genuinely distinct from the natural causal system.
C2 — The rational faculty is the genuine originator of its own moral judgments. At genuine decision points, the agent initiates acts of moral attention, recognition, and assent that are not the inevitable outputs of prior determining causes. This origination is what grounds genuine moral responsibility: the agent who judges well or poorly is the genuine author of his judgment, not the terminal node of a causal chain.
C3 — Moral properties are non-natural and real. Prima facie duties — fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, non-maleficence — are genuine features of moral situations, not projections of attitude or outputs of rational procedure. The critique of consequentialism is not a preference statement but a recognition that the consequentialist account of moral obligation is morally wrong.
C4 — Moral claims are true or false by correspondence to real moral properties. The intuition either corresponds to the prima facie duty it apprehends or it fails to. This is not coherence, not utility, not social assertibility: it is the standard of accuracy that gives moral inquiry its point.
C5 — The rational faculty directly apprehends foundational prima facie duties without derivation from prior premises. The apprehension is genuine rational cognition, not caused psychological response. Its model is mathematical intuition: the person of sufficient maturity and experience who attends carefully directly recognizes that keeping promises is a genuine moral obligation, as directly as he recognizes that the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles.
C6 — Prima facie duties are foundational moral truths, epistemically basic in the sense that they are not derived from prior moral premises. They are the starting points of moral reasoning, not revisable outputs of coherentist procedure. No empirical revision and no change in cultural consensus touches them: they are prior to both.
The six commitments form a closed, mutually supporting system. Remove any one and the others require revision. The rational faculty that apprehends prima facie duties (C1) does so through genuine intentional directedness (C1) by a faculty that originates its own acts of moral attention (C2), recognizing real non-natural moral properties (C3) as foundational epistemic starting points (C6) whose accuracy is assessed by correspondence to moral reality (C4) through direct non-inferential recognition (C5). This is the classical moral framework, restored in the domain of Ethics.
Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). AFR resources: Roderick Chisholm (The First Person, 1981; “Human Freedom and the Self,” 1964; Brentano and Intrinsic Value, 1986), adapted; Alvin Plantinga (Where the Conflict Really Lies, 2011; Warrant and Proper Function, 1993), adapted. Primary intuitionist framework: W.D. Ross (The Right and the Good, 1930; Foundations of Ethics, 1939). Prose rendering: Claude. 2026.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home