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Articles

When Worlds (moral & causal) Collide

Toni Vogel Carey wrestles with conflicts of duty.

Conflict-of-duty remains one of the most intractable problems in moral philosophy. How to think about situations in which a person has two or more moral obligations, but can fulfill only one?

It was primarily to deal with this problem that W.D. Ross introduced the concept of prima facie duty in his signature essay ‘What Makes Right Acts Right?’, (chapter 2 of his 1930 book The Right and the Good). Prima facie means something like ‘on the face of it’ or ‘at first sight’.

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