"The Value Structure of Action", by Kelley L. Ross

The distinctions between means and ends, and between being and doing, result in the following structure of action, from beginning to middle to end, upon which much ethical terminology, and the basic forms of ethical theory (ethics of virtues, action, and consequences), are based.

Amazing! This reminds me of the time when I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article about coherentist theories of justification. I remember seeing how a clear taxonomy of epistemology could quite reasonably emerge from the regress problem. I wondered if a similar taxonomical approach could apply to ethics, and there it seemed to me that the first natural split would be between person- and act-oriented theory. The next split would be in act-oriented theory, between deontology and consequentialism. But the way that Ross has construed the dimensions of the different ethical theories here seems even more powerful. For example, one could have a matrix of four different types of ethic, based upon all the different permutations of being and doing, and means and ends. I especially like his distinction between being and doing, which seems like a far deeper way to characterise the distinction than between mere person- and act-orientation.

What it implies is just the Polynomic Theory of Value, where the means and ends are judged in terms of different domains of value, which may agree or conflict in their valence.

I have often thought that both the means and the ends must count in ethics, and that this can be the source of moral dilemmas. I was taught in second year that deontology and consequentialism were mutually exclusive. A deontologist can take consequences into account when determining duties, and a consequentialist can take actions into account when determining consequences. But at the end of the day, you had to take a stand one way or the other because of the nature of the dichotomy. But Ross in this essay proves through the use of logical squares of opposition that this assumption is clearly false. It is simply that if both means and ends are to count in ethics, then sometimes one will have genuine moral dilemmas where no matter what one chooses, one will end with some moral disvalue. I think that this is the only way that Ben Sisko's decision in "In the Pale Moonlight" could have made sense. He did what was deontologically wrong in order to achieve what was consequentially right, and he has to live with himself under those circumstances forever after. Ross is right to point out in the final sentence of this essay that the polynomic theory of value "represents a significant discovery in ethics for the Friesian School".