A couple years ago someone asked on QUORA whether W.D. Ross believe in an "absolute moral principle." I recently looked up that old question and my response to it, because I suspected it might shed some light on the matter of effective altruism I have discussed here of late. I responded to the question about Ross as follows: ---------------------------------- I don’t believe that Ross would want you to think of any moral principle as absolute. His point was, to put it simply, that there are a plurality of moral principles and that they must be balanced against one another. If you want to think of the need to balance as itself an “absolute,” at least for Ross, you can. But that is more a matter of playing with words than of philosophizing. And yes, there is a difference. Ross begins with what he calls “prima facie duties.” There are five of these: the duty to keep promises, the duty to repair such harms as we may have done, a duty to return services whence we have benefitted,