Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that moral principles are not sufficient to guide moral thought and action: they need to be supplemented by a capacity for judgement. However, why can we not rely on this capacity for moral judgement alone? Why do moral principles need to be supplemented, but are not supplanted, by judgement? So-called moral particularists argue that we can, and should, make moral decisions on a case-by-case basis without any principles. According to particularists, the person of moral judgement is a person of empathy, sensibility and virtue, rather than a person of principle. In this paper I argue that this is a false dichotomy. The person of good moral judgement is a person of principle. I propose that we think of moral principles as internalised long-term commitments that form our moral character and sensitivity, and, as such, are constitutive of moral judgement.
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Notes
For a helpful taxonomy of the different forms of particularism see McKeever and Ridge 2006, 3–24.
It is notoriously difficult to distinguishing the moral from the non-moral. However, I will assume that we have an intuitive grasp of the distinction and will refer to those judgements that fall clearly in the moral realm.
For example, Dancy introduces his Ethics without Principles as a “book […] about how to understand the way in which reasons work” (2004, 7). Similarly, Pekka Väyrynen defines particularism and generalism as “metaphysical doctrines about the role of moral principles regarding the status of certain facts as moral reasons“ (2004, 67). However, a closer look at the literature shows that the current particularist/generalist debate is also a debate about moral reasoning. Dancy starts his book by exploring different ways of “understanding the way in which moral reasoning might work” (2004, 9), and his characterisation of particularism as the thesis that “the possibility of moral thought and judgement does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of moral principles” (ibid. 7) is open to both a metaphysical and an epistemological reading.
Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, for example, have successfully shown that even strong, traditional forms of principled ethics such as utilitarianism can account for the fact moral reasons function holistically (cf. 2006, 27–32). In addition it has been shown that it is not only the case that generalists can be holists, particularists can also be atomists. The debate between atomists and holists in the theory of reasons is thus orthogonal to the debate about whether morality can and should be understood in terms of principles (cf. Albertzart 2011, 53–55).
For further discussion see Albertzart 2011.
This fits well with recent empirical work in moral psychology. Cf. Prinz 2007, 272.
By describing moral judgement in perceptual terms, particularists sometimes give the impression that all moral judging is something done in the blink of an eye. Generalists are in a much better situation to acknowledge that there are many difficult decisions which require a conscious process of careful moral reasoning. However, since this is a paper about the capacity of moral judgement and not the process of moral reasoning, it would go beyond the scope of this paper to try to offer a principle-based model of moral reasoning.
By contrast, many particularists and their generalist interlocutors conceive of moral principles as descriptive, truth-apt and explanatory propositions. Dancy claims that the function of moral principles is to fix the truth conditions of moral judgements by determining the moral status of actions (2004, 116). McKeever and Ridge believe that moral principles “provide the truth-conditions for the application of a moral concept” (2006, 7). Similarly, Pekka Väyrynen holds that a moral principle is a “proposition that identifies conditions or properties in virtue of which something has a given moral property such as rightness, and which are thus explanatory of why it is right” (2008, 76). Thus understood moral principles seem to be ‘word to world’ directed and it is much more difficult to see why the acquirement of a rich set of moral sensibilities would not render such principles superfluous.
This is a thought that can also be found in Kant’s moral philosophy and has recently been developed by Christine Korsgaard. According to Korsgaard, “the principles of practical reason are principles by means of which we constitute ourselves as unified agents” (2009, 25; cf. Korsgaard 1996, 363–397). I do not mean to commit myself to the details of Korsgaard’s account, in particular the purely rationalist approach that makes it difficult to account for the emotional component of principle-based moral judgement I alluded to earlier.
In most cases more than one act-token will be appropriate.
When particularists insist that moral principles are incompatible with context-sensitivity they usually have a different form of context-sensitivity in mind. They are concerned about cases where a particular act-token seems permissible even though there is a moral principle according to which actions of this type are forbidden. In some contexts lying is morally forbidden, for example, but in others it is not. Pointing to the indeterminacy of moral principles will not help to answer this problem. It is the defeasibility of moral principles that is at issue here. A discussion of the defeasibility of moral principles would require an in-depth discussion of reasons-holism and the development of an account of moral reasoning as default reasoning, which would go beyond the scope and purpose of this paper. For discussion see Horty 2007; Lance and Little 2008.
Cf. Dancy 2004, 141: “The basic reason-facts which we are to come to know are particular; their purview is initially restricted to the particular case. We need to be able to come to know these non-general facts, or to acquire justified beliefs about them; and our knowledge of them will be our basic normative knowledge.”
I borrow this analogy from Joshua Greene. See Greene, “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Talk, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 17. 02. 2011.
This does not mean that an agent’s understanding of these facts is divorced from, or prior to, what it is to be an agent. I argued that undertaking a commitment shapes an agent’s experiences and sensibilities. An agent might be unable to fully understand certain social and cultural facts about a society, for example, unless she has certain commitments such as a commitment for the welfare of some members of that society or a commitment to social justice. Our commitments shape who we are and how we see the world.
To say that a moral principle needs to be consistent with an agent’s overall system of moral and non-moral commitments is not to say that there can be no moral dilemmas. Moral principles can conflict contingently but not intrinsically (cf. O’Neill 1996, 158–161). Principles that conflict intrinsically can never be simultaneously instantiated. Principles that do not conflict intrinsically are consistent and can be jointly instantiated in at least some circumstances. However, such principles may nevertheless give rise to contingent conflicts: telling the truth will sometimes (but not always) hurt somebody, and saving a life can sometimes (but not always) require a lie. These contingent conflicts are conflicts not between principles but between ways of living up to the principles in particular circumstances. That is, they are conflicts not between the act-types prescribed by moral principles but conflicts between particular tokens of these act-types. Moral conflicts and dilemmas are the result of the particular, contingent circumstances in which an agent finds herself.
This does not mean that we could not adopt a similar principle as a moral ideal. We could commit ourselves to strive towards the ideal of being able to help all those in need. However, the above principle requires us to actually help all those in need, and we should not commit ourselves to doing something we know we cannot do.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hallvard Lillehammer, Niklas Möller, Onora O’Neill and two anonymous referees of this journal for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Albertzart, M. Principle-Based Moral Judgement. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 339–354 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9343-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9343-x