Chapter 2 Do Our Moral Judgements Need to Be Guided by Principles?

Abstract

This chapter discusses whether our moral decisions should be conceived as the mere application of abstract moral principles or rather as practical knowledge derived from our moral experience and grounded in the complexity of concrete situations in which principles are embedded. Appealing to Aristotle, this chapter argues that, although principles play a key role in our moral judgments, these latter cannot be reduced to the result of purely deductive reasoning, since they previously require another kind of rationality: instead of being purely deductive, our moral decisions appear to be the result of a combined inductive-deductive process. This claim is developed in two parts. The first part briefly presents some of the criticisms levelled in recent decades against purely deductive moral theories. The second part claims that an inductive-deductive model provides a more realistic account of how sound moral judgments are actually made. This discussion has direct relevance to medical ethics, especially in the context of the criticisms levelled against the principlist approach proposed by Beauchamp and Childress.

This article was first published as: Roberto Andorno, “Do Our Moral Judgments Need to Be Guided by Principles?”, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Volume 21(4), pp. 457–465 (2012), © Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission.