Scepticism about Principles

Abstract

Care ethicists tend to see principles — understood as conditionals with an imperative consequent — as at best insufficient, and at worst distortive, for proper moral justification and deliberation. This thought is expressed differently by different theorists, but the general idea is that a full and accurate specification of the moral reasons to perform an action, φ, in a context, C, will include so much detail about C that none of the reasons will apply to other contexts. So, we cannot generalise beyond C if we are to explain why the moral reasons to φ in C are (or are not) weighty enough to generate a moral reason (even a non-decisive one) to φ. Care ethicists’ view here has a cousin in the particularism made famous by Jonathan Dancy (2004; see also Hooker and Little (eds) 2000), according to which a reason can favour φ-ing in context C, and disfavour performing an action of φ’s type in context C’. This is arguably a different particularism to that of at least some care ethics, for whom the categorisation of actions into types, and the idea that the reason is the ‘same’ between contexts, is already too general and abstract. For them, the reason is unique to this particular person or situation, and derives directly and irreducibly from the concrete things (or people or events) in this situation. In any case, despite the possible close parallels to Dancy’s view, I will here focus on the view as it is presented by care ethicists.