Meta-Ethics > Moral Principles > Moral Generalizations

Moral Generalizations

Edited by Vojko Strahovnik (University of Ljubljana)
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Summary

The debate on moral generalizations predominantly focuses on their nature, scope and function. In this way it is partially parallel to discussion between moral generalism and moral particularism but also goes beyond this issue that debates plausibility of a principled approach to morality. The central topic is whether and how it is possible to capture morally relevant aspects of actions and situation into generalizations. Do moral generalizations cover the whole field of morality or merely a part of it. Can we then state such generalizations merely pro tanto or prima facie or are they exceptionless? Next issue is, what function such generalizations serve. Are they to be understood as regulative principles, a mere guides or do they play no significant role in moral decision-making?
Key works Dancy 1983 discusses the relationship between morally relevant features of situations and moral principles and argues against the possibility of moral generalizations. Little & Lance 2004 develops the theory of defeasible moral generalizations, while Väyrynen 2008 argues for a model of hedged moral generalizations and in a similar vein Holton 2002 argues for "that’s it" model of moral principles. 
Introductions For a general introduction to the debate on moral generalizations see Hooker & Little 2000 and chapter I of McKeever & Ridge 2006.
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  1. John Rawls: Two Concepts of Rules.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    In his seminal essay, 'Two Concepts of Rules', John Rawls draws a central distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. In this review, Leslie Allan walks through Rawls's essay, highlighting his key arguments for a strengthened version of rule utilitarianism and reflecting on the lasting influence of his analysis.
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  2. If You're Quasi-Explaining, You're Quasi-Losing.Derek Baker - forthcoming - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics 16. Oxford University Press.
    Normative discourse frequently involves explanation. For example, we tell children that hitting is wrong because it hurts people. In a recent paper, Selim Berker argues that to account for this kind of explanation, expressivists need an account of normative grounding. Against this, I argue that expressivists should eschew grounding and stick to a more pragmatic picture of explanation, one that focuses on how we use explanatory speech acts to communicate information. I propose that the standard form of a normative explanation (...)
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  3. Moral principles as generics.Ravi Thakral - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
    I argue that moral principles involve the same sort of generalization as ordinary yet elusive generic generalizations in natural language such as 'Tigers are striped' or 'Peppers are spicy'. A notable advantage of the generic view is that it simultaneously allows for pessimism and optimism about the role and status of moral principles in our lives. It provides a new perspective on the nature of moral principles on which principles are not apt for determining the moral status of particular actions (...)
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  4. Against Moral Contingentism.Pekka Väyrynen - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (3):209-217.
    [This paper is available as open access from the publisher.]The conventional wisdom in ethics is that pure moral laws are at least metaphysically necessary. By contrast, Moral Contingentism holds that pure moral laws are metaphysically contingent. This paper raises a normative objection to Moral Contingentism: it is worse equipped than Moral Necessitarianism to account for the normative standing or authority of the pure moral laws to govern the lives of the agents to whom they apply. Since morality is widely taken (...)
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  5. Problems for Hard Moral Particularism: Can We Really Dismiss General Reasons?Dario Cecchini - 2020 - Philosophical Inquiries 8 (2):31-46.
    Moral particularism, in its extreme version, is the theory that argues that there are no invariant context-independent moral reasons. It states also that moral knowledge is not constituted by principles and that these are useless or harmful in practice. In this paper, I intend to argue that this position takes context-sensitiveness of reasons too seriously and has to face many philosophical problems—mainly because its most important argument (the argument from holism of reasons) is not convincing but also because a pluralist (...)
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  6. Hypocrisy as Either Deception or Akrasia.Christopher Bartel - 2019 - Philosophical Forum 50 (2):269-281.
    The intuitive, folk concept of hypocrisy is not a unified moral category. While many theorists hold that all cases of hypocrisy involve some form of deception, I argue that this is not the case. Instead, I argue for a disjunctive account of hypocrisy whereby all cases of “hypocrisy” involve either the deceiving of others about the sincerity of an agent's beliefs or the lack of will to carry through with the demands of an agent's sincere beliefs. Thus, all cases of (...)
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  7. The Not So Golden Rule.Dan Flores - 2018 - Philosophy Now (125):32-34.
    The Golden Rule is (roughly) as follows: treat others as you would have others treat you. Philosophical reactions to it vary; it has both supporters and detractors. In any case, almost nobody who things critically about morality takes the literal version of the Golden Rule seriously, since there are just too many problems with it. To demonstrate this, I will look at a literal version of the Golden Rule espoused by John C. Maxwell, a well-known and influential motivational speaker, and (...)
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  8. Reasons and Moral Principles.Pekka Väyrynen - 2018 - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. pp. 839-61.
    This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate and related issues concerning the relationship between normative reasons and moral principles.
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  9. The Problem of Relevant Descriptions and the Scope of Moral Principles.Irina Schumski - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4):1588-1613.
    In her seminal attack on modern moral philosophy, G. E. M. Anscombe claims that Kant's ‘rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it’. Although this so-called problem of relevant descriptions has received considerable attention in the literature, there is little agreement on how it should be understood or solved. My aim in this paper is, first, to clarify the problem (...)
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  10. Defeasibility, norms and exceptions: normalcy model.Vojko Strahovnik - 2016 - Revus 29 (29).
    The paper discusses the notion of defeasibility and focuses specifically on defeasible norms. First, it delineates a robust notion of the phenomenon of defeasibility, which poses a serious problem for both moral and legal theory. It does this by laying out the conditions and desiderata that a model of defeasibility should be able to meet. It further focuses on a specific model of defeasibility that utilises the notion of normal conditions to expound the robust notion of defeasibility. It argues that (...)
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  11. Can the Canberrans’ Supervenience Argument Refute Shapeless Moral Particularism?Peter Tsu - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):545-560.
    Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and Philip Pettit contend in their 2000 paper that an argument from supervenience deals a fatal blow to shapeless moral particularism, the view that the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. A decade has passed since the Canberrans advanced their highly influential supervenience argument. Yet, there has not been any compelling counter-argument against it, as far as I can see. My aim in this paper is to fill in this void and defend SMP against (...)
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  12. Pro-tanto Obligations and Ceteris-paribus Rules.Danny Frederick - 2015 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (3):255-266.
    I summarize a conception of morality as containing a set of rules which hold ceteris paribus and which impose pro-tanto obligations. I explain two ways in which moral rules are ceteris-paribus, according to whether an exception is duty-voiding or duty-overriding. I defend the claim that moral rules are ceteris-paribus against two qualms suggested by Luke Robinson’s discussion of moral rules and against the worry that such rules are uninformative. I show that Robinson’s argument that moral rules cannot ground pro-tanto obligations (...)
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  13. Explaining Moral Knowledge.Uri D. Leibowitz - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (1):35-56.
    In this paper I assess the viability of a particularist explanation of moral knowledge. First, I consider two arguments by Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge that purport to show that a generalist, principle-based explanation of practical wisdom—understood as the ability to acquire moral knowledge in a wide range of situations—is superior to a particularist, non-principle-based account. I contend that both arguments are unsuccessful. Then, I propose a particularist-friendly explanation of knowledge of particular moral facts. I argue that when we are (...)
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  14. Obligating Reasons, Moral Laws, and Moral Dispositions.Luke Robinson - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (1):1-34.
    Moral obligations rest on circumstances. But what are these obligating reasons and in virtue of what are they such reasons? Nomological conceptions define such reasons in terms of moral laws. I argue that one such conception cannot be correct and that others do not support the familiar and plausible view that obligating reasons are pro tanto reasons, either because they entail that this view is false or else because they cannot explain—or even help to explain—how it could be true. I (...)
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  15. Die Idee der Verallgemeinerung in der Ethik: Eine Kritische Untersuchung der Moralphilosophischen Entwürfe von I. Kant, M.G. Singer Und R.M. Hare. [REVIEW]Viktor Friesen - 2013 - Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
    Eine kritische Untersuchung der moralphilosophischen Entwürfe von 1. Kant, M. G. Singer und R. M. Hare -/- Der vorliegenden Untersuchung liegt die Überzeugung zugrunde, dass die Idee der Verallgemeinerung ein zentraler Bestandteil eines jeden an den Prinzipien der Vernunft orientierten Moralsystems ist. In theoretischer Hinsicht bildet ein morallogisches Verallgemeinerungspostulat unsere fundamentale Vorstellung von der Unparteilichkeit moralischer Vorschriften und der normativen Gesetzgebung beziehungsweise der Gleichheit aller Menschen bezüglich ihrer Rechte und Pflichten ab. Diese Vorstellung besagt im Kern, dass es ungerecht wäre, (...)
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  16. Moral Dilemmas and Vagueness.Matjaž Potrč & Vojko Strahovnik - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (2):207-222.
    In this paper we point out some interesting structural similarities between vagueness and moral dilemmas as well as between some of the proposed solutions to both problems. Moral dilemma involves a situation with opposed obligations that cannot all be satisfied. Transvaluationism as an approach to vagueness makes three claims concerning the nature of vagueness: (1) it involves incompatibility between mutually unsatisfiable requirements, (2) the underlying requirements retain their normative power even when they happen to be overruled, and (3) this incompatibility (...)
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  17. Applying Principles to Cases and the Problem of Judgment.John K. Davis - 2012 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (4):563 - 577.
    We sometimes decide what to do by applying moral principles to cases, but this is harder than it looks. Principles are more general than cases, and sometimes it is hard to tell whether and how a principle applies to a given case. Sometimes two conflicting principles seem to apply to the same case. To handle these problems, we use a kind of judgment to ascertain whether and how a principle applies to a given case, or which principle to follow when (...)
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  18. How Insensitive: Principles, Facts and Normative Grounds in Cohen’s Critique of Rawls.Daniel Kofman - 2012 - Socialist Studies 8 (1):246-268.
    Cohen’s hostility to Rawls’ justification of the Difference Principle by social facts spawned Cohen’s general thesis that ultimate principles of justice and morality are fact-insensitive, but explain how any fact-sensitive principle is grounded in facts. The problem with this thesis, however, is that when facts F ground principle P, reformulating this relation as the "fact-insensitive" conditional “If F, then P” is trivial and thus explanatorily impotent. Explanatory, hence justificatory, force derives either from subsumption under more general principles, or precisely exhibiting (...)
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  19. Five Elements of Normative Ethics - A General Theory of Normative Individualism.Dietmar von der Pfordten - 2012 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (4):449 - 471.
    The article tries to inquire a third way in normative ethics between consequentialism or utilitarianism and deontology or Kantianism. To find such a third way in normative ethics, one has to analyze the elements of these classical theories and to look if they are justified. In this article it is argued that an adequate normative ethics has to contain the following five elements: (1) normative individualism, i. e., the view that in the last instance moral norms and values can only (...)
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  20. Moral Principles As Moral Dispositions.Luke Robinson - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 156 (2):289-309.
    What are moral principles? In particular, what are moral principles of the sort that (if they exist) ground moral obligations or—at the very least—particular moral truths? I argue that we can fruitfully conceive of such principles as real, irreducibly dispositional properties of individual persons (agents and patients) that are responsible for and thereby explain the moral properties of (e.g.) agents and actions. Such moral dispositions (or moral powers) are apt to be the metaphysical grounds of moral obligations and of particular (...)
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  21. Moral Metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg: Towards an Analysis of the Aesthetic Settings of Morality.Alison Ross - 2011 - Thesis Eleven 104 (1):40-58.
    This paper examines the role of formal, aesthetic elements in motivating moral action. It proposes that Blumenberg’s analysis of the existential settings of myth and metaphor provide a useful framework to consider the conception and function of the aesthetic symbol in Kantian moral philosophy. In particular, it explores the hypothesis that Blumenberg’s analysis of ‘pregnance’ and ‘rhetoric’ are useful for identifying and evaluating the processes involved in self-persuasion to the moral perspective.
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  22. Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal. By Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge.Ira Singer - 2011 - Metaphilosophy 42 (1-2):170-177.
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  23. Another Particularism: Reasons, Status and Defaults. [REVIEW]Alan Thomas - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (2):151-167.
    This paper makes the non-monotonicity of a wide range of moral reasoning the basis of a case for particularism. Non-monotonicity threatens practical decision with an overwhelming informational complexity to which a form of ethical generalism seems the best response. It is argued that this impression is wholly misleading: the fact of non-monotonicity is best accommodated by the defence of four related theses in any theory of justification. First, the explanation of and defence of a default/challenge model of justification. Secondly, the (...)
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  24. Moral Particularism.Pekka Väyrynen - 2011 - In Christian B. Miller (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Ethics. Continuum. pp. 247-260.
    This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics.
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  25. Reflections on Moral Disagreement, Relativism, and Skepticism about Rules.Denis Robinson - 2010 - Philosophical Topics 38 (2):131-156.
    Part 1 of this paper discusses some uses of arguments from radical moral disagreement—in particular, as directed against absolutist cognitivism—and surveys some semantic issues thus made salient. It may be argued that parties to such a disagreement cannot be using the relevant moral claims with exactly the same absolutist cognitive content. That challenges the absolutist element of absolutist cognitivism, which, combined with the intractable nature of radical moral disagreement, in turn challenges the viability of a purely cognitivist account of moral (...)
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  26. How the Ceteris Paribus Principles of Morality Lie.Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu - 2010 - Public Reason 2 (1):89-94.
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  27. What Does the Frame Problem Tell us About Moral Normativity?Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons - 2009 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12 (1):25-51.
    Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals (...)
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  28. Jonathan Dancy. Ethics Without Principles (Oxford University Press, 2004) Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge. Principled Ethics. [REVIEW]Mark Schroeder - 2009 - Noûs 43 (3):568-580.
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  29. A Theory of Hedged Moral Principles.Pekka Väyrynen - 2009 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4:91-132.
    This paper offers a general model of substantive moral principles as a kind of hedged moral principles that can (but don't have to) tolerate exceptions. I argue that the kind of principles I defend provide an account of what would make an exception to them permissible. I also argue that these principles are nonetheless robustly explanatory with respect to a variety of moral facts; that they make sense of error, uncertainty, and disagreement concerning moral principles and their implications; and that (...)
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  30. Defending "Restricted Particularism" from Jackson, Pettit & Smith.Dan López De Sa - 2008 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 23 (2):133–143.
    According to Jackson, Pettit & Smith , “restricted particularism” is not affected by their supervenience-based consideration against particularism but, they claim, suffer from a different difficulty, roughly that it would violate the platitude about moral argument that, in debating controversial moral issues, a central role is played by various similarity claims. I present a defense of “restricted particularism” from this objection, which accommodates the platitudinous character of the claim that ordinary participants in conversations concerning the evaluative are committed to descriptive (...)
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  31. Book Note on Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal. [REVIEW]Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3):521-524.
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  32. Moral particularism and the real world.Brad Hooker - 2007 - In Mark Norris Lance, Matjaž Potrč & Vojko Strahovnik (eds.), Challenging Moral Particularism. Routledge. pp. 12--30.
    The term ‘moral particularism’ has been used to refer to different doctrines. The main body of this paper begins by identifying the most important doctrines associated with the term, at least as the term is used by Jonathan Dancy, on whose work I will focus. I then discuss whether holism in the theory of reasons supports moral particularism, and I call into question the thesis that particular judgements have epistemological priority over general principles. Dancy’s recent book Ethics without Principles (Dancy (...)
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  33. Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment.Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons - 2007 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (3):279-295.
    According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. (...)
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  34. Where the laws are.Mark Lance & Margaret Little - 2007 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 2:149-171.
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  35. Turning on default reasons.Sean McKeever & Michael Ridge - 2007 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (1):55-76.
    Particularism takes an extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons and thereby threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example, pain, and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, some particularists draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. The present paper argues that all but the most deflationary ways of drawing this (...)
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  36. Challenging Moral Particularism.Matjaž Potrc, Vojko Strahovnik & Mark Lance (eds.) - 2007 - Routledge.
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  37. Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws.Luke Robinson - 2007 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (3):1-22.
    What are moral principles? The assumption underlying much of the generalism–particularism debate in ethics is that they are (or would be) moral laws: generalizations or some special class thereof, such as explanatory or counterfactual-supporting generalizations. I argue that this law conception of moral principles is mistaken. For moral principles do at least three things that moral laws cannot do, at least not in their own right: explain certain phenomena, provide particular kinds of support for counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary (...)
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  38. Ethical generality and moral judgment.Robert Audi - 2006 - In James Lawrence Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory. Blackwell. pp. 6--285.
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  39. Moral concepts: From thickness to response-dependence. [REVIEW]Nenad Miščević - 2006 - Acta Analytica 21 (1):3-32.
    The paper examines three tenets of Dancy’s meta-ethics, finds them incompatible, and proposes a response-dependentist (or response-dispositional) solution. The first tenet is the central importance of thick concepts and properties. The second is that such concepts essentially involve response(s) of observers, which Dancy interprets in a way that fits the pattern of context-dependent resultance: thick concepts are well suited for the particularist grounding of moral theory. However, and this is the third tenet, in his earlier paper (1986) Dancy forcefully argues (...)
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  40. Moral holism, moral generalism, and moral dispositionalism.Luke Robinson - 2006 - Mind 115 (458):331-360.
    Moral principles play important roles in diverse areas of moral thought, practice, and theory. Many who think of themselves as ‘moral generalists’ believe that moral principles can play these roles—that they are capable of doing so. Moral generalism maintains that moral principles can and do play these roles because true moral principles are statements of general moral fact (i.e. statements of facts about the moral attributes of kinds of actions, kinds of states of affairs, etc.) and because general moral facts (...)
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  41. Dancy Cartwright: Particularism in the philosophy of science. [REVIEW]Constantine Sandis - 2006 - Acta Analytica 21 (2):30-40.
    This paper aims to explore the space of possible particularistic approaches to Philosophy of Science by examining the differences and similarities between Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism—as expressed in both his earlier writings (e.g., Moral Reasons , 1993), and, more explicitly defended in his book Ethics without Principles (2004)—and Nancy Cartwright’s particularism in the philosophy of science, as defended in her early collection of essays, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), and her later book, The Dappled World: A Study of (...)
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  42. Particularism and the Point of Moral Principles.Rebecca Lynn Stangl - 2006 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2):201-229.
    According to radical moral particularists such as Jonathan Dancy, there are no substantive moral principles. And yet, few particularists wish to deny that something very like moral principles do indeed play a significant role in our everyday moral practice. Loathe at dismissing this as mere error on the part of everyday moral agents, particularists have proposed a number of alternative accounts of the practice. The aim of all of these accounts is to make sense of our appeal to general moral (...)
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  43. Moral Generalism: Enjoy in Moderation.Pekka Väyrynen - 2006 - Ethics 116 (4):707-741.
    I defend moral generalism against particularism. Particularism, as I understand it, is the negation of the generalist view that particular moral facts depend on the existence of a comprehensive set of true moral principles. Particularists typically present "the holism of reasons" as powerful support for their view. While many generalists accept that holism supports particularism but dispute holism, I argue that generalism accommodates holism. The centerpiece of my strategy is a novel model of moral principles as a kind of "hedged" (...)
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  44. Moral particularism and transduction.Gilbert Harman - 2005 - Philosophical Issues 15 (1):44–55.
    Can someone be reasonable or justified in accepting a specific moral judgment not based on the prior acceptance of a general exceptioness moral principle, where acceptance of a general principle might be tacit or implicit and might not be expressible in language? This issue is an instance of a wider issue about direct or transductive inference. Developments in statistical learning theory show that such an inference can be more effective than alternative methods using inductive generalization and so can be reasonable. (...)
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  45. What does holism have to do with moral particularism?Sean McKeever & Michael Ridge - 2005 - Ratio 18 (1):93–103.
    Moral particularists are united in their opposition to the codification of morality, and their work poses an important challenge to traditional ways of thinking about moral philosophy. Defenders of moral particularism have, with near unanimity, sought support from a doctrine they call “holism in the theory of reasons.” We argue that this is all a mistake. There are two ways in which holism in the theory of reasons can be understood, but neither provides any support for moral particularism. Moral particularists (...)
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  46. Moral Particularism and Epistemic Contextualism: Comments on Lance and Little.Nikola Kompa - 2004 - Erkenntnis 61 (2-3):457-467.
    Do we need defeasible generalizations in epistemology, generalizations that are genuinely explanatory yet ineliminably exception-laden? Do we need them to endow our epistemology with a substantial explanatory structure? Mark Lance and Margaret Little argue for the claim that we do. I will argue that we can just as well do without them – at least in epistemology. So in the paper, I am trying to very briefly sketch an alternative contextualist picture. More specifically, the claim will be that although an (...)
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  47. Neither generalism nor particularism: Ethical correctness is located in general ethical theories.Jane Singleton - 2004 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 1 (2):155-175.
    In this article I shall be supporting two main claims. The first is that the essence of the difference between particularism and generalism lies in where they locate ethical correctness. The second is that generalism, although to be preferred to particularism, is not the final resting place for ethical correctness. Ultimately, ethical correctness resides in ethical theories that provide the rationale for generalism. Particularism is presented as a theory that allows attention to be paid to specific cases and shows a (...)
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  48. Review of Moral Particularism (ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little). [REVIEW]Pekka Väyrynen - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (3):478-483.
    This is a short review of Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (Oxford University Press, 2002).
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  49. Particularism and principles.Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen - 1999 - Theoria 65 (2-3):114-126.
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  50. Virtues and moral rules — a reply.Bernard Gert - 1998 - Philosophia 26 (3-4):489-494.
    In his article, Are Virtues No More than Dispositions to Obey Moral Rules (Philosophia, Vol. 20, Nos. 1-2 (July 1990), pp. 195-207), Walter E. Schaller lists three theses that he characterizes as the Standard View of the connection between the virtues and the moral rules and criticizes me for holding two of them. I show that this claim ignores my distinction between moral rules and moral ideals and involves a widespread misunderstanding of what is meant by moral rules.
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