Abstract

Jonathan Dancy’s Ethics Without Principles (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004) presents the fullest account of the moral particularism for which its author is well known. Moral particularism, for Dancy, is the view that there is little if any place in the moral life for moral principles, that moral judgement does not need to appeal to them, and that ‘there is no essential link between being a full moral agent and having principles’ (p. 1). We need an account of moral thinking which allows for moral conflict: the idea that moral thinking consists essentially in subsuming particular cases under a universal principle implies that the agent who thinks she is confronted by conflicting reasons is simply in error, since she has not found the relevant universal principle. And this seems wrong. Roughly similar considerations apply to the idea of regret. When I face a dilemma such that the consequences of whichever path I do not take seem bound to haunt me, the ‘subsumption’ view of principles entails that ‘there was no reason to do the other thing at all, since only one principle applied to the case, and it was decisive, and the only reasons around were those which depend for their existence on that principle’ (p. 4). Thus Dancy seeks, in Aristotelian fashion, to save the phenomena: conflict and regret just are part of our moral lives. Principles do not work in our moral deliberation in the way that their supporters think they do; and they may often cause us to fail to attend to the particularity of moral phenomena.