Particularism and the Point of Moral Principles

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2):201-229 (2006)
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Abstract

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 truths in both reaching and justifying our particular moral judgments without thereby violating the particularists' stricture against substantive moral principles. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent non-substantive accounts of moral generalities appealed to by radical particularists – the heuristic account and default reasons accounts – fail in this aim.

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Rebecca Stangl
University of Virginia

Citations of this work

Moral principles as generics.Ravi Thakral - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-20.
Moral Particularism and Moral Generalism.Michael Ridge & Sean McKeever - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Virtue Ethics and Particularism.Constantine Sandis - 2021 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95 (1):205-232.
Is Every Action Morally Significant?John Haldane - 2011 - Philosophy 86 (3):375-404.
Recent work: Moral particularism.Jennifer Flynn - 2010 - Analysis 70 (1):140-148.

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References found in this work

Ethics without principles.Jonathan Dancy - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Right and the Good. Some Problems in Ethics.W. D. Ross - 1930 - Oxford: Clarendon Press. Edited by Philip Stratton-Lake.
The methods of ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1874 - Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press. Edited by Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones.

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