On knowing the 'why': Particularism and moral theory

Hasting Center Report

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 32-40

  Little, Margaret Olivia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; ARTICLE; BIOETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; ETHICAL THEORY; ETHICS; HUMAN; MORALITY; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH; UNITED STATES;

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; BIOETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH;

ETHICAL THEORY; HUMANS; MORAL DEVELOPMENT; PRINCIPLE-BASED ETHICS; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0013116588     PISSN: 00930334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3527954     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. John McDowell is cited by many as inspiration for the view, which is developed and endorsed more explicitly by, among others, J. Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993);
2. D. McNaughton, chapter 13 of Moral Vision (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1988);
3. M. Little, "Moral Generalities Revisited," in Moral Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), ed. B. Hooker and M.O. Little. For recent debate on the view as such, see
4. B. Hooker and M.O. Little, eds., Moral Particularism.
5. R.B. Louden, Morality and Moral Theory: A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation (Oxford: New York, 1992).
6. For a collection of related essays, see S. Clarke and E. Simpson, eds., Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York, 1989).
7. N. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8. S. Hampshire, "Morality and Conflict," in his Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983).
9. A. Baier, "Theory and Reflective Practices," in her Postures of the Mind: Essays in Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
10. To the objections just presented we can add two others that concern epistemological issues less relevant to the discussion pursued above. When Bernard Williams objects to theory, for instance, his central point is to criticize the idea that it might admit justification that is transcendent of a culture's norms. See his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). And sometimes "antitheory" is used to describe objections to the claim, no longer current, that justification always proceeds in a "top-down" fashion - that is, that intuitions about generalizations always carry more weight than intuitions about individual cases.
11. Kant, for instance, is often singled out as a particularly egregious sinner in these regards, but as many have pointed out, he never denied the need for judgment or dismissed entirely the importance of emotion in the human moral life. And Aristotle, often touted as the exemplar for amitheorists, is often let off the hook too lightly. As Hampshire notes (see ref. 4), Aristotle was dismissive of the idea that moral values and directives located in "conventions," such as the way society organizes familial or sexual relations, could nonetheless be fully authoritative for those within those ways of life. And while not a reductivist, he was a true-born systematist of the sort objected to in the following paragraphs (although he agreed that the concepts needed to describe morality are open-ended): each virtue is assigned its domain, and all are capable of being corralled under one notion - flourishing - to boot.
12. Most everyone, of course, will agree that moral concepts can all be organized under very abstract concepts, though disagreement will persist in the extent to which those abstract concepts thus do any real work for us.
13. A. Rorty, "The Advantages of Moral Diversity," Social Philosophy and Policy 9, no. 2 (1992): 38-62.
14. I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1970);
15. E. Milgram, "Murdoch, Practical Reasoning, and Particularism," forthcoming in Notizie di Politeia.
16. The pain example is from Milgram, the Diplomacy example from Mark Lance, and the pleasure example from Dancy, who further attributes it to Roy Hattersley.
17. A good representative of the first can be found in D. McNaughton and P. Rawlings, "Unprincipled Ethics," in Moral Particularism, ed. Little and Hooker, pp. 256-75. An example of the second is in
18. J. Dancy, "In Defense of Thick Concepts," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 20 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995).
19. Note that the two sorts of objection are different. One could be a holist about the reason-giving force of considerations and yet believe moral concepts capable of nontrivial exhaustive definitions. Note, too, that one may well believe there remain pockets of well-ordered theory even if the whole is not so systematic. (Many, for instance, will believe the cluster of concepts dealing with interference, agency, and consent form such an internally codifiable system, however messily it might interface with other moral considerations.) I myself think it motley all the way down; but again, this is only an issue of how widely the particularist wants to cast her net.
20. This is the central point of Cora Diamond's, "Anything But Argument?" The reference to animals and poetry in this paragraph is a reference to her "Eating Meat and Eating People," both from her The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology Press, 1991).
21. My thanks to Mark Lance for the example.
22. See M.O. Little, "Wittgensteinian Lessons on Particularism," in Wittgensteinian Bioethics, ed. C. Elliott (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), and
23. J. Garfield, "Particularity and Principle: The Structure of Moral Knowledge," in Moral Particularism, ed. Hooker and Little, pp. 178-204.
24. J. Annas, "Virtue as a Skill," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 3, no. 2 (1995): 227-43.
25. See ref. 10., Milgram, "Murdoch, Practical Reasoning, and Particularism."
26. For an argument defending the claim that Aristotle himself could not have endorsed a statistical interpretation of "for the most part" generalizations, but which then tries therefore to render them in principle exceptionless, see T.H. Irwin, "Ethics as an Inexact Science: Aristotle's Ambitions for Moral Theory," in Moral Particularism, ed. Hooker and Little, pp. 100-129.
27. In this section, I am presenting work done jointly with my colleague Mark Lance, which we are developing more fully in a book tentatively tided "Porous Generalizations and Privileged Conditions." This section also signals an important change in the view I presented in "Moral Generalities Reconsidered," where I defended a more radical particularism that denied moral imports to features such as lying - the import we precisely work here to recover.
28. Not an epistemic default, in the sense of something we can justifiably presume is true until we see evidence to the contrary: a court servant at Versailles might wisely abandon his usual presumption of sitting on the chairs he encounters; the person who realizes she is going into the hologram chamber rightly presumes to distrust what her eyes seem to tell her.
29. These are different and more robust than the explanatory generalizations I defended in the last section of "Moral Generalities Reconsidered." There my concern was to provide an analysis of the "good-making" relationship (not the notion of moral nature here discussed); the explanations recovered there hence apply equally well to something like shoelace color, wherever it does in fact count as a good-making feature.