Particularist moral reasoning and consistency in moral judgments

Journal of Value Inquiry

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 43-56

  Kaebnick, Gregory E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033089730     PISSN: 00225363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1004345213068     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1993).
2. Dancy, Moral Reasons, pp. 60ff.
3. Ibid.
4. Dancy uses this term in op. cit., p. 80. For McDowell's development of it, see "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979), p. 336; "Non-cognitivism and Rule Following," in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Stephen H. Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 143-145. A very similar position is endorsed by David Wiggins in "Deliberation and Practical Reason" and "Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments," both in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1987).
5. Dancy uses this term in op. cit., p. 80. For McDowell's development of it, see "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979), p. 336; "Non-cognitivism and Rule Following," in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Stephen H. Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 143-145. A very similar position is endorsed by David Wiggins in "Deliberation and Practical Reason" and "Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments," both in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1987).
6. Dancy uses this term in op. cit., p. 80. For McDowell's development of it, see "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979), p. 336; "Non-cognitivism and Rule Following," in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Stephen H. Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 143-145. A very similar position is endorsed by David Wiggins in "Deliberation and Practical Reason" and "Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments," both in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1987).
7. Dancy uses this term in op. cit., p. 80. For McDowell's development of it, see "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979), p. 336; "Non-cognitivism and Rule Following," in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Stephen H. Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 143-145. A very similar position is endorsed by David Wiggins in "Deliberation and Practical Reason" and "Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments," both in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1987).
8. Dancy tends to speak of the features of cases. I take it that the features are the non-moral properties of a situation, and that talking about the features of a case is the same as talking about the facts or circumstances of a case.
9. Martha Nussbaum gives a thorough and compelling version of this argument in several essays. See "Non-scientific Deliberation," in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 302-304, and " 'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible': Literature and the Moral Imagination," in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 148-167.
10. Martha Nussbaum gives a thorough and compelling version of this argument in several essays. See "Non-scientific Deliberation," in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 302-304, and " 'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible': Literature and the Moral Imagination," in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 148-167.
11. In this spirit, Nussbaum explains that her objection to codes has to do with the generality of rules, not with universalizability. See her " 'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible' " in op. cit., pp. 165-167. If rules were sufficiently finely written, she says, universalizability would be unobjectionable.
12. Dancy, op. cit., pp. 73-79; also Jonathan Dancy, "On Moral Properties," Mind 90 (1981), pp. 367-385.
13. Dancy, op. cit., pp. 73-79; also Jonathan Dancy, "On Moral Properties," Mind 90 (1981), pp. 367-385.
14. Dancy, "On Moral Properties," pp. 367 and 374.
15. Dancy, Moral Reasons, p. 79.
16. Dancy explicitly embraces a primary quality model of moral value in "Two Conceptions of Moral Realism. Part I," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 60 (1986), pp. 167-188.
17. John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Morality and Objectivity, ed. by Ted Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 111.
18. Alternatively, we might say that we respond in a stable way to facts of some kind. Plainly, the point assumes that facts fall into kinds. Dancy makes this assumption as well, witness his characterization of holism as the view that a certain fact may have one moral relevance in one case and another in a different case. Clearly what he means is a fact of the same kind.
19. J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 38ff.
20. Dancy, Moral Reasons, pp. 30ff.
21. Dancy also rejects McDowell's distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities, arguing that it collapses on McDowell's own premises, in "Two Conceptions of Moral Realism," pp. 185-187. Since Dancy characterizes McDowell's realism as a metaphysically weak form, he presumably thinks that the distinction is supposed to be ontological. But McDowell's idea is that secondary qualities and primary qualities are on a par ontologically and differ in the way they figure in experience: secondary qualities are understood as requiring reference to a subject, while primary qualities do not.
22. The thought that behavior is constitutive of rationality is a point that McDowell stresses in various ways, in various idioms. Cf. "Virtue and Reason," and "Two Sorts of Naturalism," in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Philippa Foot, ed. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
23. Dancy, Moral Reasons, pp. x, 114.
24. Ibid., p. 60.
25. This should not be construed as a weakness for the account, however, at least from Dancy's perspective. Dancy's claim that a fact can have one sort of moral relevance in one case and another in another case also implies that we can understand that fact in a non-value-laden way.
26. Dancy, Moral Reasons, p. 112.
27. Barbara Herman, "Moral Deliberation and the Derivation of Duties," in The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 132-158. See Section IV, pp. 147-151.
28. Barbara Herman, "Moral Deliberation and the Derivation of Duties," in The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 132-158. See Section IV, pp. 147-151.
29. Barbara Herman, "The Practice of Moral Judgment," in The Practice of Moral Judgment, pp. 73-93.
30. Dancy, Moral Reasons, p. 63.
31. Ibid., p. 64.
32. Ibid., p. 82.
33. Ibid., pp. 63 and 64.
34. I am indebted to Professors Norman O. Dahl, H.E. Mason, and Sarah Holtman for their criticism of this paper. Professor Dahl has made several substantive suggestions that he will find incorporated into the paper. I also owe a debt to the members of an ethics discussion group at the University of Minnesota, to which I presented an earlier version of the paper and from which I received valuable help.