What does holism have to do with moral particularism?

Ratio

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 93-103

  McKeever, Sean ^a   Ridge, Michael ^b  

^a ITHACA COLLEGE   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749163603     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2005.00273.x     Document Type: Article

References (7)

1. Jonathan Dancy calls this the problem of 'looking away.' See Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 63-64
2. Jonathan Dancy, 'The Particularist's Progress,' in Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, eds. Moral Particularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 135
3. Margaret Little, 'Moral Generalities Revisited,' in Hooker and Little 2000, previously cited, p. 284
4. Philip Stratton-Lake, Kant, Duty, and Moral Worth (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 129, see also pp. 128-30
5. Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith argue at the end of their paper on particularism and patterns that holism is compatible with a form of 'expected value' utilitarianism, but the version of utilitarianism they consider is unnecessarily technical and obscures the basic point. The theory they consider maintains that, 'the moral value of A is a weighted sum of the value of each possible world at which A obtains: V(A) = Σw Pr(w/A).V(w), where V(w) is a measure of total happiness at w. And R is a reason for A if and only if the value of A given R is greater than the value of A, i.e., ΣwPr(w/A.R).V(w) > ΣwPr(w/A).V(w), which obtains if and only if V(A.R) > V(A).' (p. 97) Their explication of this form of utilitarianism and its presuppositions may succeed (though this is not obvious), but the basic point should not be thought to depend on the elaborate details of this particular version of expected value utilitarianism. See Jackson, Pettit, and Smith, 'Ethical Particularism and Patterns,' in Hooker and Little, previously cited, pp. 79-99, esp. p. 96-99
6. For a similar point, see Richard Holton, 'Particularism and Moral Theory: Principles and Particularism,' Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 76, July 2002, fn.12
7. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis Beck (London: Macmillan/Library of Liberal Arts, 1990 originally published in 1785), p. 9 (Academy pagination 393)