Do particular moral judgments follow a rule?

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 269-294

  Smith, Jeffery D ^a  

^a ST CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949506617     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2002.tb01901.x     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993)
2. "The Particularist's Progress," in Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 130-56.
3. John McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979): 331-50
4. "Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following," in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. S. Holtzman and C. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 141-62.
5. Cf. Gregory Kaebnick, "Particularist Moral Reasoning and Consistency in Moral Judgments," Journal of Value Inquiry 33 (1999): 45-7.
6. For Dancy's original discussion of this point see his Moral Reasons, 79.
7. Dancy, "Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties," Mind 92 (1983): 530-17.
8. McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," 342.
9. McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," 346
10. "Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following," 143.
11. At best, general considerations are gleaned from particulars through a type of practical training that always takes place at the level where agents attempt to understand the particular problems they face. As Jay Garfield has recently noted, general principles do not determine appropriate responses and can only carry epistemological weight in virtue of their ability to serve as "dialectically useful summaries of that which we know" from particular cases. Cf. "Particularity and Principle: The Structure of Moral Knowledge," Moral Particularism, 199n.
12. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 121-4.
13. See also Marcus Singer, Generalization in Ethics (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963), 17.
14. Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 77-93.
15. Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165-86.
16. O'Neill has recently written that "[r]ules can be indispensable and yet indeterminate; they can be indeterminate and yet action-guiding. Agents can use rules to shape action, because rules do not function as mechanisms and in spite of the fact that they provide no algorithms for action. In using rules we shape our lives, we make judgments - often nuanced judgments - both about the situations we face and about the lines of action we will pursue ... Rules are not the enemy of but the matrix of judgment" (Towards Justice and Virtue: A Reconstructive Account of Practical Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 85).
17. McDowell, "Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following," 144.
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1958), §185.
19. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§101, 131, and 437.
20. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1958), 14.
21. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 15.
22. One recent example of a deontological ethical theory that emphasizes application in the way I am describing is Juergen Habermas's discourse ethics. See his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 181-2.
23. Philosophical Investigations, §85.
24. I borrow this example from Robert Arrington, Rationalism, Realism, and Relativism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 302. Arrington offers this rule as an example of a "grammatical proposition" or "basic moral principle."
25. Thomas Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 39.
26. See Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory, 196-225.