Abstract
The metaethical debate between particularists and generalists concerning moral principles has proven to have legs. Those whose normative theories are principle-driven must now get down to the business of justifying their reliance on such principles, clarifying not merely their content but also their nature. Here, Diana Heney argues that what is at stake in this dispute are our deeply embedded practices of codification—our shared moral architecture. The practice-first case for generalism is made by considering the shared quality of moral life; and within a shared life, the importance of prediction, adjudication, and education. We have to get along to go along, and we simply cannot do that when we never know what the other will do next. Principles facilitate social living by giving actions some predictability. Adjudication can involve assessing compliance with principles taken as binding, as well as assessing the principled distribution of goods and resources. And for shared life to go well, education is critical. Thus from a practice-first standpoint, the generalist can offer a compelling vindicatory account of such architecture, while the particularist cannot.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
For a fine-grained analysis of this cluster , see McKeever and Ridge (2006, Chapter 1), ‘Many Moral Particularisms’.
- 2.
See also Little (2000).
- 3.
The main task of this paper is to make some headway in what has seemed like an intractable dispute by seeking methodological clarity, and so I do not develop my own version of generalism in detail here. Elsewhere, I develop and defend a form of regulative generalism consistent with pragmatist methodology and characterized by empirically discoverable, exception-laden principles adopted on practical-epistemic grounds (Heney 2016). I have been tempted, in honor of Charles Sanders Peirce, to label it ‘painfully matured generalism’: ‘Broad generalization is glorious when it is the inevitable outpressed juice of painfully matured little details of knowledge; but when it is not that, it is a crude spirit inciting only broils between a hundred little dogmas, each most justly condemning all the others’ (Peirce CP 2.14).
- 4.
This may sound near to tautological, but I don’t think that it is. For some domains, we may discover that a practical investigation reveals that anything goes. In the moral domain, a practical investigation reveals an apparent reliance on shared practices. The question, then, is whether such practices are structured or constituted by reliance on principles, and whether they are defensible.
- 5.
It is worth noting that most people working in this area do think that we need to explain both reasons and practices, but the priority question remains important because it brings some considerations into the forefront and pushes others into the background, or even out of the picture. A parallel sort of division occurs in the early twentieth-century debates about cognitivism and non-cognitivism—whether the frame is set to start first with ontological or with semantic considerations bears in important ways on how the truth-aptness of a moral judgment is construed.
- 6.
Not all generalists are invested in this line of argumentation, because not all generalists defend reasons-invariance. For example, Väyrynen (2009) does not commit to reasons-invariance, but that account is also a clear case of a practice-first approach, as he investigates moral principles in their ‘explanatory and epistemological roles’, not on the basis of their metaphysical underpinnings (Väyrynen 2009, 92).
- 7.
In a discussion of justice that he himself calls ‘a bit thin’, Dancy offers the following: ‘We can retain at least part of our sense that the justness of an action functions as a reason very differently from more ordinary reasons by saying that it is a default reason. But to be a default reason is not to be an invariant reason. So there might be no true principle of justice; all that is true is that where the justness of an action counts in favour of doing it, there is nothing to explain; in that sense, this is what one should expect to happen. It is only when the justness of the act does not count in favour (or even counts against, if that is imaginable) that there is something to explain’ (Dancy 2004, 113). Notice that this retention can be secured only in the notion of a default reason is workable; if it is not, how one can secure what one should expect—in other words, the function of prediction on which Hooker is focused—is left murky. He later hypothesizes that ‘the role of justice as a reason can vary according to context’—and even if it did not, and thus had an ‘invariant normative role as a reason-giver’, we would have no reason to think that there are many (or any) other such concepts (Dancy 2004, 121).
- 8.
This is a feature, on his account, of ‘moderate’ holism—so perhaps a concession he actually thinks better off not made.
- 9.
Darwall offers an interesting alternative, beginning with Dancy’s basic taxonomy, but nonetheless defending principles. Darwall argues that even if one affirms reasons holism, one must also see that principles are necessary for the idea of being held accountable: ‘according to morality as accountability, rules and principles are essential […] for us to be morally accountable to one another, and to ourselves’ (Darwall 2013, 187).
- 10.
One possibility for a principle that could avoid reliance on regularity in the sense of statistical prevalence or normalcy could be a principle expressing a generic: a proposition expressing a generalization that stops short of universality, and need not even track a common conjunction or state of affairs. In their (2013), Adam Lerner and Sarah-Jane Leslie argue that while generics can capture interesting features in the moral domain, generalists have erroneously taken generic generalizations as universal generalizations. In my view, this is true only of generalists who have taken there to be an identified stock of invariant reasons underwriting exceptionless moral principles—thus, I do not think that the point about generics undermines the sort of generalist view gestured toward in 3.2.
- 11.
- 12.
See Heney (2016) for further discussion on this point.
- 13.
If this seems too imprecise, perhaps it is worth remarking that it is far from clear how to understand practical reasoning itself, in part because the integration of our theoretical models of reasoning and our knowledge of psychology is very much a work in progress. Bernard Williams has gone so far as to say that ‘There is an essential indeterminacy in what can be counted a rational deliberative process. Practical reasoning is a heuristic process, and an imaginative one, and there are no fixed boundaries’ (Williams 1981 [1980], 110).
- 14.
One way that Hooker does this is by developing a thought experiment comparing a particularist society with a society of Rossian generalists. It is an interesting case: it could be construed as transcendental or regulative in character, or as a more direct (but fallible) inference to the best explanation. The transcendental reading: from deeply embedded practices that rely on the invariance of reasons, one could posit the invariance of reasons. The regulative reading: the practices of moral reasoning may make no sense without the idea of an invariant moral reason, which is then taken on as a regulative assumption of moral inquiry. The inference to the best explanation reading: practices of moral reasoning operate as if there are invariant reasons, and do a pretty good job; the best explanation of that is that there are actually such reasons. I say more in 3.2.
- 15.
While this does not look promising from the reasons-first perspective, one can imagine accepting this as a consequence of the generalist’s preferred metaphysics of reasons without agreeing that it will produce any problem of practicability. I return to this point in 3.2.
- 16.
The practice-first approach, while it may be experiencing a current surge in metaethics, has older roots—and notably, very strong roots in the pragmatist tradition, which is united by a commitment to the primacy of practice (Putnam 1995, 52).
- 17.
My thinking about this point in terms of fundamental versus non-fundamental features, along with the possibility of focusing on either coherence-first or credibility-first, is sparked by McPherson (2018).
- 18.
I am tempted to also include our aspiration to get things right. Moral thought, moral deliberation, moral discourse—all of these processes are deeply entangled with cognitive aspirations, and such aspirations seem to be principled in some sense. It may be that what animates this thought is really cognitivism rather than generalism. For the idea that what we take ourselves to be doing in a practice partly constitutes the practice, see Terence Cuneo’s (2006).
- 19.
For further development of Bakhurst’s compelling critique of particularism as failing to offer an appropriately rich account of the character of our moral lives, see Bakhurst (2013) (which also considers some ways in which a particularist might respond).
- 20.
As Queen lead guitarist Brian May sings during an unusual turn on lead vocals, ‘take care of those you call your own/and keep good company’ (‘Good Company’; A Night at the Opera, 1975).
- 21.
It is important that it is not merely the strength of our grip that matters—many odious acts are the downstream result of holding too tight to a principle when it turns out to be exception-laden.
- 22.
An example of the kind of case I have in mind is a hostage-negotiation situation. When an agent has decided to flout the norms about threatening and harming others, bringing that agent to accept that he does in fact accept them, underneath it all, may be the first step onto shared scaffolding that can be used to resolve such a situation.
- 23.
Note that practical indispensability does not warrant belief in the truth of such principles, but only adoption of such principles as guiding or regulative.
References
Agassi, Martine. 2009 [2000]. Hands Are Not for Hitting, Illustrated by Marieka Heinlen. Minneapolis: Free Spirit Publishing.
Bakhurst, David. 2007. Pragmatism and Ethical Particularism. In New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak, 122–141. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. Moral Particularism: Ethical Not Metaphysical? In Thinking About Reasons: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Dancy, ed. David Bakhurst, Brad Hooker, and Margaret Little, 192–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cuneo, Terence. 2006. Saying What We Mean: An Argument Against Expressivism. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, vol. 1, 35–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dancy, Jonathan. 1993. Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
———. 2004. Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darwall, Stephen. 2013. Morality and Principle. In Thinking About Reasons: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Dancy, ed. David Bakhurst, Brad Hooker, and Margaret Little, 168–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dreier, James. 2006. Introduction. In Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, ed. James Dreier, x–xxiv. Malden: Blackwell.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1989. “What Is Moral Maturity? A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical Expertise. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/papers.html.
Gibbard, Allan. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Heney, Diana B. 2016. Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics. New York: Routledge.
Hooker, Brad. 2000. Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad. In Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2008. Moral Particularism and the Real World. In Challenging Moral Particularism, ed. Mark Lance, Matjaž Potrc, and Vojko Strahovnik, 12–30. New York: Routledge.
Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lance, Mark, and Margaret Little. 2006. Defending Moral Particularism. In Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, ed. James Dreier, 305–322. Malden: Blackwell.
———. 2007. Where the Laws Are. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, vol. 2, 149–178. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lerner, Adam, and Sarah-Jane Leslie. 2013. Generics, Generalism, and Reflective Equilibrium: Implications for Moral Theorizing from the Study of Language. Philosophical Perspectives 27: 366–403. Philosophy of Language.
Little, Margaret. 2000. Moral Generalities Revisited. In Moral Particularism, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, 276–304. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Manne, Kate. 2013. On Being Social in Metaethics. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, vol. 8, 50–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKeever, Sean, and Michael Ridge. 2006. Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2012. Elusive Reasons. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, vol. 7, 110–137. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McNaughton, David. 1988. Moral Vision. Oxford: Blackwell.
McPherson, Tristram. 2018. Naturalistic Moral Realism, Rationalism, and Non-Fundamental Epistemology. In The Many Moral Rationalisms, ed. Karen Jones and Francois Schroeter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neurath, Otto. 1983 [1932–33]. Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. Neurath. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–58. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, i–vi edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, vii and viii edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Cited as CP plus volume and paragraph number.
Putnam, Hilary. 1995. Pragmatism: An Open Question. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Railton, Peter. 2006. Normative Guidance. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, vol.1, 3–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scheffler, Samuel. 1992. Human Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schroeder, Mark. 2009. A Matter of Principle. Nous 43 (3): 568–580.
Talisse, Robert (forthcoming). Epistemic Democracy, Public Reason, and the Ethics of Citizenship.
Väyrynen, Pekka. 2009. A Theory of Hedged Moral Principles. In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, vol. 4, 91–132. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wiggins, David. 1990–1. Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91: 61–85.
Williams, Bernard. 1981 [1980]. Internal and External Reasons. Reprinted in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, 101–13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Heney, D. (2020). On Moral Architecture. In: Kaspar, D. (eds) Explorations in Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48051-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48051-6_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48050-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48051-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)