Abstract
I take the debate between the particularists and the principlists to be centered on the issue of whether there are true moral principles. One argument the principlists often appeal to in support of their claim that there are true moral principles is the argument from supervenience. Roughly, the argument is made up of the following three statements: (P1) If the thesis of moral supervenience holds, then there are true moral principles. (P2) The thesis of moral supervenience holds. (C) There are true moral principles, and hence particularism is false. In this paper, I argue that the above argument is not sound by attacking (P1). I hold that no general supervenient/resultance base has a robust enough configuration of contextual features as to ground the existence of true moral principles. If I am right about this, I think it would be indicative of a reason to be less confident about the truth of principlism and more confident about the truth of particularism.
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Notes
The first four paragraphs in this section are an excerpt from my 2010 article, “Can Morality Be Codified.” See Tsu (2010).
It has to be noted here that the debate between principlism and particularism can be conducted entirely in terms of non-cognitivist language. If one holds to a non-cognitivist view about moral claims, i.e., the view that no moral claims have truth values, the issue still remains whether the moral claims about moral principles are correct or not. See Dancy (2004a, p. 140).
The most representative defender of the argument is probably Richard Hare. See his Moral Thinking, (1981), although in that book Hare uses the term ‘universalizability’ to mean what most people mean by ‘supervenience,’ as Jonathan Dancy correctly notes in his Moral Reason (1993, Appendix II). More recent defenders include Jonathan Bennett and Walter Sinott-Armstrong. See Bennett’s The Act Itself, (1995, p. 19), where he says, ‘Moral judgments supervene on non-moral facts; so if some particular act is wrong, it is made so by some of its non-moral properties and relations, ones that would suffice to make wrong any act that had them.’ Dancy also quotes this passage in Moral Reason, p. 88; another moral theorist who implicitly subscribes to the argument from supervenience is Walter Sinott-Armstrong. See his ‘Some Varieties of Particularism’ (1999, pp. 5–6), where he defends the view consisting of the following two claims: (i) if we judge one action right, we must judge any other relevantly similar action right. (ii) An action is relevantly similar if, roughly, it shares with the first action all the properties that were reasons why the first action was right, as well as all the underminers, reversers, excuses and overriders.
This is what Jonathan Dancy takes the principlists to mean when they talk about moral supervenience. See Dancy (1993, p 77).
See for instance Smith (2004, chapter 11, p. 214).
See Dancy (2004a, p. 87), where Dancy claims that ‘[a] principle that has only one instance is worse than useless, for no such principle could ever be a guide for judgment.’
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for his/her helpful suggestion here.
Brad Hooker has a similar view that the features of context should be included inside the full specification of the reason. See Hooker (2000, p.14); it is also worth noting here that Raz (2006, p. 110) points out, although somewhat implicitly, that two senses of ‘in virtue of’ have to be distinguished, namely, that there is a distinction between facts that make the actions right and the fact statement of which will provide an adequate explanation in context.
Zangwill (2008, pp. 109–127) argues that if an action is right, only the right-making properties are responsible for its moral status but the lack of wrong-making properties is not.
Non-cognitivists will have no objection to this claim as they typically see our moral judgments as constrained by the morally relevant features of an action.
It is noteworthy here that an action’s moral properties must be distinguished from its moral valence. Two actions having the same moral valence may not necessarily have the same moral properties. To give a simple example, both the action of stealing a candy bar from a shop and the action of raping have negative moral valence (they both are wrong rather than right, and hence are both negatively valenced rather than positively valenced), but they do not have the same moral properties because the latter action is certainly, in a sense, much more wrong than the former one.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection and giving me the opportunity to further clarify my position.
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Acknowledgements
I thank an anonymous reviewer and the following people for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of this paper: Jeanette Kennett, Daniel Stoljar, David Chalmers, Daniel Star, Keith Horton, Richard Fumerton, Christopher Pincock, Chung-Hung Chang, Nic Southwood, Ben Blumson, Jens Christian and Carl Brusse. I thank the audience at the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference (2007), Australian National University Postgraduate Conference at Kiola and Soochow Analytic Philosophy Conference (2007) for stimulating discussions.
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Tsu, P.SH. Defending Particularism from Supervenience/Resultance Attack. Acta Anal 26, 387–402 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0127-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0127-z