Abstract
This paper makes the non-monotonicity of a wide range of moral reasoning the basis of a case for particularism. Non-monotonicity threatens practical decision with an overwhelming informational complexity to which a form of ethical generalism seems the best response. It is argued that this impression is wholly misleading: the fact of non-monotonicity is best accommodated by the defence of four related theses in any theory of justification. First, the explanation of and defence of a default/challenge model of justification. Secondly, the development of a theory of epistemic status and an explanation of those unearned entitlements that accrue to such status. Thirdly, an explanation of the basis of epistemic virtues. Finally, an account must be given of the executive capacity of rational decision itself as a ‘contentless ability’. This overall set of views can accommodate a limited role for generalizations about categories of evidence, but not such as to rescue a principled generalism. In particular, the version of particularism defended here explains why one ought not to accept the principled “holism” that has proved to be a problem for Dancy’s form of particularism. Ethics certainly involves hedged principles. However, principles cannot be self-hedging: there cannot be a “that’s it” operator in a principle as Richard Holton has claimed that there can be. Practical reasoning is concluded by the categorical detachment of the action-as-conclusion itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
To be precise, I am committed to the strongest possible form of particularism in which a finite set of finite principles cannot model our ethical judgement, so is not a sufficient condition of our capacity for judgement, nor is it implicated in how we do judge, so it is not a necessary condition of that capacity either. For further explanation of this distinction in terms of an analogy with knowledge of grammar see Thomas (2010a).
I have titled this paper “Another Particularism”, but the version of particularism defended here is not a rival to Dancy’s particularism but picks up on one strand in his ideas. That strand is clearest in Dancy (1993) when he refers to ethical judgement as a “contentless ability” in the way I have noted. In more recent work Dancy has foregrounded his argument from reasons holism in a way that has proved inconclusive against his generalist opponents; the argument strategy here is a return to an aspect of his earlier approach. For the view in the literature closest to my own see Garfield (2000). But I will also note the various passages in Dancy (2004) that continue to highlight the conception of sound practical reasoning as a “contentless ability” and Dancy’s endorsement of the Aristotelian thesis that practical reasoning is terminated by action. Dancy, ‘Practical Reasoning and Inference’, unpublished manuscript.
I will call this the problem of “informational complexity”. Arguments from informational complexity to an unrestricted generalism are prominent in Ridge and McKeever (2006). They claim to respect the finite and limited resources of creatures like us while also setting us the cognitive task of grasping a principle that would dictate a practical verdict for all actual and counterfactual circumstances in which it might be applied. I do not think this does take our cognitive limitations seriously but a detailed consideration of their views requires a separate paper, Thomas (2010b).
A focus on informational complexity also suggests a rationale for why some of the epistemic agent’s competences take the form of epistemic virtues.
Of course there is a substantive argument with those who also acknowledge the role played by hedged principles in ethics (and who deny that there are any strict principles in ethics) such as Lance and Little, Robinson and Väyrynen. For those theorists my view is calculatedly superficial: I have identified merely the form of good practical reasoning. But there must be content, too, and we need to start from the substantively “correct” hedged principles that exhibit either deontic kinds or the correct explanatory basis of a true verdict. I will touch on some of the issues here in section 4, below.
One formulation of Dancy’s particularism is this: “A particularist conception is one which sees little if any role for moral principles”; later in the same passage he claims that you can be a “full moral agent” and not have any such principles at all (Dancy 2004, p. 1).
Dancy’s only consideration of a view of the kind defended here, his consideration of the work of Robert B. Brandom, views it as a failed attempt to defend generalism. That is because Dancy’s reason holism forces him to view the existence of even hedged principles as a problem for this version of particularism and as demanding a concession to the generalist that he cannot make. See Dancy, (2004) pp 8–9, 60–63.
I may think, for example, about the desirability of my learning Spanish, undoubtedly valuable as an end, but suppress the condition “if it is, at the time, what I most want and is a reasonable end given the costs” and so on.
The basic difference between Tenebaum (2007a; b) and Thomas 2010c is that Tenenbaum contrasts the generality of thought with the particularity of action. But, it seems to me, some thoughts can be particular, such as singular thoughts. So I express the distinction between the indeterminacy of one’s premises and one’s determinately doing that which, in fact, one does. That still allows one to acknowledge the typically non-monotonic character of practical reasoning.
This is important because one important form of strict generalism, the regulative generalism of Ridge and McKeever, takes it that since ethical judgment must involve strict principles, given that we do come to verdicts then we must have succeeded in quantifying over all the exception clauses implicit in the principle involved. For further discussion see Thomas (2010b).
For a related argument and, indeed, a compressed version of an argument to the Aristotelian thesis that practical reasoning is terminated by an action as its conclusion, see Dancy (2004), pp 22–23.
I am grateful to Krister Bykvist, Larry May and Brad Hooker for pressing me to clarify this point.
I hope to connect this approach to relevance to the inferential contextualism defended in Thomas, (2006) on another occasion.
As theorist of Robotics Rodney Brooks points out, the cheapest and most efficient model of the world that you can give to a machine is—the world. (It certainly saves on a lot of memory.) (Brooks 1991)
There are two key epistemological ideas put to use in the D/C model: that of status and of unearned entitlement. In Value and Context I (in effect) added a third that seems to me also pertinent to the particularist versus generalist debate, namely, the role played by topic-specific truisms. I will not discuss this at any length here as Thomas (2007) shows why I think the alleged “flattening of the normative landscape” is not a problem for particularism.
Unless, of course, all that you mean by invariance is that it is statistically true that a certain reason has tended to favour certain actions in the past. Dancy, Horty, Garfield and I all think that is true but of no theoretical interest.
This is Philipa Foot’s distinction between verdictive and evidential considerations. See Foot (1978), p. 182
Holton appeals to the idea of a relevant logic as one response to this problem. Logics of this kind precisely tag formulae with indices so as to constrain the introduction of premises to avoid the addition of true junk of the kind that generate true supersession. But all three of the leading interpretations of relevance logics appeal to the idea of information to characterize the accessibility relation over worlds that is characteristic of this family of logics: “The ternary accessibility relation needs a philosophical interpretation in order to give relevant implication a real meaning on this semantics. Recently there have been three interpretations developed based on theories about the nature of information.” Mares, Edwin, "Relevance Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/logic-relevance/>. Mares describes all three versions; I simply want to note that each interpretation involves characterizing worlds in terms of information which simply takes us back to the problem of non-monotonicity.
I am very grateful for helpful comments on an ancestor of this paper to the participants in a workshop at the University of Paris-Sorbonne IV on ‘Moral Particularism’, particularly Anna Zelinska, Pekka Väyrnen and John Skorupski. Later versions benefited from the comments of Lucy Allais, Krister Bykvist, Marilyn Friedman, Brad Hooker, Simon Kirchin, Jerry Levinson, Bob Lockie, Larry May, Mike Morris, Jonathan Neufeld, Murali Ramachandran, Sean Sayers, Robert Talisse and Ken Westphal. Special thanks, as ever, to Kathryn Brown and also to Jonathan Dancy for a discussion of the issues involved. I am also grateful to Jonathan for making available to me his unpublished paper in defence of the Aristotelian thesis that practical reasoning is terminated by action.
References
Baker G, Hacker P (1984) Language, sense and nonsense. Blackwells, Oxford
Brand-Ballard J (2007) Why one basic principle? Utilitas 19(2):220–242
Brandom R (1998) Action, norms, and practical reasoning. Noûs, 32 supplement: philosophical perspectives, 12, Language Mind and Ontology, pp 127–139
Brooks RA (1991) Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47:139–159
Carroll L (Dodgson, C. L.) (1895) What the tortoise said to achilles. Mind, n.s., 4, pp 278–80
Clark P (1997) Practical steps and reasons for action. Can J Philos 27(1):17–45
Clark P (2001) The action as conclusion. Can J Philos 3(4):481–506
Dancy J (1993) Moral reasons. Blackwells, Oxford
Dancy J (2004) Ethics without principles. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Foot P (1978) Are moral considerations overriding?’ In Virtues and Vices. Blackwell, Oxford
Garfield J (2000) Particularity and principle: the structure of moral knowledge. In: Hooker and Little (eds.) Moral particularism, pp 178–204
Harman G (1986) Change in view, M. I. T. Press
Holton R (2002) Principles and particularisms. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 76, no. 1, pp 191–209(19)
Horty JF (2001) Nonmonotonic logic. In Goble (2001) pp 336–361
Horty JF (2007) Reasons as defaults. Philosophers’ Imprint 7(3), 28 pp 1–28
Lance M, Little M (2004) Defeasibility and the normative grasp of context. Erkenntnis 61:435–455
Lance M, Little M (2006a) Particularism and anti-theory. In Copp D (ed) (2006), pp 567–593
Lance M, Little M (2006b) Defending moral particularism. In Dreier J (ed) (2006) pp 304–321
Lance M, Little M (2007) Where the laws are. In Shafer-Landau R (ed) (2007), chapter seven
Lance M, Little M (2008) From Particularism to defeasibility in ethics. In: Lance M, Potrcz M, Strahovnik V (eds) (2008) pp 53–74
Morton A (2004) Epistemic virtues, metavirtues, and computational complexity. Nous 38(4): 481–502(22)
Ridge M, McKeever S (2006) Principled ethics: generalism as a regulative ideal. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Robinson L (2006) Moral holism, moral generalism, and moral dispositionalism. Mind 115(458):331–60
Robinson L (2008) Moral principles are not moral laws. Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (2):1–22
Tenenbaum S (2007a) Moral psychology. Rodopi, Amsterdam
Tenenbaum S (2007b) The conclusion of practical reasoning. In Tenenbaum (2007b), pp 323–343
Thomas A (2005) Reasonable partiality and the agent’s personal point of view. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 8(1–2):24–43
Thomas A (2006) Value and context: the nature of moral and political knowledge. Clarendon, Oxford
Thomas A (2007) Practical reasoning and normative relevance. Journal of Moral Philosophy 4(1):77–78
Thomas A (2010a) Moral particularism. Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, Reed-Elsevier
Thomas A (2010b) Should generalism be our regulative ideal?’ paper presented to the conference ‘Intuition and Anti-Theory in Ethics’, University of Edinburgh
Thomas A (2010c) Is practical reasoning essentially first personal? In Feltham B, Cottingham J, Stratton-Lake P (eds) Partiality and impartiality in ethics. Oxford, Oxford University Press
Väyrnen P (2004) Particularism and default reasons. Ethical Theory Moral Pract (7), March, pp 53–79
Väyrynen P (2009) A theory of hedged moral principles. In Shafer-Landau (ed) (2009) pp 91–132
Williams B (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Fontana, London
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Thomas, A. Another Particularism: Reasons, Status and Defaults. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 151–167 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9247-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9247-6