Next up: “Particularism and Antitheory”, by Mark Lance and Margaret Little. This is a very helpful article (especially for people who, like me, might have the suspicion that particularists and anti-particularists are often talking past one another). It starts off by distinguishing between normative principles (principles which say which considerations are good- or bad-making) and deliberative principles (which say what procedures we can use to arrive at good moral judgments), and then gives the following three conditions on being a classical Principle:
1. Universal, exceptionless, law-like generalizations. Normative principles give us necessary and nontrivial connections involving moral properties. Deliberative principles give us procedures that guarantee the discovery of a right action.
2. These principles are informative. The features they pick out are in principle questionable, and we can use them to justify or to criticize particular moral claims, reactions to individual cases, etc.
3. These principles are part of a theoretical system, and so illuminate and give leverage on one another. (This is the fuzziest of the constraints.)
They then go through quite a nice back-and-forth between the view that moral theory should give a list of principles and an algorithm for computing moral verdicts, and the view that something like interpretation (an ability to see the morally salient features of a situation, which can’t be reduced to an ability to see the physical features of a situation) and judgment (the ability to tell what principles one should act upon in cases of competition, not reducible to any procedure for weighing the conflicting principles) is required. They also argue that those who take interpretation and judgment to be essential can defend their position by citing other properties (their example: ‘being a chair’) that aren’t reducible, but that we can employ rationally and consistently, and settle disputes about, and that don’t seem to require a mysterious extra faculty to understand; and that we shouldn’t prejudice ourselves ahead of time by assuming that only theoretical understanding can be reasonable. These points, however, can be taken up by the theorist/generalist: a theorist could think that the understanding and application of moral principles required the sort of moral knowledge that essentially included interpretation and judgment, but still think that honesty was always good-making (or that there was always a prima facie duty to be honest).
So in order to make particularism have some purchase against these sorts of positions, it has to argue that Principles really do little or no work in understanding, justifying, deliberating, etc. Moral reasoning isn’t about the application of generalizations, but the competent use of concepts: instead of noting that this is a case of lying and inferring that it is wrong, the real work is involved in building up our concept of lying-wrongly and identifying instances of it. Why might we think this?
1. Perhaps we think that the way we come to moral knowledge is by making a series of particular moral judgments, and building up increasingly sophisticated concepts that way. Building up the concept of cruelty involves being able to see that it’s bad, just as building up the concept of red involves seeing that it’s a color. Just as “this is red, so this is colored” isn’t a good explanation (it’s not illuminating to someone who has the concept of red, as they will already know that red things are colored), so “this is cruel, so it’s wrong” is not a good explanation. To assess particularism on this front, then, we’d want to know how we learn to make moral judgments, and how we employ them: when it looks like we’re using generalizations, are they just heuristics, to help us remember the key features of our concepts, or are they really linking distinct ideas?
2. Explanatory Principles are just impossible somehow (-because they can’t be systematic, as the moral landscape is too rich; or because there are no moral features with the same valence in all situations; or whatever). I’m less swayed by these suggestions.
How might we spell out the way that reasons work, so as to acknowledge the particularist push?
1. Dancy: resultance. That a painting is beautiful is the result of its colors; but those colors in a different setting might not produce beauty. Resultance is familiar and primitive; we can intuitively pick out the proper level at which to describe the resultance (-the level of colors in the painting rather than the level of brushes of paint, for example). And explanation isn’t a matter of subsuming particular cases under generalities, but of “narrative”: an explanation is supposed to help someone to see a situation as we do, not to justify by appealing to agreed-upon principles. The authors think this is a worrisome account: we should take a narrative or “resultance base” to count as an explanation only when it plays a certain epistemic role – that we take the fact that an act caused harm as the resultance base for its being cruel only when we take some act’s having caused harm to be something that generally does tell us that that act was cruel (it licenses the inference in this and in other relevantly similar situations). I’m not sure what would let us distinguish between something’s being nothing more than a resultance base and something’s being the first part of an inference, except for answers to questions like the content of the concepts involved (doing harm/being cruel, etc), or about the practice and value of practical reason.
2. “For the most part” generalizations, which aim to give insight into the nature of a concept. It is in the nature of lying to be wrong. It’s not always wrong, but when it’s not wrong, there’s a reason: there’s some other, deeper moral trouble in the area, or an agreement has been made to lie in a game. The question is now: how do we get our understanding of the nature of a type of activity, and the circumstances in which its valence can switch? If we think that this understanding is just a summary of previous knowledge, we can’t use moral principles to criticize our responses to situations, as this summary always takes our responses as inputs. But if we think that we can be led – perhaps by experience – to a grip on some sort of for the most part generalization, we might be able to use that self-critically, which would allow those generalizations to serve the sort of role Principles do (at least in that capacity).
Things I’d like to think more about:
-how to flesh out an understanding of rationality on which it makes sense not to demand that practical reason operate based on principles; the reasons for pushing for or against a robust role for principles in practical reason, and in particular, how this business about self-criticism lines up with the operation of principles
-whether there are “unprincipled” sorts of recognition/interpretation/judgment going on in our physical lives (recognizing a chair, etc) and, if so, whether there’s a possible analogy in the moral case
Further reading:
Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons
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