Defending moral particularism

Abstract

This thesis is a defense of extreme moral particularism, the view that morality cannot be codified in principle into necessarily true natural-moral moral principles, be they of the absolute kind or the pro tanto kind. My defense of it is negative rather than positive in the sense that instead of producing any positive evidence for my claim, I argue that two prominent arguments, the supervenience argument and the argument from the atomism of reason, that have been proposed by its opponents, the absolute principlists and the pro tanto principlists, are toothless against extreme moral particularism. If I am right about the failures of these arguments, I think we can be more confident about the claim of extreme moral particularism. Here is the plan of the thesis. The introduction introduces the general background of the debate between principlism and particularism. Chapter 1 lays out a conceptual taxonomy of various types of principlism and particularism. Here, I make it clear that my thesis is devoted to defending a particular kind of moral particularism-or what I call 'extreme particularism' , the view that there are no necessarily true natural-moral moral principles, be they ofthe absolute kind or the pro tanto kind. Chapter 2 deals with some businesses arising from the taxonomy. I try to head off some worries about the taxonomy and forestall some preliminary objections to the view of extreme particularism. Chapters 3 to 5 consist of an examination of the supervenience argument that is advanced collaboratively by Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith on behalf of the absolute principlists to establish the existence of absolute moral principles of the relevant kind. Chapter 3 is devoted to the reconstruction and elucidation of the argument whereas in chapters 4 and 5 I argue that Jackson et al. have not provided us compelling reasons to accept its premises. Chapters 6 and 7 examine an argument proposed by the pro tanto principlists to establishthe existence of pro tanto moral principles of the relevant kind. It is the argument from the atomism of reason. I argue that it fails chiefly for the following reasons: (1) There is no reason for us to believe that the atomism of reason is true. (2) The atomism of reason faces a problem of individuation of features such that it does not really tell us how a feature qua reason behaves. (3) The argument begs the question against extreme particularism.