1 MORALITY AND PRINCIPLE Jonathan Dancy is largely ...

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philosophy” as essentially incoherent (Anscombe 1998). The only way morality could be acoherent concept is if its putative obligations could derive from God’s supremelyauthoritative command, but only few moderns accept the divine command theory.Obviously, this is not the place to try to respond to Anscombe’s critique. 13 My pointhere is that if she is right, as I think she and Williams are, in characterizing its target—thecentrality of moral obligation to morality—then generalism about morality will follow fromgeneralism regarding moral obligation. Assume, then, that there would be no such thing asmorality unless there were moral obligations. And assume, as the argument of the lastsection attempted to conclude, that moral obligations depend upon general principles. Itfollows from these two assumptions together that there can be such a thing as morality onlyif there are valid, obligation-creating general principles. So it would follow that particularismas Dancy defines it is false.What, then, about the possibility of holistic moral oughts and reasons, and therefore,of particularism about these? I said above that I can concede that there is a sense in whichthere might be non-obligating moral reasons and oughts that are particularistic. However, ifwhat we have just said is correct, then there is also a sense in which the very existence ofmoral reasons and oughts depends on general principles too. Any non-obligating normativemoral reason or ought need not itself depend on a general principle. However, a reason orought can be a moral reason or ought only if there is such a thing as morality. And there canbe such a thing as morality only if there are moral obligations. And these require, if theargument of the last section is correct, that valid general principles be in place. So there canbe moral normative reasons and moral oughts at all, and any specific normative reason orought can be a moral reason or ought, only if there are valid general principles.I put forward this argument, again, not so much to establish its conclusion as toshow that there is an argument for generalism that Dancy’s formidable case for holism aboutnormative reasons and oughts simply does not touch. If this argument is correct, thoughthere are senses of ‘ethics’ in which “ethics without principles” is clearly possible, “moralitywithout principles” is not.Stephen DarwallYale University13 I attempt to do so in Darwall 2006.16
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1998). “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crispand Michael Slote. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 26-44.Baier, Kurt (1966). “Moral Obligation,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 3: 210-226.Black, Henry Campbell (1999). Black’s Law Dictionary. Minneapolis, MN: West Group.Brandt, Richard (1979). A Theory of the Good and the Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Dancy, Jonathan (1983). “Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties,” Mind, 92:530-547.Dancy, Jonathan (1993). Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Dancy, Jonathan (2006). Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Dancy, Jonathan (2009). “Moral Particularism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism/. First published in 2001,revised in 2009.Darwall, Stephen (2006). The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Dworkin, Ronald (1978). Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Gibbard, Allan (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hart, H. L. A. (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Hiernoymi, Pamela (2005). “The Wrong Kind of Reason,” The Journal of Philosophy 102: 437-457.Hooker, Brad (200). Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality. OxfordUniversity Press.Hooker, Brad and Margaret Olivia Little, eds. (2000). Moral Particularism. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Hooker, Brad (2000). “Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad,” in Hooker and Little, pp. 1-23.Lance, Mark Norris and Margaret Olivia Little (2006). “Defending Moral Particularism,” inContemporary Debates in Moral Theory. Boston, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.McKeever, Sean and Michael Ridge (2005). “What Does Holism Have to Do With MoralParticularism?,” Ratio: 93-103.17
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