Particularism, in moral theory, refers to a family
of views united only by suspicion of rules and principles. This collection of
articles by distinguished philosophers focuses largely on one variant of the
particularist view, that variant elaborated by Jonathan Dancy. Dancy’s
particularism, developed in his 1993 book Moral
Reasons, centers around the claim that there are no informative and
exceptionless moral principles. Many philosophers have argued that moral
principles are defeasible, which is to say that the considerations they
point to are not always and everywhere decisive. Dancy goes much further than
this, holding that they can be completely silenced, or even reversed.

For instance, we might intuitively think that
whatever other features a particular action has, it will always count in its
favor that engaging in it is fun. But moral particularists point out that some
actions are worse for being fun. That the torturer enjoys his work is
not a small saving grace of his activity. Seeing this, the moral generalist
will look for ways to amend her principle, modifying it to take account of
exceptions. Particularists deny that any attempt at amendment will ever succeed
in producing a principle that is informative. We will end up, they claim with
principles which are trivial, such ‘always do the action that is best in the
circumstances’ (or, according to a less radical strain of particularist,
principles which contain unanalyzed moral terms, such as ‘always be just’). But
these principles, even those yielded by the less radical strain of
particularism, are completely uninformative: all the work of determining
exactly what is best or just in the circumstances remains to be done.

Dancy believes that the morally sensitive person
does not in fact apply principles in deciding what to do. Instead, she sees
what matters. She possesses faculties of moral perception that are alert to the
morally salient features of particular situations. These faculties are the
products of the right kind of moral education, not of theoretical training.

All this seems a kind of recipe for
anti-intellectualism; we might expect Dancy and his supporters to trade in
philosophy for homespun wisdom. But this is not in fact the case. Moral
Reasons is not easy going, and neither is this collection of essays. Unless
the reader is fairly well acquainted with recent moral philosophy, or, better,
has read Moral Reasons, she can expect to struggle.

In many ways, this is a pity, because the
particularist claim is important. It has implications for the way in which
education ought to take place, and (though no one has yet considered this) for
the very possibility of an approximately just legal system. Of the essays here,
only that by Martha Nussbaum is easily accessible to the general reader;
significantly, it is one of the few that is concerned with anti-theory in
general, rather than Dancy’s views in particular. If the book was intended to
serve as an introduction to the debate, then something ought to have been done
to contextualize the essays. Let me enter a plea, at this point, for
introductions to books that actually serve to introduce their topic and
the set of essays to come. This book, like most such collections these days,
has an introduction by the editors, which provides potted summaries of the
contributions it contains. And, like most such introductions, the summaries are
almost incomprehensible until you have the read the essays they summarize – at
which point they are redundant. Again, this is a pity, since the editors are
both excellent moral philosophers, quite capable of turning out an introduction
that would cast light on the topic under discussion.

Perhaps the real problem with this book is that no
one is sure just what the topic is. Is it a collection of essays on the
work of Jonathan Dancy? If so, it might have been better if it had adopted the
traditional Festschrift format – a collection of essays followed by
replies by the celebrated thinker. This would have provided greater cohesion to
the book, and it might well have proven more illuminating for the reader.

For instance, several essays here are concerned with
the extent to which there might be some moral principles that escape particularist
criticism. Unfortunately, the many papers that discuss this question do not
take account of each other to any significant extent. This is important,
because, as we saw, there are two distinct particularist theses. A
particularist might hold either that there are no actions described exclusively
in nonmoral terms (such as ‘involved the infliction of pain’) that
always count in the same way, or that there are no actions, even describable in
moral terms, which always count in the same way. The first thesis is defended
by Margaret Little, the second seems to be defended by Dancy. But the second
view is implausible: how could the fact that an action was just ever count
against it? Dancy’s own contribution to this volume is interesting enough, but what
I wanted to read was his response to this line of argument, advanced by several
contributors, but most compellingly by David McNaughton and Peirs Rawling.

If this is not a Festschrift for Dancy, then
is it an overview of moral particularism in general? But there are many moral
particularisms, and most go without a mention (ten out of the twelve essays are
largely or exclusively concerned with Dancy’s version). This lack of focus
translates into an overall lack of cohesion. As a result, the book is more
difficult than it need be for the non-specialist, and less useful than it might
have been for the specialist.

All that said, however, there is a lot here to like.
This might not be a good book – a unified and focused whole – but it is
a good set of essays by top-flight philosophers. Anything that contains the
work of Jospeh Raz, Frank Jackson, and T.H. Irwin, besides the philosophers
already mentioned, cannot fail to be interesting. For those who want to sample
something of the range and concerns of moral philosophy today, this collection
is well worth the effort. Those who just want a general idea of what moral
particularism claims, however, would do better to read the entry on the topic,
written by Dancy himself, in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

©
2002 Neil Levy

Dr Neil Levy
is a fellow of the Centre
for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles
Sturt University, Australia. He is the author of two mongraphs and over a
dozen articles and book chapters on Continental philosophy, ethics and
political philosophy. He is currently writing a book on moral relativism.

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics