Do our moral judgements need to be guided by principles? (original) (raw)
2012, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
This paper argues that, although principles play a key role in our moral judgments, these latter cannot be reduced to the result of purely deductive reasoning, since they previously require another kind of rationality: instead of being purely deductive, our moral decisions appear to be the result of a combined inductive-deductive process. This claim is developed in two parts. The first part briefly presents some of the criticisms levelled in recent decades against purely deductive moral theories. The second part argues, appealing to Aristotle’s account of the knowledge’s process, that an inductive-deductive model provides a more realistic account of how sound moral judgments are actually made.
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