Moral Particularism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Este texto apresenta um modo de interpretar a ética do cuidado, a epistemologia do ponto de vista e a epistemologia baseada no cuidado como desenvolvimentos na direção de um momento radicalmente particularista do debate ético e epistemológico feminista. Para sustentar tal leitura, o texto foi divido em três movimentos. Dedicamos a primeira seção (I.) à apresentação dos critérios conceituais de uma ética do cuidado feminista. Na segunda seção, (II.) reconstituímos o debate inaugural entre C. Gilligan e L. Kohlberg, para, na sequência, (III.) movermo-nos para o terreno das epistemologias feministas. Neste último movimento, propomos (III.I) uma interpretação da epistemologia do ponto de vista e (III.II) uma interpretação da epistemologia baseada no cuidado como respostas, no campo da teoria do conhecimento, para algumas das conclusões a que podemos chegar quando se adota a perspectiva de uma ética do cuidado. "Ouvir vozes diferentes", de acordo com uma ética do cuidado, passa por justificar, com uma epistemologia do ponto de vista, de um lado, e uma epistemologia baseada no cuidado, de outro, por que devemos, quando enfrentamos questões éticas e relativas à construção do conhecimento, ouvir vozes particulares, antes marginalizadas e silenciadas Palavras chave: ética feminista, cuidado, epistemologias feministas, particularismos.

- by
- •
- Moral Particularism, Teoria Política, Feminist Standpoint Theory, Ética do Cuidado

The interactive fields of philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of mind and psychiatric ethics have proved excellent frameworks in which to examine conceptual changes in our understanding of the human being during the last two centuries. Comparatively little has been written in the field of moral philosophy about these insights into the nature of moral agency, subjectivity and other fundamental concepts that enrich our understanding of mental health. The aim of this chapter is to develop Iris Murdoch’s work on moral perception in this novel direction. In doing so, it speaks to recent philosophical and empirical work on therapeutic understanding through literary expressions and illness biographies, which I use to explain why narrative self-creation is central to the recovery process. My new argument of narrative understanding in psychiatry explores the wider implications of relational moral agency for psychiatric ethics. This deliberate move away from an overly individualistic conception of the moral self to an intersubjective one creates opportunities for self-cultivation in concept application and the normative grounding of concepts.

- by Anna Bergqvist
- •
- Mental Health, Narrative Medicine, Intersubjectivity, Narrative Ethics

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles.
However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions
and their features. Such action-centred particularism, I argue, is compatible with
generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist
virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘be X’ but rejects any implication
that the relevant x-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

- by Constantine Sandis
- •
- Ethics, Philosophy of Action, Moral Psychology, Virtue Ethics
- by Philipp Schwind
- •
- Moral Particularism, Practical Reasons, W.D. Ross, Jonathan Dancy
- by Yong Huang
- •
- Ethics, Comparative Philosophy, Confucianism, Moral Particularism

Bernard Williams influentially attacked ethical theory. This paper assesses arguments for the ‘anti-theory’ position in ethics, including mainly arguments put forward by Williams but also arguments put forward by others. The paper begins by discussing what is supposed to be theory in ethics, what ethical intuitions are taken to be by those involved in the theory versus anti-theory debate. Then the paper responds to all of the following objections to ethical theory. Ethical theory is mistaken to prize principles, mistaken to prize rationalism, and mistaken to presume or prize foundational unity. Ethical theory is mistaken to presume morality is deeply impartial, mistaken to presume to tell agents how to deliberate, mistaken to presume or prize ethical codifiability, mistaken to presume value commensurability, and mistaken to eliminate ethical dilemmas.

- by Brad Hooker
- •
- Ethics, Normative Ethics, Moral Psychology, Ethical Theory
- by Wanpat Youngmevittaya
- •
- Political Philosophy, Social Justice, Communitarianism, Moral Philosophy
- by Katharina Kaufmann
- •
- Utilitarianism, Moral Philosophy, Moral Particularism, Kantian ethics
- by Gina Chen
- •
- Law, Jurisprudence, Ethics, Aristotle
- by Mariano Torres
- •
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Aristotle

Die eudaimonistische Tugendethik sieht sich, was ihre innere Struktur anbelangt, standardmäßig mit den Vorwürfen des Egoismus und Anthropozentrismus konfrontiert, was auch das Projekt einer ökologischen Tugendethik zu gefährden scheint. Der vorliegende Artikel versucht, ausgehend von der Tugendethik Erich Fromms, eine neue Perspektive auf diese Standardvorwürfe zu entwickeln, indem er den theoretischen Implikationen nachgeht, die die Anerkennung der Biophilie – der Liebe zum Leben – als eine der Tugenden des Menschen für den Frommschen Ansatz hat. Die zunächst noch exegetisch ausgerichtete Diskussion der werkinternen Relation von humanistischer und biophiler Ethik bei Erich Fromm leitet schließlich zu einer stärker systematisch ausgerichteten Diskussion der inneren Dynamik von selbst- und umweltbezogenen Tugenden im tugendhaften Akteur über. In diesem Zuge wird deutlich gemacht, dass das selbstbezogene Streben nach eigener Eudaimonie und das umweltbezogene Streben nach der Förderung des Objekts der eigenen Liebe zwar durchaus miteinander in einen Konflikt geraten können, dass dieser Konflikt aber nicht zur Selbstauslöschung der Tugendethik führt, sondern stattdessen im tugendhaften Akteur eine produktive Dynamik entfaltet. Die klassische Gegenüberstellung von Anthropozentrismus und Biozentrismus innerhalb der Ethik lässt sich auf diese Weise unterlaufen.

- by Richard F Runge
- •
- Environmental Virtue Ethics, Erich Fromm, Moral Particularism, Biocentrism
- by Daniela Alegría
- •
- Moral Particularism
- by Brad Hooker
- •
- Moral Particularism

PhD-Dissertation (University of Miami)

- by Philipp Schwind
- •
- Bioethics, Evolutionary Ethics, Linguistics, Moral Epistemology

An important shift occurs in Martin Heidegger’s thinking one year after the publication of Being and Time, in the Appendix to the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. The shift is from his project of fundamental ontology—which provides an existential analysis of human existence on an ontological level—to metontology. Metontology is a neologism that refers to the ontic sphere of human experience and to the regional ontologies that were excluded from Being and Time. It is within metontology, Heidegger states, that “the question of ethics may be raised for the first time.” This paper makes explicit both Heidegger’s argument for metontology, and the relation between metontology and ethics. In examining what he means by “the art of existing,” the paper argues that there is an ethical dimension to Heidegger’s thinking that corresponds to a moderate form of moral particularism. In order to justify this position, a comparative analysis is made between Heidegger, Aristotle, and Bernard Williams.

- by Lauren Freeman
- •
- Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, Heidegger, Aristotle's Ethics
- by Narve Strand
- •
- Business Ethics, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory
- by Jacquelyn Maxwell
- •
- Moral Philosophy, Iris Murdoch, Moral Particularism, Particularism

Virtue theories can plausibly be argued to have important advantages over normative ethical theories which prescribe a strict impartialism in moral judgment, or which neglect people’s special roles and relationships. However, there are clear examples of both virtuous and vicious partiality in people’s moral judgments, and virtue theorists may struggle to adequately distinguish them, much as proponents of other normative ethical theories do. This paper first adapts the “expanding moral circle” concept and some literary examples to illustrate the difficulty of adequately distinguishing virtuous from vicious partiality. Later sections aim to show how an adequate philosophical ethics will be able to both a) attribute virtue (and hence praiseworthiness) to agents whose actions may directly serve only their special interests, roles, or special relationships; and b) attribute vice (and hence censure) where an agent’s attitudes and/or actions mirror known personal biases (for instance, an egoistic attitude) or social biases (for instance, and ethnocentric attitude). This dual ability leaves space for much virtuous partiality, while also reflecting a “risk-aware” approach, recognizing the deleterious consequences of our human penchant for constructing and imbuing moral significance to oftentimes factitious us/them dichotomies.

- by Guy Axtell
- •
- Moral Psychology, Chinese Philosophy, Virtue Ethics, Morality (Social Psychology)

Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim formation: Kant's theory of reflective judgment. Kant tasks reflective judgment with picking out salient empirical particulars for formation into maxims, associating it with purposiveness, or intentional activity (action on ends). The unexpected resources in Kantian reflective judgment suggest the possibility of a particularist universalism, where recalcitrant particulars directly inform, and in some cases revise, moral principles. Such an account improves on particularist accounts of moral salience and moral perception: rather than deriving moral sensitivity solely from an agent's upbringing or cultural resources, the reflective dimension is situated alongside the universalist dimension of moral principles typically identified with Kantian ethics, allowing for a critical approach both to moral universals and to reception of moral particulars.

This paper proposes a critical analysis of Bruno Celano’s normative legal positivism. The main objections focuses on four crucial points of Celano’s theory: 1) the distinction between descriptive and normative jurisprudence, which is not taken in due account; 2) the underestimation of the role of interpretation in the legal domain; 3) the acritical acceptance of the source thesis; 4) the attempt of reconciling a procedural ideal of the Rule of Law with the substantial values of the contemporary constitutional States.

- by Aldo Schiavello
- •
- Rule of Law, Legal positivism, Legal Philosophy, Moral Particularism

Philosophy & Literature, vol. 23 (October, 1999), pp. 334-350. Begins with a contrast between emotional, concrete, empathetic literature and cold, abstract, judgmental philosophy, but then complicates that contrast by showing that Francesca (the famous devotee of love poetry) is a poor reader of texts and people. Cliche in narrative prose and abstraction in philosophical argument emerge as comparable threats to good judgment.

- by Peter Levine
- •
- Dante Alighieri, Moral Particularism

Resumen: En ‘Razones y normas’ Redondo se propuso trasladar la discusión entre universalismo y particularismo del ámbito de la filosofía moral al de la teoría del derecho. En este trabajo, analizo críticamente tanto el modo en que Redondo articula la discusión en el ámbito moral como su intento de trasladarla al ámbito jurídico. Defiendo tres tesis fundamentales. Primero, la caracterización de Redondo del universalismo y el particularismo morales es insatisfactoria, en tanto no distingue adecuadamente entre normas (que constituyen razones para la acción) y proposiciones que describen relaciones nomológicas entre hechos naturales y razones morales, lo que la lleva a englobar bajo un rótulo común discusiones muy distintas entre sí. Segundo, contra lo que sugiere Redondo, universalismo y particularismo no están comprometidos con modelos incompatibles de razonamiento práctico. Tercero, tras examinar diferentes modos de caracterizar el particularismo jurídico, concluyo que ninguno satisf...

- by Ezequiel H Monti
- •
- Legal Philosophy, Moral Particularism

I states Sandis' view in his paper (particularism for actions, generalism for dispositions); II describes and begins to criticise Dancy-style particularism; III applies these criticisms to Sandis' view; IV delineates an alternative view (my own) about actions, dispositions, and the particularism/ generalism debate; V raises and considers a further puzzle, about how in general we should understand virtue-ascriptions anyway.

- by Sophie Grace Chappell
- •
- Philosophy, Ethics, Metaethics, Moral Particularism
- by Caj Strandberg
- •
- H.P. Grice, Moral Particularism, Moral Realism, Supervenience
- by Don Hubin
- •
- Practical Rationality, Reasons, Moral Particularism, Rationality

Modern philosophers tends to regard morality as intrinsically universalist, embracing universal norms that apply formally to each moral agent qua moral agent, independent of particularities such as familial relationships or membership in a specific community. At the same time, however, most of us think (and certainly act as if) those particularist properties play a significant and legitimate role in our moral lives. Accordingly, determining the proper relationship of these two spheres of the moral life is of great importance, but a fully successful resolution of this tension remains lacking. I believe Dietrich von Hildebrand’s work on love, and specifically his development of the idea of Eigenleben (Subjectivity) in The Nature of Love, offers a fruitful way forward. In this paper I begin by laying out some of the chief features of the universalist character of modern moral theory in both Kantianism and consequentialism. I then articulate some of the ways in which von Hildebrand’s understanding of Eigenleben offers us genuine insights towards articulating a substantive account of the proper relationship of the universal demands of morality and the particularist demands of my own life. Specifically, von Hildebrand’s critique of extreme altruism shows that moral agents cannot be properly understood according to merely formal properties like rationality, because each person’s particular Eigenleben is the only real grounds for moral agency. Von Hildebrand develops a critique of depersonalized universalism similar to Bernard Williams’ later criticisms of Kantian moral thought, while offering a positive account that is in many ways more compelling. Ultimately, von Hildebrand allows us to see that a genuine Subjectivity is the necessary grounds for the possibility of love, including and especially the love of God, which serves as the basis for a genuine morality based on objective values. Building on this insight we can begin to articulate an account of the moral life grounded in answering the call of God that can do justice to both our universalist and particularist intuitions.

- by Daniela Alegría
- •
- Ethics, Utilitarianism, Moral Particularism, Kantian ethics

In this chapter I defend a methodological view about how we should conduct substantive ethical inquiries in the fields of normative and practical ethics. I maintain that the direct plausibility and implausibility of general ethical principles – once fully clarified and understood – should be foundational in our substantive ethical reasoning. I argue that, in order to expose our ethical intuitions about particular cases to maximal critical scrutiny, we must determine whether they can be justified by directly plausible principles. To expose apparently plausible principles to maximal critical scrutiny, we must determine whether their direct plausibility can survive careful clarification of what they are really saying. This means that intuitions about cases are useful only in (a) suggesting principles that must stand on their own two feet, and (b) illustrating or otherwise helping us clarify what a principle is really saying. We should not reject principles that seem most directly plausible after we have fully clarified their content simply because they conflict with our intuitions about cases, because to do so is to side with uncritical prejudices over the teachings of critical scrutiny.

- by Howard Nye
- •
- Moral Epistemology, Moral Particularism, Philosophical Methodology, Moral principles
- by Yong Huang
- •
- Ethics, Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, Virtue Ethics

An argument for particularism.

- by Charlie Hurlock
- •
- Ethics, Moral Particularism, Morality
- by Michael Ridge
- •
- Metaethics, Moral Particularism, Particularism
- by Constantine Sandis
- •
- Moral Particularism
- by Eric Brown
- •
- Ethics, Meta-Ethics, Consequentialism, Moral Philosophy

In this article, I deploy the notions of narrative and discernment as complementary support tools in understanding the moral significance of the first-person perspective in mental health. My aim is to develop and extend moral particularism’s emphasis on the significance of context and the general problem of relevance in understanding the dynamics of practical judgement and shared decision-making as applied to comprehensive diagnosis and integrated treatment. I argue that it is a mistake to think of the values embedded in responsible integrated care and patient involvement as either determined by the individual patient’s autobiographical narrative or as determined by the ‘top-down’ conception of health as presented in the biomedical model. What is missing in accounting for the idea of clinical decision-making as a shared enterprise is a relational account of the person and the wider diagnostic treatment context in understanding the process of perspective-taking. Such reorientation of focus makes available a distinctive conception of clinical knowledge, in which claims to objective meaning in patient narratives are criticised not as false per se, but as failing to yield the insight into the problem it was the point of those claims to provide.

- by Anna Bergqvist
- •
- Values, First-Person Methodologies, Value Theory, Narrative and Identity

**penultimate draft** Hands are not for hitting. This is a familiar moral principle of a general kind. Parents say it firmly and laws encode it with relatively little grey area. But what (if anything) underwrites such a principle, and do... more

- by Diana Heney
- •
- Metaethics, Moral Particularism

A review article on Dancy's *Moral Reasons*.

- by Roger Crisp
- •
- Normative Ethics, Reasons, Moral Particularism, Moral Motivation

Lo scopo di questo lavoro è di offrire una panoramica dei punti di contatto tra alcuni esponenti dell’aristotelismo contemporaneo in etica e il particolarismo morale, ovvero la tesi secondo la quale (almeno nella sua forma più estrema) non vi sarebbero principi morali difendibili. Da un lato pare lecito affermare che, storicamente, sia stata proprio la rinascita dell’aristotelismo, con la sua sottolineatura dell’importanza della percezione pratica dei particolari, a dare l’impulso decisivo per l’affermarsi di tesi particolariste, contrapposte alle posizioni generaliste promosse, ad esempio, dal deontologismo e dal consequenzialismo. Il mio obiettivo è tuttavia quello di difendere l’idea che la priorità assegnata dalla lettura neo-aristotelica alla percezione del particolare non rappresenti necessariamente un vero e proprio particolarismo, per almeno due ordini di ragioni: la prima, evidenziata da Nancy Sherman, è che, anche in una prospettiva di questo tipo, è necessario ammettere l’esistenza di regole di generalizzazione e capacità descrittivo-narrative che guidano la percezione; la seconda, messa in luce da Martha C. Nussbaum, è il ruolo importante svolto dalla teoria, da intendersi come sistema di fini e regole. Dopo aver evidenziato questi aspetti, proporrò alcuni brevi spunti critici nei confronti dello stesso neo-aristotelismo e della sua lettura standard del pensiero dello Stagirita.

- by Maria Silvia Vaccarezza
- •
- Aristotle, Virtue Ethics, Moral Particularism
- by Philipp Schwind
- •
- Moral Particularism, Robert Audi, W.D. Ross, Ethical Intuitionism

Section i states Sandis's view in his paper (particularism for actions, generalism for dispositions); Section ii describes and begins to criticize Dancy-style particularism; Section iii applies these criticisms to Sandis's view; Section iv delineates an alternative view (my own) about actions, dispositions, and the particularism/generalism debate; Section v raises and considers a further puzzle, about how in general we should understand virtue ascriptions anyway. Elizabeth Swann: Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren-Hector Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement, so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the Pirates' Code to apply and you're not. And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules.

- by Sophie Grace Chappell
- •
- Philosophy, Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Moral Particularism

Control of corruption is a political process that creates winners and losers. Given the large adverse effects that corruption generates on social development and equity, the potential number of winners when no corruption occurs is greater than the number of losers. However, as the beneficiaries from this situation face significant collective action problems, it is common that they are left at the mercy of the minority groups who win with corruption and particularism. Only when collective action problems are overcome it is possible to advance in controlling corruption and reducing social spaces where particularism rules the game.
This requires the confluence of three different factors: a favorable critical juncture, some initial institutional reforms able to act as levers to generate the necessary institutional incentives and a coalition of different social and political forces with sufficient capacity to overcome the existing obstacles to collective action. This confluence is so rare that it could well explain the recurring failures of anti-corruption policies.
Our hypothesis is that in the Spanish case two of these three elements are present: a favorable critical juncture and an institutional framework that, although still weakly implemented, offers certain levers to fight corruption and patronage. We know much less about the third element. Is there a social and political coalition in Spain that, beyond feeling outraged when confronted with corruption cases, and beyond being active exclusively in the persecution and exposure of corruption affecting rival groups, promotes the adoption of reforms to prevent the patrimonialist or partisan use both of government institutions and of agencies responsible for limiting governmental power?
This paper provides some analytical tools to try to assess the different objectives and motivations of a wide sample of Spanish anti-corruption organizations. This kind of associations have emerged in large number after the outburst of the great recession of 2008, but there are very important differences among them in terms of organization, agenda, motivations and objectives.

- by Fernando Jiménez
- •
- Moral Particularism, Corruption, Particularism, Particularism v.s Universalism

Normative notions are offen explained in terms of reasons, which (allegedly) can be weighted and combined, for instance in order to know what one ought to do. But what is their weight? How do they combine? This paper applies measurement theory to these questions. I argue that normative reasons cannot be consistently weighted and aggregated for purely formal, rather than substantial, reasons and that this is a prima facie novel, non ad hoc argument for normative particular-ism. In section 1, I make precise in what sense normative reasons are scalar, why an aggregation operation is needed, and introduce the most common types of scales. In section 2 I prove that normative reasons cannot be numerically measured (in a precise sense), and that the scale of normative reasons, if any, is therefore not ratio , interval, or ordinal (in a precise measurement-theoretic sense). In section 3 I argue that no representation theorem is possible, i.e. that, given certain standard assumptions, no consistent measure can be constructed. In section 4 I discuss the consequences of these results for normative theorizing, and especially for normative particularism.

- by Charles Blattberg
- •
- Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Aristotle, Human Rights

Specific moral facts (like the fact that you ought to send the paper by that deadline) seem to be grounded in relevant natural facts (that you promised), together with relevant moral principles (that you ought to keep your promises). This picture—according to which moral principles play a role in grounding specific moral facts—is a very natural one, and it may be especially attractive to non-naturalist, robust realists. A recent challenge from Selim Berker threatens this picture, though. Moral principles themselves seem to incorporate grounding claims, and it’s not clear that this can be reconciled with according the principles a grounding role. This chapter responds to Berker’s Challenge, utilizing a (moderate) grounding pluralism. In particular, it argues that distinguishing between normative and metaphysical grounding is the key to saving the natural picture. It also shows how such a distinction is one that you have a reason to endorse independently of this challenge, as it does ...

- by David Enoch
- •
- Philosophy Of Law, Metaethics, Legal Philosophy, Moral Particularism

Are Bioethical Principles Universally Binding or Culturally Relevant ?
A question has often been raised, does biomedical ethics provide absolute
answer to biomedical dilemmas? In the past around Hippocratic time, the answer may be yes because what good and bad or right and wrong was clearly defined. With dawn of human civilization, the answer to this question became ambiguous because right and wrong or good and evil are no longer clearly defined. Binding may refer to something someone has to comply. Since each person is endowed to his own right to set his own value theory, the biomedical principles are no longer binding but since principles are been derived from common good, we can say they are universally valid. In this presentation I will use Asian bioethics as an example to discuss that principles are universally valid and cultural relevant even conditioned. In the process Asian bioethics will be introduced.

- by Prof. Dr. İLHAN İLKILIÇ (MD PhD)
- •
- Asian Studies, Ethics, Culture, Relativism

The paper examines four kinds of principles for machine morality. (1) exceptionless principles covering all cases and features (e.g. Kantianism, consequentialism); 2) a plurality of midlevel prima facie-principles concerning one act-in-a-situation type (Ross, Beauchamp & Childress, applied to robotics by Anderson & Anderson), as well as their typical enabling and disabling conditions; 3) priority principles concerning the midlevel principles (e.g. F. M. Kamm, Asimov's Laws); 4), overall judgements in situations when everything relevant is taken into account, stressed by particularists (Dancy, cf. Guarini). The paper argues that (2) is best achievable and possibly useful even in the absence of overall judgements of type (4).

- by Arto Laitinen
- •
- Robotics, Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Roboethics