Particularism and Practical reason

My main influences have been from continental philosophy, various authors have changed the way I view morality but it’s been somewhat difficult to communicate my outlook. Here I’ll try to elaborate on it using 2 specific theses. They don’t completely accurately describe my outlook and there may be some issues holding them together but it’s a work in progress.

Moral Particularism

Many common positions on morality are based on the application of moral principle to situations. So when analysing a question one will pick out the relevant moral principles to the case and use them to decide on a moral course of action. One extreme example of applying a moral principle is Kant’s axe murderer. A man knocks on the door and asks for the whereabouts of a person he intends to kill. The Kantian is then faced with a difficulty, she cannot breach the principle that we ought not to lie but she also does not want to inform the murderer of the person’s whereabouts.

This example is good for highlighting two common ways of thinking about principles. The absolutist says that it is always wrong to breach a principle while a contributory conception is weaker and states that breaching a principle always contributes to reasons against performing an action. On the contributory theory we can balance out the principle against lying with other principles that apply to the situation, but the lying itself always counts as a negative point.

Particularism rejects both of the absolute and contributory views. Instead of applying moral principles the morally attuned person applies moral reasons to situations. The main difference here is that the actual specifics of a situation are primary. Sometimes the fact that one is lying is a reason not to perform an action whilst in others it could be neutral or even a good thing to do. Perhaps it’s morally correct to lie to the axe murder and the lying itself is good.

One of the downsides is that we lose the universality that is so desired in moral discourse. People want to say ‘In this situation you claim something is immoral because of X, therefore this other similar situation should be immoral because of X’. A common argument that is the first that comes to my head is from an ad campaign.

You wouldn’t steal a car
You wouldn’t steal a handbag
You wouldn’t steal a television
You wouldn’t steal a movie

Downloading pirated films is stealing.

Here its telling us that all these examples fall under the principle of stealing, therefore for consistency we should not pirate films. This is something I think we need to give up, we need to overcome the fetishism for systemisation and the desire to be able to prove our positions by deriving them. Moral principles are at best a crutch and may only be useful for people that are out of touch and for teaching children.

Morality as part of practical reason.

Basically morality doesn’t have trumps. The moral reasons to do an action are just part of a larger practical reason for doing it. We generally think of moral reasons as radically different from other reasons and that the moral conclusions represent the complete practical reason. The thought is that we should isolate the moral considerations in a situation. If these imply that I should take action which will result in losing my job, then I should nonetheless take those actions. Instead of this I’m proposing that moral reasons factor as just another reason for doing an action. ‘Moral reasons’ are the way we describe a subset of practical reasons. This works well with particularism, in a specific situation we weigh up all the reasons for and against doing a particular action. Some of these are moral and some not. We then form a practical reason which is what we should do.

I'll also add that I don't think that morality is congnitivist and that many of the influences of our moral deliberations won't explicitly present to us as reasons. Furthermore in many situations there won't be any kind of deliberation at all, intuition plays a large role.