Moral Dilemmas, Ethical Particularism, and Dewey’s Continuum of Normative Inquiry

Abstract

Departing from hypothetical dilemmas and drawing on examples from law, this paper offers a pragmatist account of normative induction that characterizes moral particularism and generalism as stages of inquiry into ethical problems, rather than rival accounts of moral knowledge and motivation. Pragmatism’s response to analytical moral theory lies in understanding the transformative nature of John Dewey’s social continuum of inquiry. The continuum is unrecognized in the analysis of hypothetical dilemmas, like the trolley problem, but can clearly be seen in studies of law. Real moral dilemmas represent actual conflicts, of which the dimensions emerge through experience and the solution cannot be addressed through the analysis of cleverly balanced moral puzzles. Repeated over time, real problems drive the consensual formation and revision of social practices and the predication of general moral rules and principles. Ethical particularism holds that the evaluative cannot be “cashed out” propositionally, and that it is descriptively “shapeless.” It fails to recognize that real moral problems occur in a continuum, and at first encounter a shapeless particularist context of seemingly unlimited non-moral properties. Normativity is driven by repetition of similar situations toward shared practices and descriptive predication. Rather than a Dancian retention of epistemic status by defeated reasons, this illustrates retirement of relevant properties and accompanying reasons, transformation of the reasons environment, and a pluralist normative ontology.