Moral Generalism: Enjoy in Moderation

Abstract

One important strand in moral particularism concerns moral practice. Moral reasoning, it maintains, ought not to rely on moral principles because such reliance distorts moral judgment and so provides poor moral guidance. Another important strand concerns the structure of the moral domain. The traditional generalist conception of moral theory goes wrong, particularists maintain, in seeing moral theorizing as a project of articulating and defending substantive principles concerning the rightness and wrongness of actions, the value of states of affairs, the fairness of social arrangements, and so on. Depending on which particularist you talk to, this is either because there are no true moral principles, or because there is no good reason to think there are any, or because, even if there are true moral principles, actions and other objects of moral assessment don’t depend for their moral status on there being any. In this article I challenge the second strand in particularism