Precedents, Principles and Practices

Abstract

Having examined how a moral judgement is rationally supported, or a moral grievance rationally advanced or met, we turn to moral reasoning more concerned with the orderly development of moral rules, the process by which they gradually accumulate, brick by brick, so to speak, to emerge as moral patterns or practices or as moral customs or codes. Moral reasoning, we shall begin to see, has really two quite distinguishable even if closely interrelated sides to it. The first has to do with moral decisions or judgements, the moral reasons we can and must give for imposing blame, the principal task here being to identify the conditions under which a decision or judgement qualifies as moral and not as of another sort. The second side deals more specifically with moral rules and their logical careers. Since moral judgements are not simply ad hoc responses to particular grievances, but are rules about kinds of actions as well as kinds of affairs, every rule, though deriving from a past moral judgement, becomes relevant to future situations as well; future conduct is what a rule is for; indeed just this is the basis for saying that moral rules must treat like cases alike and unlike cases differently, this last for no more recondite reason than that a decision about situation X does not extend to situation Y.