Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons

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Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons Benedict Smith

Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons

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Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons Benedict Smith Durham University, UK

© Benedict Smith 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–55281–4

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Benedict, 1975– Particularism and the space of moral reasons / Benedict Smith. p. cm. Summary: “This book adopts a new approach to moral particularism. It applies a range of novel ideas by drawing on different areas and traditions of philosophy, and includes discussion of human subjectivity, moral experience and moral judgement”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978–0–230–55281–4 (hardback) 1. Ethics. I. Title. BJ1031.S626 2010 170'.42—dc22 2010027562 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my parents, with all my love and thanks


Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

1

Characterizing Moral Particularism 1.1 Particularism and moral philosophy 1.2 Abstraction 1.3 Theory and practice 1.4 Constraints 1.5 Metaphysics/epistemology 1.6 Holism 1.7 Particularism and epistemology

1 1 7 9 12 16 19 23

2

Particularism and Subjectivity 2.1 Rationality and moral knowledge 2.2 Platonism and practice 2.3 Practices, perspectives and the moral world 2.4 Projectivism and normativity 2.5 Rationality, experience and uncodifiability

28 28 35 39 44 49

3 Perception and the Myth of the Moral Given 3.1 Moral perception 3.2 Perception contra particularism 3.3 Looking and ‘looking away’ 3.4 The Myth of the Moral Given 3.5 From experience to judgement 3.6 Subjectivity and judgement

56 56 60 66 69 72 80

4

Moral Judgement 4.1 Judgement and moral epistemology 4.2 Judgement, rules and examples 4.3 Particularism, judgement and experience 4.4 Judgement and justification 4.5 Beyond judgement?

83 83 88 92 97 103

5

Moral Phenomenology 5.1 Phenomenology 5.2 Scepticism about moral phenomenology 5.3 Mandelbaum’s moral phenomenology 5.4 Dreyfusian moral phenomenology

110 110 113 119 121

vii

viii Contents

5.5 ‘Looks’ 5.6 Particularism and moral phenomenology 6 The 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Space of Moral Reasons Placing in the space of reasons Concepts and the moral world Moral experience What is ‘context’? Thinking in the space of moral reasons

128 130 137 137 140 142 147 153

Notes

163

Bibliography

172

Index

179

Preface and Acknowledgements In recent years moral particularism has become one of the most important and widely discussed topics in moral philosophy. In writing this book I aim to contribute to the ways in which it can be advanced. What I have to say is, overall, sympathetic to moral particularism although I am critical of the position in a number of ways. The central figure in moral particularism is Jonathan Dancy who has been developing the position for almost 30 years and his work is, of course, vital to what follows. In engaging critically with particularism I draw on the work of John McDowell and some aspects of the work of Wilfrid Sellars, the former being in some sense the source of modern particularism. Sellars’s work has provided a rich source of inspiration for many philosophers, including McDowell, and it is Sellars who coined the phrase ‘the space of reasons’ – a phrase that, at least in analytic philosophy, is now familiar. McDowell’s own work has also been extremely influential in a number of areas and one purpose of this book is to try and draw together the ways in which some of the insights and contributions that McDowell has made more generally can be made especially relevant for the ways in which moral particularism can be understood and developed. In what follows I do not provide a comprehensive or scholarly account of McDowell’s work, or Sellars’s, and those aspects that I do draw on are only meant to be a part of a more general approach to the topic of particularism.1 Chapter 1 serves to introduce the ways in which moral particularism is characterized in relation to conceptions of moral philosophy. Differing conceptions of what is constituted by philosophical inquiry and its subject matter have important ramifications in this context. A contrast is drawn between the nature and role of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ as it figures in debates over moral particularism, and the extent to which a commitment to moral principles is a commitment to the importance of ‘theoretical abstraction’ in moral theory. I explain the central role that holism about the nature of reasons has for Dancy’s version of particularism, a crucial element in how he characterizes the view. In this chapter, I also raise an issue that recurs at several places in this book. That is, the relation between metaphysics and epistemology. I suggest that issues in moral epistemology in this context have not been adequately ix

x

Preface and Acknowledgements

addressed. Chapter 2 develops further the nature of moral particularism and contrasts the metaphysical version defended by Dancy with a more epistemological version as suggested by John McDowell, who emphasizes the uncodifiability of moral knowledge. In this chapter, I consider competing accounts of how we ought to conceive of the constraints in virtue of which we make intelligible the distinction between more or less correct ‘moves’ within moral practice, and the importance more generally of how conceptions of practice have been conceived by moral philosophers. In this chapter I suggest that subjectivity is important to particularism in ways that have not been adequately recognized. This theme is developed in following chapters. Chapter 3 examines the influential critique, from Wilfrid Sellars, of a traditional view of experience. The aim here is to transpose Sellars’s criticisms into a form relevant to the context of moral perception and knowledge, and to apply it to moral particularism. Dancy has recently suggested that our ability to discern reasons is not entirely sensory but involves our ‘capacity to judge’, and so Chapter 4 takes up this topic of moral judgement. This chapter contains some revised material from a previously published article, ‘Particularism, Perception, and Judgement’, Acta Analytica, 21 (2006), 12–29. I would like to thank Springer Science and Business Media for kind permission to use this material. Chapter 4 considers the extent to which moral judgement is helpful for moral particularism. This chapter discusses whether the application of judgement is rule-governed or requires the existence and use of principles, and how different accounts of the status and role of principles relate to interpretations of judgement, practice and experience. Chapter 5 considers moral phenomenology and distinguishes between phenomenology as philosophical method and phenomenology as subject matter of philosophical inquiry. This chapter discusses the central, although often implicit, status that phenomenology has in moral philosophy and identifies the relevance this has for moral particularism, especially in relation to experience, practice and judgement. Chapter 6 develops an account of the space of moral reasons. In this final chapter I suggest that experience, judgement and knowledge, once understood in terms of the space of reasons, can provide a helpful way to understand the prospects of moral particularism. In writing this book I have tried to draw out what I take to be fundamentally important issues for moral particularism, and I have tried to do justice to at least some of the wider implications that particularism has for philosophy more generally. Needless to say, there are many things that have been left out of this book or that remain on the periphery

Preface and Acknowledgements xi

of the discussion. I have focused on a number of issues that I regard as central to the problems and prospects of particularism, and in doing so I hope to have at least brought elements into the debate that have not yet received adequate attention in the literature. Moral particularism was the focus of my work as a postgraduate student in the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick. During that time, I was lucky to have been surrounded by an extraordinarily diverse and stimulating postgraduate community. I would like to thank Jakob Lindgaard, in particular, for many conversations about the topics that are central to this book, and many other fellow students to whom I owe a great deal. From my time at Warwick, I would also like to thank Keith Ansell-Pearson, Stephen Houlgate, Michael Luntley and Martin Warner for their help and advice and, especially, Tim Thornton, for many helpful discussions. I have been, again, extremely lucky in having the opportunity of working with a very special group of talented philosophers at Durham University. My colleagues here have been extremely helpful and encouraging and exemplary in their passion for philosophy. In particular, I would like to thank Andy Hamilton, Simon James, Jonathan Lowe and Matthew Ratcliffe and also Andreas Pantazatos, all of whom have provided an invaluable mixture of personal and intellectual support, education and inspiration. Thanks also to Donnchadh O’Conaill who provided many valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the manuscript. The final stages of preparing this book were also helped by research funding from the AHRC and DFG for an Anglo-German project titled ‘Emotional Experience in Depression: A Philosophical Study’. Through a grant awarded by the British Academy I was able, with my colleagues Simon James and Matthew Ratcliffe, to organize two workshops in the summer of 2008: ‘The Varieties of Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Investigation’. The discussions that took place at these workshops have been extremely helpful for my work on particularism and related topics. I would like to acknowledge the support provided by the British Academy, and to all those who presented their work and participated in the workshops, including Nalini Bhushan, Clare Carlisle, James Clarke, David Cooper, Shaun Gallagher, Jay Garfield, Peter Goldie, Sabina Lovibond, Wayne Martin, Peter Poellner, Jan Slaby, Elisabeth Schellekens, Tim Thornton and Mark Timmons. My very special thanks to my wife, Laura, who has provided all the love, support and motivation that anyone could hope for, even during what is, at the time of writing, the difficult last days of pregnancy.


1 Characterizing Moral Particularism

1.1 Particularism and moral philosophy Moral particularism is becoming one of the most important topics in contemporary moral theory. Although there are reasons to think that the roots of particularism are very ancient, the position has been placed firmly at the forefront of recent philosophy primarily through the work of Jonathan Dancy (for example, 1993, 2004), who cites as inspiration the writings of John McDowell (Dancy, 1993, p. xii).1 There is no settled way to characterize moral particularism, and this is partly because of the variety of considerations which explicitly support or can be interpreted as endorsing the position. Particularism is sometimes characterized as the source, and sometimes as the consequence, of commitments to theses about the relation between ethics, mind and world and there are an increasing number of nuanced qualifications and distinctions geared to defend or criticize particularism. Despite the wide interest that it now commands, the debate over particularism has recently been described as enjoying a well-earned ‘reputation for obscurity’, and that it ‘has been thought by some to be a refuge for those with patience for the murky’ (Schroeder, 2009, pp. 568, 578).2 However, working through the problems and prospects of particularism need not lead to a dialectic of ever-decreasing circles. In fact, and as I hope to demonstrate, I think the opposite is true. The historical character of particularism is unclear. Aristotle is often regarded as proposing a form of particularism, but there is a debate over the extent to which that is true (for example, Irwin, 2000; Price, 2005). Kantianism and forms of utilitarianism, which in one view involve the explicit articulation and resolute defence of moral principles are, in another view, not only compatible with but presuppose the truth of core particularist commitments (for example, McKeever and Ridge, 2005). We are told 1

2


that particularism is a thesis in moral metaphysics (for example, Dancy, 2004) and sometimes that it is a position in moral epistemology (for example, Garfield, 2000) and other times that the debate is best cast in semantic terms (for example, Jackson, Pettit and Smith, 2000). Particularism has been described as ‘more a sort of a suspicion than a thesis’ (Dancy, 2008b, p.3). It has been aligned with and compared to ‘situationism’ (O’Neill, 2001) and ‘contextualism’ (Lance and Little, 2008). In any case, it is best thought of as a family of doctrines which are at least united by adopting a critical view towards the nature and role of principles. This range of characterizations makes it a hard task to calibrate positions defending and attacking particularism, and it is important to resist a tendency to produce or rely on caricatures of the range of relevant viewpoints. The complexities here need not ground the inference that any advances can only be highly specific and of interest only to a select few who are, according to Schroeder’s image, already at the party (2009, p.568). In my view, the variety of approaches here makes the debate over particularism very fertile, and the implications for our understanding are, for both theoretical and applied versions, potentially far-reaching. As a point of departure, then, if particularists are, at least, united in their critical attitude towards moral principles, how ought we to understand where the onus of proof lies in this context? A natural thought here is that the particularist is providing a direct challenge to the orthodox view that our moral thought and practice is essentially bound up with moral principles without which the rationality of our moral discourse would be threatened, and the underpinnings of our ethical practice might collapse. As such the onus is on particularism to provide reasons to revise or reject the orthodox account. At first glance, moral particularism can look preposterous since it seems to deny the relevance of moral principles in our moral thought and discourse. Furthermore, it can be taken to deny that there are any moral principles at all. For some, particularism is plainly false. Only a philosopher in some state of artificial detachment from the nature of our moral lives could sincerely defend the idea that moral principles are not one of the cornerstones of moral thought and practice, and the apparent rejection of moral principles can look to be some form of intellectual conceit. One reason why the claims of particularism might seem intuitively implausible is because of presuppositions about what morality is and what moral philosophy must be like. In a dramatic portrayal, moral particularism is anti-philosophical since it is taken to imply an active resistance to reflecting on the systematic

Characterizing Moral Particularism 3

nature of moral reasoning and to the structured generalities that make moral thought and discourse possible. One kind of anxiety here is that the apparent rejection of moral principles is thereby a rejection of morality and of moral theorizing. Particularism is not only a form of philosophical and moral scepticism, it is also itself somehow morally suspect.3 Jonathan Dancy, who has done more than anyone else to articulate and defend particularism, rightly rejects this view. Particularism, in his understanding, is not only unthreatening to morality but can make a difference for the better to our actual practice. Among the conventional ways to articulate and locate particularism (which I will come to), it is tempting to frame particularism in negative terms. By this, I mean that the dialectic surrounding particularism usually begins by representing it as a set of objections or responses to some established way of thinking – a principled approach to ethics and moral philosophy. We are told that the dominant paradigm of (Western) ethical thought is characterized by the central place of moral principles, although with clearly much conversation and debate about how many principles there are and which ones are (or perhaps which one is) the most important. Particularism is a critique of that paradigm. This makes particularism sound as though it is a new way of conceiving moral philosophy and, to some extent, it is. It seems to me, however, that a valuable way to advance discussions is to make the right sort of connections between moral particularism and the broader philosophical frameworks that provide motivation for it, as well to provide analyses of the ways in which particularism is said to stand against the tradition. Particularists conceive of the nature of moral situations as ‘saturated with unique combinations of morally salient features’ (Little, 2000, p.276), in contrast to the idea that each particular moral state of affairs is ‘principle laden’ (Hare, 1996, p.194). Moral particularism can be viewed as an attempt to expose the redundancy or the undesirability of appeal to moral principles in ethical theorizing. It can appear as though particularism is a radical doctrine in this respect, perhaps too radical. It may seem that the existence and skilled usage of moral principles lie at the heart of moral reasoning. Broadly, particularism tries to demonstrate that an agent’s appeal to moral principles to justify moral judgements is ill founded. In addition, it is the very expectation that there are, or had better be, moral principles that is targeted by particularist criticisms. Broadly construed, principlism about moral reasoning is the idea that correct moral judgements can only be reached if an agent is suitably

4


provided with moral principles; as Dancy puts it at the beginning of Ethics Without Principles ‘Moral thought, moral judgement, and the possibility of moral distinctions – none of these depend in any way on the provision of a suitable supply of moral principles. This claim is what I call particularism’ (Dancy, 2004, p.5). Particularism can look unattractive in light of a number of different but related notions of rationality. On the one hand, deliberative rationality about novel moral situations is enabled by appeal to a principle. Thus, when confronted with a difficult and puzzling moral circumstance, an agent appeals to a code that aids thinking about the new case. A moral principle such as ‘It is always wrong to cause pain’ guides deliberation about a state of affairs in which actions may cause pain. In contrast to this deliberative or instrumentalist appeal to principles, it might be thought that in the very act of giving a reason, we are thereby invoking the normative force of a principle. If an action is wrong in a particular circumstance, then its being wrong instantiates a principled explanation of why it is wrong, and one which generalizes over other relevantly similar cases: ‘A moral principle is, if you like, a moral reason which has had its generality made explicit’ (McNaughton, 1988, p.191). Thus the conditions of what it is to give a moral reason have a broad base that necessarily extends beyond any particular state of affairs. At least two different but related understandings of what is meant by a ‘moral principle’ are relevant. One is more epistemological or psychological, and the other more metaphysical or ontological. Particularism is variously directed towards both of these understandings and attempts to undermine the (epistemological) claim that moral knowledge is made possible through the grasping of those principles which pick out moral saliences, and the (metaphysical) claim that in order to explain the non-accidental difference between right and wrong actions and judgements, this difference must track and be constituted by principled connections relating non-moral features with moral features. According to a ‘principlist’ account, a judgement about a particular moral state of affairs is essentially related to some general piece of knowledge and is derivable from it. The particular state of affairs in question must be brought under the respective generality in order for subjects to detect the morally salient features, and hence form a suitable judgement with reference to it. Described in this way, moral principles then serve as the normative ground for judgements concerning states of affairs or actions; principles serve to justify particular moral judgements.


David McNaughton describes a moral principle as a finite check-list of non-moral properties which are morally relevant to the rightness or wrongness of an action. With the aid of such a check-list the agent could examine any actual or possible action and determine its rightness or wrongness by consulting his list. (McNaughton, 1988, p.192) In this sense, principles are action-guiding to the extent that they articulate when and where a feature is or will be morally relevant, thus presenting a reason to do this or to think that. In addition, principles are typically universal to the extent that they range over all agents. Thus, it is possible to ascribe to the character of a moral principle a dual essence: universality of scope and normative force. Both elements are considered to be merits of principlism. The scope requirement ensures that those subject to the principle are considered equally, ensuring that there are no unjustifiable exceptions. It may be written into the principle that like individuals are treated alike. In addition, the normative aspect ensures that agents will be able to employ a decision procedure that enables correct judgement concerning a particular case. This is especially useful, the principlist could argue, when a case turns up that is morally vague or unprecedented. A principle guides action and thought in cases where the morally appropriate course of action is not in doubt, but also, the principle can enlighten an agent in a circumstance that presents an apparent conflict between moral obligations. In this sense, a moral principle both appears to explain why a certain moral judgement or action is right (it correctly tracks and extends non-moral-to-moral patterns), and also can give reasons to do this rather than that. The reason-giving aspect of principlism is located in its prescriptive component that affords agents with rules for actions and thoughts. The alleged normative efficacy is made possible by the fact that a given principle can be both general in scope, yet extremely detailed in its instructions formulated by an extensive list of subjunctives perhaps.4 An alleged benefit of principlism is that it requires that proper moral deliberation and reasoning is undertaken by abstracting from features that may serve to distort reflection on a given case or set of cases. In this sense, thinking about individual or particular cases alone, independently from the light cast by a moral principle, could indicate a form of moral myopia or perhaps even to be to failing to think morally at all. The process of abstraction is thus considered to ensure that an individual looks past their immediate concerns and contingent hypothetical beliefs and desires, and adopts the perspective of a moral agent

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in the relevant respects. This process of abstracting from the peculiarities of individual cases is not to be viewed as itself a constraint peculiar to moral reasoning. Abstraction, it has been suggested, is a condition of what it is to reason per se. Yet an objection to the manner in which principles enable forms of abstraction could complain that this process encourages thinking about ethical matters from the point of view of no one, and thus what was a virtue of principles in this respect turns out to be a vice. Principles which are ‘glacially abstract’ cannot help us to examine the ‘interesting textures of particular problems’ (Blackburn, 1998, p.309) and, in any case, do not reflect the character of ethical existence considered from the point of view of actual persons.5 Despite some clear differences between particularism and opposing views, the debate is governed by a shared assumption. Particularists and their opponents agree that our moral thought and discourse is rationally structured. It is, we might say, a condition of the debate over particularism (and for many other debates) that our moral thought and reasoning is not arbitrary or whimsical but is rationally structured (for example, Kirchin, 2007, p.10). A key feature of the debate is, then, an issue about what needs to be the case or what we need to be committed to in order to provide a compelling account of what this rational structure consists in. It is important to consider this rationality assumption since a great deal depends on what is meant by it. It is right but not very informative to say that our moral thought and reasoning is rationally structured. But at least it means that when we consider a moral case or judge that S is cruel we do so for reasons; reasons that might figure explicitly in our deliberations (and subsequent attempted justifications) or reasons that figure in the explanation and/or justification even if, from a first-person perspective, we cannot articulate them. The existence of reasons secures this quite general sense of the ‘rationality’ of moral thought. The debate, then, involves rival accounts of what those reasons are like and how they figure in this domain of our lives. It looks, then, as though there is at least some common and stable ground between particularists and their opponents. Nevertheless particularism can seem to be ‘a philosophical dead end’ (Millgram, 2002, p.64). This is in part because, despite sharing some basic presuppositions about the nature of moral thought and discourse, particularism seems also to deny some basic assumptions about the value of philosophical enquiry and about how philosophy in this domain ought to proceed. This could threaten the idea of moral philosophy as a worthwhile or cogent enterprise. Although I think this attitude is mistaken, it is important and worth considering in more detail.


1.2 Abstraction Moral particularism is sometimes construed as a reaction against ‘theoretical abstraction’ in moral thinking. Onora O’Neill points out that a general virtue of reasoning as such is that it is, precisely, abstract. Why is it then, she asks, that moral reasoning is singled out and denounced for being abstract (O’Neill, 1987, p.55)? O’Neill is unconvinced by those who claim that principled approaches suffer from over-abstraction and she argues that ethical reasoning based on principles fine-tunes our moral insights by helping agents to avoid self-centredness or by instilling an ability to look past contingent cultural norms that may obscure moral truths. In addition, the existence of moral principles grounds the possibility that we can have a grasp of any particular moral state of affairs; that is, particular states of affairs are conceptually derivative and parasitic on principles. Thus according to O’Neill, [t]hose who dispute the relevance of principles in ethical reasoning have also, it seems … failed to offer an adequate account of how we are to describe the situations we find. For example, a lot of Wittgensteinian and related writing on ethics suggests that examples carry the whole burden of ethical deliberation. (O’Neill, 1987, p.66) So the order of priority, on O’Neill’s picture, is best thought of as running from principles to particular circumstances. Her remarks suggest that if we deny the importance of principles, we thereby lack the resources even to describe individual circumstances. From this point of view, any disagreements over whether a principled or a particularist approach is right already presuppose the primacy of principles, since without them there would be no description or understanding of particular cases at all. According to O’Neill, [Particularists] allege that a focus on principles is formally inadequate, ethically defective, or both. Ethical reasoning and decision-making should, they think, be responsive to cases … or specific situations … in any case center on something less abstract than principles. (O’Neill, 2001, pp.15–16) She continues that, according to the particularist, principles (being indeterminate) cannot really help us decide what to do, or alternatively that principles (being algorithms) could help us

8


decide what to do, but at the cost of demanding a leaden and ethically dubious uniformity of response across differing cases. In place of principles, they suggest, we should focus on the specificities of actual situations, on case studies, on particular examples and exemplars, on the situation to hand in its rich complexity. (O’Neill, 2001, p.16) A danger of excessive formalism here emerges from the relative emptiness of moral principles implied by the necessary level of abstraction. O’Neill understands this point as claiming that because moral principles are universal, they must suffer from indeterminacy, and thus they fail to satisfy a basic normative requirement; principles can offer no properly guiding content without relinquishing the theoretical force gained by their abstract character. A danger of excessive rigorism is a consequence of an overly strong demand for unerring adherence to the dictates of a moral principle. O’Neill’s complaint in this context is directed against a style of thinking that finds the very idea of theorizing about ethics problematic. To some extent, moral particularism can be understood as an expression of this style. O’Neill has done a great deal to articulate and defend a sophisticated moral theory inspired by Kant. Particularists are a distinctive (if not exclusive) set of opponents to that theory because, among other things, they appear to reject the very idea of drawing on general principles to make sense of, let alone discuss, the details relevant to individual cases. Particularists ‘insist that ethical judgements are a matter of perceiving, intuiting, or appraising the salient aspects of particular cases or “concrete situations”’ and are primarily concerned with what she elsewhere describes as ‘reading’ individual circumstances; a kind of situation-specific appraisal (O’Neill, 2001, p.16; O’Neill, 2007, p.159).6 Cast like this, particularism is a view about moral epistemology and argues for the claim that our appreciation and knowledge of moral circumstances can come only at the level of individual acts of discernment. O’Neill is correct to raise this general issue of appraisal and discernment as an important element in particularism. Nevertheless we should be careful to remember that the majority of the discussions over particularism, and certainly the way in which the view is articulated by Dancy, place much more emphasis on metaphysical issues. For instance, a familiar debate is over the question of whether what makes an action wrong, say, requires there to be some principled explanation that makes explicit the general connections linking non-moral to moral


features, for example. Particularists might insist that there need be no connections of that kind, where principlists insist that there is and must be. Perhaps the most readily available ‘metaphysical’ interpretation of what particularists and their opponents are arguing about focuses on the nature of reasons One way, then, to begin clarifying the conceptual geography of the debate is to insist on a broad distinction between issues in moral epistemology and issues in moral metaphysics. Most of the contributors to the debate, I think it is fair to say, have been concerned more with the latter. Nevertheless sticking rigidly to this distinction renders invisible a significant range of issues and options available. While it may have some initial taxonomical value, it is very unclear how we are supposed to understand the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology in this context. I will say more about this below.

1.3 Theory and practice In Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge provide, among many other things, a detailed taxonomy of the different types of particularism which are, broadly speaking, differentiated according to how ‘strong’ the apparent rejection of principles is or the extent to which moral principles are tolerated (McKeever and Ridge, 2006). In addition, they discuss the variety of ways in which principles themselves can be characterized. For example, what McKeever and Ridge describe as ‘eliminativism’ about moral principles rejects head-on the idea that there are moral principles in anything like the way that they are conceived by traditional approaches in moral theory. This, then, would be a good candidate for ‘strong’ particularism. Other ‘weaker’ accounts emphasize that, say, there is no good reason to suppose that there are moral principles – a kind of ‘scepticism’ about principles, according to McKeever and Ridge. If there are no good reasons for in favour of thinking that there are moral principles, then supposing that there are such principles is at best unmotivated. Alternatively, a so-called principled particularism can recognize the existence and substantive role for some moral principles although, if and when these hold, they are contextual truths and do not by themselves licence the thought that moral principles exist or can be used in anything like the way that orthodox moral philosophy has proposed. McKeever and Ridge characterize these three broad forms of particularism as concerned, at least initially, with moral ‘theory’ rather than moral ‘practice’. They contrast these forms with other versions, which

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they call ‘principle abstinence particularism’ and ‘anti-transcendental particularism’ which focus more directly on the practical question of whether our actual commonplace and everyday moral thinking and discourse should make use of moral principles (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.17). Although a distinction between theory and practice is familiar in moral philosophy and elsewhere, its relevance for debates over particularism can be overlooked or regarded as uncontroversial relative to the technical details of particular types and strengths of particularism, and the versions of principlism that those types engage with. The distinction between theory and practice is indeed familiar but, I think, it is not therefore something that we should regard as sitting harmlessly in the background.7 Some philosophers might regard ‘practical’ ethics as if it is simply parasitic upon ‘theoretical’ ethics to the extent that any understanding of the former presupposes an understanding of the latter, and that any responsible practice is an application of a theory. This attitude can come in at least two versions, both of which I suggest are mistaken. One is that practice is an uncontroversial explanandum, a shared and plain object for philosophical investigation. What we do (and sometimes what ‘they’ do) is the thing that needs explaining, and we can explain it only through recourse to and employment of theory. I will give more details about a different understanding of practice in Chapter 2. For the moment, according to another mistaken version, moral practice is the ‘output’ of theory in the sense that our ordinary moral practice of our daily lives depends upon an underpinning that can only be provided by a theory. The sense of ‘dependence’ here is important. Part of the debate between particularists and their opponents is disagreement over that which is required in order for our moral practice to be possible. Some philosophers might think that even if a person does not themselves know or is unable to articulate a background theory, the substantive details and particularities of moral thought and discourse nevertheless require the existence of principles. This sense of dependence is accordingly logical in form. Simply by noting that there are people who make actual moral judgements, perform actions and engage in the practice of moral appraisal, we can, via a transcendental argument, seek to identify the theoretical principles presupposed by these facts. This idea expresses the thought that the relevant sense of dependence is explanatory; what explains our moral practice is the existence of principles which are, or at least can be, given a theoretical articulation. An alternative sense of dependence refers to a different requirement to which agents are answerable if they are to be responsible thinkers


and agents. S is a responsible thinker and agent if she is able to subsume a particular case or judgement under a relevant theoretical principle. Failure to do so can be because of ignorance, as in cases where S simply does not know what she ought to know. Perhaps she hasn’t examined the case closely enough, or thought about moral principles hard enough. S is nevertheless under an obligation to identify the connection between an instance and a theoretical principle. Fulfilling this obligation displays that S has a moral understanding superior to that enjoyed while remaining at the level of individual cases. This sense of dependence is justificatory; to justify an action or claim is – at least in part – to realize for oneself the relation between the instance and the theory. So, this dependence is connected to the explanatory sense in that the relevant obligation is to identify and confirm the pre-existing relation between an individual case and a background theoretical principle.8 Although at the start of Moral Reasons Dancy considers the metaethics he develops as ‘high theory’, the positive teachings of moral particularism ‘would none the less make a considerable difference to moral practice if accepted’ (Dancy, 1993, p.ix). Yet others, who are broadly sympathetic to the view, claim particularism can be construed as antithetical to ‘moral theory’. For instance, according to David McNaughton, ‘particularism claims, in effect, that there is no such subject as moral theory’ (McNaughton, 1988, p.204) although Margaret Little, also broadly sympathetic to particularism, describes herself as ‘a card-carrying moral particularist who makes a living doing something I’d be happy to call moral theory … the two are compatible’ (Little, 2001, p.32). Nevertheless not only might particularists be opposed to what they consider to be bad theories (as, of course, anti-particularists might be), they are also opposed to what they consider to be misguided conceptions of just how theory relates to moral practice. An instructive parallel here, as Mark Lance and Margaret Little note, is Wilfrid Sellars’s influential contrast between the ‘scientific image’ and the ‘manifest image’ (Lance and Little, 2006a, p.578). Sellars tells us that this contrast is one between conceptual frameworks for understanding ‘man-in-the-world’. The former image is constituted by theoretical entities posited or inferred by virtue of their explanatory efficacy. The ‘manifest image’, by contrast, involves the framework of ordinary things, properties and relations. Lance and Little invoke Sellars’s scientific/manifest contrast to illuminate a sub-distinction within a broader one contrasting versions of particularism. One sort of particularist could grant that the morally relevant counterpart to the scientific

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image is such that the moral world and our thoughts in and about it can be characterized in tightly principled ways, and according to which the way things morally are and our knowledge of them involves recourse to general laws and principles. Nevertheless this image is of merely theoretical interest, as it were, and cannot provide any purchase on our world or on the deliberations of actual persons who confront the ordinary, familiar and sometimes painful demands of moral existence. The idea is that, as a matter of fact, the moral landscape is codifiable in principles and that our moral thought and reasoning is governed by laws determining the correct answer to moral questions. Yet, as actual persons, our practical deliberations concern infinitely rich and often unique circumstances and, as such, this counterpart to the scientific image is an intellectualist fabrication or, at best, an abstraction. So, as Lance and Little suggest, some particularists might concede (or insist) that, ultimately, morality is principled but deny that this has any explanatory or justificatory relevance for our understanding of the nature of moral thought and discourse. Perhaps, then, the question as to whether morality is ultimately this way or that way is redundant. Nevertheless there is an important distinction to be drawn between different forms of constraint here; a distinction between what disciplines ethics in the sense of what constitutes the constraint by virtue of which our thinking and actions are rationally assessable in terms of their justification, and what guides our moral thinking in the sense of what enables us to determine what the right thing to do or to think is.9

1.4 Constraints On the one hand, the debate over particularism is one about what we need deliberatively in order to be guided towards the right, or a justified, moral judgement or action. That is, the issue is about the kind of thing that we need to consult, as it were, to get things right. Particularism, at least under one description, defends the view that adequate guidance does not imply the use of moral principles, and we can be guided in our moral thinking and reasoning by close attention to the particularities of each case. In contrast, opponents of particularism suggest that adequate guidance is possible only by invoking principles. Particularists about guidance need to provide an account of how we can be guided simply by virtue of attending to a particular case in such a way that eschews any appeal to considerations ‘external’ to that case. Such external factors might be how the case is related to other similar ones, or whether the object case is (or can only be) understood as part of a series or collection


of cases. Those suspicious of particularism draw attention not only to the unavoidability of these external features but would also stress how such features are organized and applicable in a principled way. Now, even the most ardent of particularists can recognize that there are moral principles in the sense that they can be a helpful ‘reminder’, as Dancy says, as to what might be important in an individual case (Dancy, 1985a, p.150). What principles do not do, however, is to function as a stock of general moral truths, the appeal to which enables us to reach decisions about individual cases. There is nothing constitutive about moral principles such that they deliver the right thought or action.10 As previously mentioned, particularists sometimes try and glean support for their position by emphasizing the complexity of the moral landscape. Principles mask that complexity and try to force the moral terrain into a systematic framework. However, opponents can object that, in the context of questions about guidance, principles are essential for our working out of what to do or think. It need be no part of a principlesbased approach to deny that the moral world is fraught with difficulty or that there exist hugely complex moral problems and situations. Principlists, as much as particularists, can and ought to regard with suspicion anyone who reports that the moral world is an easy place to live. Furthermore, principles are at their most important precisely in cases of complexity and conflict. When we have to weigh competing obligations, demands and considerations, our moral principles organize our thoughts and help us reach a decision. Those who seek to reject particularism can show how their own attachment to principles is better placed to cope with moral conflict by presenting a framework through which we can understand and work around the difficulties. Principles can guide us through moral conflict by encoding how duties are related. There is a set of worries here to which O’Neill’s remarks, discussed above, can be seen as an intended response. Specifying or encoding what our duties are is one task. Different but equally important is that of generating the right decision. That is what the guiding role is for. Although a principled approach seems apparently well placed to help us through episodes of moral confusion or indecision, there are a number of philosophical considerations that need to be addressed. One is that, in satisfying the guidance constraint, the approach can generate an infinite regress by requiring that further principles are needed to arbitrate between the competing demands specified by the ‘original’ principles. For example, a central consideration driving Beauchamp and Childress’s principled approach in biomedical ethics is to play down the role of what they call subjective judgement (2001, p.21). The idea is

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that, in working out how their four principles operate and are related to each other in a particular case, we must resist reducing decision-making to a subjective judgement or an ‘intuition’. The four principles are Respect for autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence and Justice. The relative weightings and normative relevance of principles must be established by invoking further rule-governed deliberative mechanisms to secure the objectivity of that deliberation and of the final judgement. Perhaps this type of worry, as with O’Neill’s suggestion that particularism encourages a kind of impoverished moral thought since we are looking too much at individual cases, is needlessly worried about the so-called subjective element here. The emphasis on ‘subjectivity’ could be read as implying that moral judgements are or could be entirely whimsical since any constraint on judgement would be imposed by its author and thus would be answerable to nothing external. But there is no need to conceive of subjectivity like that. The relevant objectivity of deliberation and judgement here is not achieved to the exclusion, somehow, of subjectivity. There is another worry, similar to the one previously outlined but at a different level. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the source of guidance is a set of principles which also incorporates rules governing the weight those principles bear to one another in particular circumstances. This (even if true) is only half the story. Considerations about the source of guidance, the principles, weights, balances, scope, specifications and so on are of limited value unless the object of guidance – human beings – can make use of them. This sounds like a trivial requirement. What is meant by actually being guided here is not merely that one acts in accord with the dictates of the relevant principles. Acting in accordance is something that can be ascertained and assessed from a third-person perspective. What we are interested in here is the further aspect that someone acts because of the principles or relevant set of rules. Kant famously emphasized this relation and argued forcefully that we ought to be acting not only in accordance with the moral law but also because of the moral law. Roughly speaking, what Kant points to is that the relevant subjective element is required in order to be authentically guided by a moral principle. Something like this distinction is familiar from other contexts in which rules, rule-following and the normativity of conceptual thought are discussed. Such contexts are important not simply because they shed light on the debate between moral particularists and their opponents, but because they typically set the agenda for that debate. The question as to what disciplines our moral thought is related to the question of guidance, but focuses on ontological issues about what


it is by virtue of which our moral judgements and actions can be more or less correct. This contrasts with the epistemological question of guidance. Particularists and their opponents disagree about what is needed to make the distinction between more or less correct intelligible in the context of our moral lives. Recall that all concerned, however, agree that there is something that does serve to discipline our thought: the shared assumption that our moral thought and discourse is rational in the sense that it is structured in non-whimsical or non-arbitrary ways. Sceptics about particularism insist that, without principles, the distinction between what makes actions more or less correct collapses. The point is less about demonstrating that unprincipled moral thought could go wildly wrong, and more about what constitutes correctness or justification. The principles are not only our guides but are also part of the metaphysics of moral thought and discourse. Being more or less correct in one’s thinking or actions is internally related to the nature and role of moral principles. Principled structures make possible the distinction between more or less correct judgements. In contrast, a particularist account of the discipline constraint denies that correctness is intrinsically related to principles. The idea that principles are part of the metaphysics of moral thought implies that principles go deeper, so to speak, than the level of deliberation and decision-making – the guiding function. Now, particularists can agree (as Dancy does) that the level of metaphysics is the most important but insist that the source of correctness is to be found in the nature of particular cases themselves. Particular cases thus provide guidance and also constitute the origin of what makes the difference between more or less correct judgements. This is cold comfort for philosophers who may agree that ‘particulars’ are important but regard the rejection of principles that provide structure and order to particular cases as misguided. This view would object to the idea that there is a sense in which particular cases can themselves provide the constraint on our thought. This kind of scepticism about particular cases is similar to a scepticism about the nature and role of the virtues. Consider Jeremy Bentham’s attitude to the virtues: There is no marshalling them; they are susceptible of no arrangement; they are a disorderly body, whose members are frequently in hostility with one another ... (m)ost of them are characterised by that vagueness which is a convenient instrument for the poetical but dangerous or useless for the practical moralist. (Bentham, 1834, p.196)

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Whether or not Bentham is right about this, the analogy with a form of scepticism about particular cases is helpful in two ways. It makes explicit the assumption that some form of ‘marshalling’ is a precondition of a proper understanding of particulars. In addition, it also succeeds in bringing to the foreground how that assumption can also affect how we think about our ways of understanding or forms of awareness. This is important, and in the next section I try to bring out the relation between metaphysics and epistemology in this context.

1.5 Metaphysics/epistemology I take it that while the distinction between guidance and discipline is useful and important, we should not understand it as marking out entirely separate elements in the discussion. There is an image in moral philosophy, as in other areas, according to which there is a distinction between an indifferent and neutral external world on the one hand, and the subjectivity peculiar to human beings on the other. For many, it has been a central aspiration of moral theory to identify the sense in which moral reasoning is objective since only that would protect against the prejudices of subjectivity, where these include the specific contingencies that individuate particular persons as well as wider considerations about the essentially perspectival nature of human subjectivity as such. A promising sort of particularism would not amount to a subjectivization of moral judgement in the narrow sense; a kind of individualistic ‘free for all’. On the other hand, a principled approach to ethics, as its defenders rightly emphasize, need not be committed to an algorithmic conception of principles according to which they would be applied in some brutely mechanical way and exist ‘impersonally’ in an isolationist sense of objectivity (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.11). The choice between objective and subjective, like that between guidance and discipline, is not exclusive. There may be a fruitful possibility available which recognizes that both subjective elements of ‘being guided’ and objective elements of ‘getting it right’ can be part of the same process. Any plausible account of moral thought and reasoning needs to acknowledge how, like being guided by a partner in a dance, there is a subjective element and an objective element: a particular way that captures being guided and an objective aspect which provides the constraint in light of which the relevant activity is more or less correct.11 Along with the other caricatures that I described earlier, there is a temptation to construe particularism as somehow ‘against rules’. Recall that one of the things that unites particularists and their opponents is


that moral thought and discourse is rational, in the minimal sense that it is non-whimsical. Although I will be discussing this in greater detail in what follows, it is worth pointing out here that the rationality of moral thought incorporates the sense in which understanding and following rules involves subjective commitment. Wilfrid Sellars writes that ‘man is not a creature of habits but of rules’, and regards our sensitivity to rules as a constitutive element of what it is to be a human being (Sellars, 1980, p.138).12 There need be nothing in particularism that denies the importance of rules, and neither are the various ‘strengths’ of particularism best calibrated according to how tolerant they are towards rules. Rules as such are not the problem and there are explicitly particularist understandings of rules that have been defended (for example, Garfield, 2000). The dialectic in this context does not proceed by revising or augmenting particularism in such a way so as to make it compatible with rules. Rather, it is how rules are conceived that is most important. Nevertheless there is a suggestion that a metaphysics-focused particularism implies a scepticism about the status and role of rules in moral thinking and reasoning. Jay Garfield writes that ‘Ontological particularists like Dancy … would infer from the truth of moral particularism that there are no moral rules’ (Garfield, 2000, p.181). In contrast epistemological particularists, like Garfield, defend precisely a particularist understanding of moral rules and of our knowledge of them, not a rule-nihilism … epistemological particularists … argue that moral knowledge does consist in the grasp of rules, but that that grasp must be understood in particularist terms. (Garfield, 2000, p.181) According to Garfield, Dancy’s radical particularism denies that moral rules have any bearing on moral knowledge. In setting up his defence of an epistemologically inspired moral particularism Garfield conceives that, if given an appropriate construal, rules constitute a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for thinking and speaking in the way human beings do. Garfield quotes Sellars’s imaginary story: When God created Adam, he whispered in his ear, ‘In all contexts of action you will recognise rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet.’ (Sellars, 1980, p.138)

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Garfield claims that this ‘is surely as true of our moral lives as it is of the more narrowly cognitive domain of language and ratiocination’ (Garfield, 2000, p.178). In some sense, Garfield’s remarks are consistent with Dancy’s to the extent that for both it is crucial to understand moral discourse as subject to the rational constraints of discourse per se. This is fundamental to Dancy’s onus-of-proof argument, which I will come to below. Sellars insists that ‘rules’ are a fundamental condition of being minded in the way that we are, and that concepts involve laws and are inconceivable without them.13 This reflects the central place accorded to the notion of ‘ought’ which is ‘central to the moral universe of discourse’ (Sellars, 1980, p.134). Sellars conceives ‘ought’ to be central to moral thinking and reasoning ‘because what it expresses and instigates is the observance of a rule’ (Sellars, 1980, p.134). Sellars maintains that rule-regulated activity, learning a language for instance, is an essentially practical know-how like dancing or playing bridge (see Sellars, 1980, p.151), and that what rules are and what it is to know them cannot be accounted for in external-to-practice terms. For Sellars, a rule isn’t a rule unless it lives in behaviour, rule-regulated behaviour, even rule-violating behaviour. Linguistically, we always operate within a framework of living rules. (The snake which sheds its skin lives within another.) In attempting to grasp rules as rules from without, we are trying to have our cake and eat it. To describe rules is to describe the skeletons of rules. A rule is lived, not described. Thus, what we justify is never a rule, but behaviour and dispositions to behave. The ‘ought’ eludes us and we are left with ‘is’. (Sellars, 1980, p.155)14 Rules and oughts are essentially normative and cannot be made intelligible, let alone genuinely understood, in purely descriptive terms. Descriptivism, in this sense, can only list instances of past or present occurrences and has no account of the immanent relations that (at least in part) constitute the normative force of a practice and ground the sense in which participation in a practice involves knowing ‘how to go on’. I will come back to this in Chapter 2. Hume’s version of descriptivism involves the claim that ‘what we learn not from one object, we can never learn from a hundred’ (Hume, 1978, p.88). The appearances notwithstanding, each object is in fact confronted afresh, as it were, and a kind of psychological projection discovers (or rather produces) relations between objects or cases.15 Dancy explains that the sort of moral theory his version of particularism


targets ‘supposes that the essence of moral judgement lies in the move from one case to the next’ (Dancy, 1993, p.63); that is, that moral judgement can reveal the essential ways – perhaps principled ways – in which moral cases are intrinsically related. For Hume, this ‘movement’ between cases rests on inescapably natural-psychological dispositions; for the particularist, the way in which this movement is characterized can indicate a misguided metaphysics of reasons and reliance on principles. Hume is an atomist about relations and the kind of empiricism and philosophy of mind that he famously articulates relies heavily on a psychologistic framework. What constitutes the relations we think unite each case of, say, a sunrise, is not part of the uniformly principled fabric of Nature (or at least we have absolutely no rational warrant for supposing that it is). Rather, the relevant relations emerge at the level of our psychology not at the level of the way the world is. Humean atomism locates what it is to be genuinely sensitive to reasons for belief on a case-by-case basis; there may be many things that we can learn from one object. Experience of two objects (or a hundred) does not, however, provide us with any more or different reasons. So, like the particularist, Hume conceives of reasons to be given case by case. There is more to say about how atomistic empiricism can illuminate moral particularism, and I will return to this in Chapter 3. Although it is terminologically awkward given the preceding remarks, the thought that cases are rationally isolated is described by Dancy as a form of holism. I now turn to this idea.

1.6 Holism Jonathan Dancy’s attempt to articulate and defend moral particularism turns on a distinctive thesis about the nature of reasons. In this sense, the debate about moral particularism is a debate about the metaphysics of reasons. According to Dancy, once the nature of reasons is clarified, particularism in ethics results. In this section, I will outline the ‘holism’ about reasons which Dancy considers central to the defence of particularism. The leading defence of contemporary moral particularism is typically taken to be Dancy’s Moral Reasons (1993) and his Ethics Without Principles (2004). The defence of moral particularism found there is founded on a holism in the theory of reasons, (although holism is by no means the only way that particularism is defended).16 In Dancy’s version, holism is put forth as an argument whereby moral reasons are inextricably embedded within contexts, and the reason-giving force, or

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‘valence’, emerges from how features in such contexts combine. Dancy explains that [t]he leading thought behind particularism is the thought that the behaviour of a reason (or of a consideration that serves as a reason) in a new case cannot be predicted from its behaviour elsewhere. The way in which the consideration functions here either will or at least may be affected by other considerations here present. So there is no ground for the hope that we can find out here how that consideration functions in general, somehow, nor the hope that we can move in any smooth way to show how it will function in a different case. (Dancy, 1993, p.60) Here, Dancy’s attempt to defend particularism about moral reasons largely proceeds by example, and he claims that what the examples reveal is an important truth about the way in which reasons function. Dancy explains that there is an intuitive attraction towards understanding reasons as functioning particularistically. He claims that the natural thing to say is that a consideration is functioning, in one case, as a reason in favour of doing the action, but in another is either no reason at all, or even a reason against it (Dancy, 1993, p.60). In Moral Reasons, Dancy offers the following example in order to demonstrate the context-sensitive and holistic nature of reasons: [C]onsider a family game called ‘Contraband’, in which the players are smugglers trying to get contraband material past a customs officer. The game requires them to lie; if one doesn’t do plenty of lying, it spoils the game. That an action is a lie is commonly a reason not to do it; here it is a reason in favour. Less domestically, that we did this last time can be a reason for doing the same this time, but sometimes it will be a reason for doing something different. Whether it is so or not will depend on other features of the case. (Dancy, 1993, pp.60–1) Dancy claims that if a reason changes its valency, it is not merely outweighed by other reasons but can in fact be ‘silenced’ by them. The reason-giving force of any consideration is not trumped by any other one; to picture it in this way would require an appeal to a theory of reasons that understands reasons to retain their valence irrespective of context, and thus appeal to atomism in the theory of reasons.17 It is central to Dancy’s position that the valence of reasons is elastic to the extent


that reasons do not, atomistically, reserve normative currency independently of circumstance. According to the understanding of reasons that Dancy recommends, the valence of a reason cannot exist in any way that would have a rational bearing on an agent prior to, or independently from, circumstance or context. Dancy warns against conceiving of moral particularism as merely emphasizing that circumstances can make a difference to moral reasons. Dancy’s distinctive claim is that the very nature of a reason can change with relevant changes elsewhere:18 ‘I maintain that all reasons are capable of being altered by changes in context – that there are none whose nature as reasons is necessarily immune to changes elsewhere’ (Dancy, 2000a, p.130). A reason’s valence can be altered if that is what the changes in context demand, but it is insufficient for particularism to claim merely that circumstances determine appropriate moral judgement. For instance, Ross’s defence of generalism claims that circumstances play a crucial role in determining which moral reasons obtain and how relevantly they do so. There is no way of telling in advance what the morally right action or judgement is to be through a process of deductive reasoning from general principles (Ross, 1930, p.31). It may seem as though this claim implies a form of particularism, but Dancy considers Rossian ethics to rely on a metaphysics of reasons precisely in contrast to particularism (see Dancy, 2000a, p.131). Despite an apparent commitment to a form of particularism, Ross’s theory rests upon a group of pre-existing duties that have prima facie reason-giving force. For example, duties to keep promises have a reason-giving force by virtue of being an act of a certain kind (Ross, 1930, p.19).19 When two or more duties are relevant in a given context, Ross insists that there is no way of knowing independently of contextually focused judgement which duty carries the greatest moral force, and will outweigh competitors. Dancy complains that although Ross gives a central place to the role of particular judgement, the fundamental purpose of this judgement is to discern the balance of prima facie duties. According to Dancy, Ross’s appeal to the doctrine of prima facie reasons betrays his anti-holist belief that certain reason-giving considerations always count morally in the same way in a circumstance, even though the normative weight of those considerations may be defeated by others. On Ross’s account, reasons retain their moral relevance and thus valence can be trumped but never silenced. The issue here at stake between Ross and Dancy is located primarily on an ontological level. It is about the nature of reasons as such. This issue is important for my approach because later arguments will appraise the suitability of conducting a particularist defence of the nature of reasons

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independently from epistemological concerns. My suggestion is that holistic particularism might be overly restrictive if it is cast as focusing upon the relations between features within a moral case which are identified as grounding a (moral) reason. A different understanding of ‘relations’ is broader and encompasses the connections between this reason and that reason and between this case and that case. The holism upon which some versions of particularism are based is not specific to any domain. Dancy claims that the nature of moral reasons is not significantly different from the nature of theoretical reasons or reasons for belief. All reasons, whether reasons to believe that p or a moral reason to ϕ, are holistic and are essentially tied to context in the appropriately qualified way. According to Dancy, holism in the theory of reasons is a doctrine about the nature of reasons as such, whether or not they happen to be moral reasons. Dancy reminds us that responses to the question as to whether reasons are atomistic or holistic have vital implications for how we conceive rationality. He remarks, [i]t is, I suppose, conceivable that though the vast bulk of reasons function holistically, there are a few that function atomistically. But if this were true then we would have a hybrid conception of rationality. There would just be two sorts of reasons, each with their own logic, and moral thought would be the uncomfortable attempt to rub such reasons together. It is much more attractive, if at all possible, to think of our reasons as sharing a basic logic, so that all are atomistic, or all holistic. (Dancy, 2000a, p.136) In articulating a unitary account of the nature and logic of reasons, Dancy appeals to the case of perception, where the content of an appearance has variable valence in terms of the reasons for belief which it provides. To paraphrase the example (Dancy, 2000a, p.132): if it looks to me as if there is something red in front of me, that is usually a reason to believe that there is something red in front of me. In a case where a drug makes blue things look red and red things look blue, the appearance of something looking red is now not a reason to believe that there is something red in front of me. Indeed, the fact that something looks red is, in this case, a reason for believing that there is a blue thing in front of me. Valence flexibility is common across kinds of reasons. There are no features which carry their reason-giving weight outside contexts.20 Normative valence, whether in the theoretical or practical


sphere, is neither prior to nor independent of context. Important to Dancy’s position is an argument from onus-of-proof which is premised on the apparent consensus with respect to holism about reasons in the theoretical domain. The anti-particularist with regard to moral reasons is under an obligation to produce an account of what demarcates moral reasons from other sorts of reasons. Whatever the merits of a global theory of reasons and the belief that our thinking is healthier for having one account of reasons rather than many, there is an important implication of the argument from onus-of-proof. In the theoretical or epistemic case, an object’s appearance gives a reason to hold particular beliefs and perhaps withhold assent from others. This is an epistemological issue as well as being relevant to questions about the nature of reasons as such. This epistemological aspect ought to carry-over to the moral domain, unless we relinquish the commitment to a global account of the nature and logic of reasons, and we are entitled to expect that the epistemological issue be recognized as important to the account for moral reasons.

1.7 Particularism and epistemology For Dancy, then, moral particularism is a narrower instantiation of a wider theory about how reasons function. The particularism defended by Dancy is opposed to the thought that moral reasons are different from other kinds of reasons since such reasons possess normative invariance. Reasons emerge from the relation between certain features of circumstance, where the moral shape that is given rise to by such features is never determinable a priori. Whether or not something is a reason for believing something else will depend on other facts present in that case. For instance, sometimes the fact that ‘x looks F’ is a reason to believe that ‘x is F’. In other cases, that ‘x looks F’ is not such a reason at all, and it might even be a reason to believe ‘x is G’. Barry Stroud captures the particularist’s claim as follows: If you already know that an object is not square, the experience of its looking square does not give you reason to believe that the object is square. In the right circumstances, an object’s looking square could even be excellent reason to believe that it is spherical. Whether the way something looks is a reason to believe that it is that way or not depends on what else is true in the situation, and on what else you have reason to believe. (Stroud, 2002, pp.89–90)

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This is an expression of epistemological contextualism and, if Dancy is right, it is a domain-specific particularism implied by a global holism in the theory of reasons. Stroud’s example here is useful because it clarifies the epistemological dimension of a theory of reasons compatible with Dancy’s reflections on the metaphysics of reasons. To foreshadow a difficulty I will articulate later, there is here a discordance between holism about the nature of reasons and an ‘atomism’ about how agents should approach them.21 Holism supposes that a reason’s emergence presupposes contextual relations, and we should expect holism by the lights of globalism to be communicated to the epistemic level also. I will suggest that this expectation causes some difficulties.22 The ontological plasticity about the normative force of reasons demands that the epistemology of reasons be sensitive to that fact. It is for this reason that, in Moral Reasons at least, Dancy is fond of urging us to look really hard at moral cases (Dancy, 1993, p.63). Were we to avoid detailed scrutiny of particular cases, then in order to find out what is morally going on there would be a danger that we might lapse into a generalism, and seek guidance for our moral thought and action by appealing to an unjustified account of the manner in which reasons function. Dancy claims that it is at best a curiosity and at worst morally fatal to conceive of the rails of moral discourse, so to speak, as being independent from contextualized content. Forming moral judgements in any way other than by looking and seeing what the nature of a case is could be evidence of a mistaken theory about how reasons function. To anticipate, Dancy’s holism about the way reasons emerge is an ‘intra-case holism’ and the difficulty which, I suggest, faces the account of how agents exercise sensitivity to reasons amounts to an ‘inter-case atomism’. The preceding section discussed the plausibility of holistic metaphysics in the context of moral reasons. In this section, I want to explain what I take to be an important epistemological aspect of the debate. Although Jay Garfield is one among only a small number who have tried to develop a particularist epistemology, he does (rightly) appreciate that debates about ontology and epistemology in this context are closely connected although separable to some extent (Garfield, 2000, p.181). While for Garfield ‘the most important questions are about moral epistemology’, he writes that ‘Dancy’s defence of particularism is ontological in character, rather than epistemological. He argues not from claims about the structure of our knowledge to a thesis about the structure of the moral domain, but rather in the reverse direction’ (Garfield, 2000, p.181).23 Nevertheless there are elements in Dancy’s view that propose what a relevant kind of epistemology would look like.


In an early expression of his moral particularism, Dancy argues from the monistic thought that there is only one moral principle, through the pluralistic thought that there are many, to the particularist thought that there are none (see Dancy, 1983). His target there, as in other places, is the thought that fundamental to moral knowledge is the existence of principles explaining and justifying the fact that certain features have general and hence atomistic moral relevance. It should be familiar that the form of particularism Dancy defends conceives that ‘ethical decisions are made case by case, without the comforting support or awkward demands of moral principles’ (Dancy, 1983, p.530). Dancy explains that the particularist’s epistemology is not significantly different from that adopted by some versions of generalism in ethics: Ross’s version for instance (see Dancy, 1983, p.543). Dancy’s particularism and Rossian generalism are in agreement to the extent that, for instance, individual acts can be morally evaluated ‘without needing detour through principles’ (Dancy, 1983, p.543). The generalism implied by Ross’s theory is driven by his metaphysics, according to which there must be some principle behind the rightness of any individual right act. Dancy suggests that particularists should ‘accept Ross’ epistemology and abandon his metaphysics’ (Dancy, 1983, p.543). Thus according to Dancy, a moral epistemology is acceptable to the extent that it emphasizes the crucial act of discerning particularities, and thus the acceptability of a moral metaphysics is neither determined by nor determines its relation to epistemology. Dancy recognizes that the form of particularism he recommends raises a prima facie difficulty for the activity of giving reasons for moral judgements: ‘Surely, it will be said, the giving of reasons is essentially an appeal to moral principles’ (Dancy, 1983, p.543). Typically, false pictures of what the giving of reasons amounts to are generated by the commitments of a mistaken metaphysics. To avoid a generalist picture of reason-giving, Dancy suggests that an agent should compare the activity of choosing some features of the particular situation as especially salient … with the activity of the aesthetic description of a complex object such as a building. In such a description, certain features will be mentioned as salient within the context of the building as a whole. There is no thought that such features will be generally salient; they matter here and that is enough … [one] picks these features out, but knows that their importance cannot be assessed or even discerned by someone who cannot see the whole building. One could not (and here is one important feature of the

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analogy) discover how the building was by considering its salient features; salient features are not epistemological clues, and by analogy reasons are not clues either. (Dancy, 1983, p.546)24 Dancy continues that someone in the act of giving reasons for an ethical judgement is not so much providing evidence for that judgement, but attempting to display the manner in which the situation is perceived; in giving reasons for a judgement, a person is not arguing for that judgement along the model supposed by a generalist metaphysics of reasons (see Dancy, 1983, p.546). Therefore Dancy’s form of holism involves the relation between salient features and non-salient features. Without an appreciation of this relation, agents would be blind to salience. This is what I have termed intra-case holism. The problem I want to identify is that it is not entirely clear that the framework has remained faithful to the basic claim that the position is primarily metaphysical, not epistemological. Despite recognizing that the epistemologies of moral particularism and generalism might closely coincide, and that it is adherence to different metaphysical claims that motivate particularist suspicions, Dancy’s particularist version of what it is to give moral reasons nevertheless has distinct and important epistemological elements. Dancy claims that the character of what it is to provide reasons on the particularist’s model is in opposition to the generalist’s framework because of the underlying generalist reliance on the alleged explanatory and normative efficacy of principles. While it is clear that particularists and generalists differ in their respective metaphysics, Dancy’s account of the activity of giving reasons describes a process whereby agents can come to be in a state of knowledge with regard to the character of a circumstance under issue. Of course, any examination of the status of reasons may well lead to or presuppose important metaphysical considerations; my point here is that it also involves epistemic ones. One might be suspicious of the claim that particularism qua metaphysical doctrine is entirely separable from epistemological considerations. In anticipation of further arguments developed below it is worth noting that for some, epistemology is precisely an activity that involves the giving of (and asking for) reasons – moral or otherwise. Thus, any appeal to the character of what it is to give moral reasons will be epistemological even if distinctive metaphysical accounts are also provided. So far, I have stressed the manner in which Dancy’s moral particularism relies on an appeal to the doctrine of holism in the theory of reasons; whether or not there is a reason to ϕ is dependent on what


else is true in the context. In other words, whether or not there is a reason, and the nature of its valence, is settled by the internal relations obtaining between relevant features within the case. Particularism in this sense is a form of intra-case holism, where the relations between features within the case ground the normative or guiding force of a moral reason. What I suggest is that this ontologically driven holism is problematically related to a certain epistemological atomism; an inter-case atomism that explicitly denies any intrinsically normative or guiding role to relations which hold between cases. An implication of inter-case atomism – the idea that each moral case is delivered and is assessable in an isolated way – can make mysterious both the origin and nature of the abilities that we need in order to take in and have command of the normative demands of ethical circumstances. A brutely metaphysical particularism might not recognize that the practices of forming beliefs about moral cases or being able to discern the saliences present in a relevant circumstance are the expression of abilities that can be exercised in better or worse ways. The epistemology relevant to potential knowledge of a moral case can be characterized only from an irreducibly normative perspective. So far, the particularist’s remarks concerning moral epistemology imply that we can be in a state of knowledge about a moral case that does not presuppose the ability to have knowledge about other actual or possible moral cases, and thus be able to take command of other actual or possible reasons. I claim, on the contrary, that this ability is (partly) honed through exposure to the practice of discerning moral salience, and in turn to the conditions that render such practice possible. Earlier I drew a comparison between Dancy’s moral particularism and Hume. Modern allusions to what has become known as the ‘space of reasons’ arise from reflections on the inadequacies of traditional empiricism. A more substantial examination of these reflections will constitute later sections of this book. To pre-empt those arguments, the radical particularist’s picture resembles that sort of framework undermined by invoking the space of reasons, which specifically aims at opposing the so-called ‘Myth of the Given’. I will argue that a particularist moral epistemology could run afoul of a metaethical version of this fallacy – the Myth of the Moral Given. Before that, there are other aspects to the character of moral particularism which are crucial for how this book will develop.

2 Particularism and Subjectivity

2.1 Rationality and moral knowledge Although according to moral particularism, principles need not be in themselves metaphysically or rationally dubious, the order of priority between principle and particular runs from the latter to the former. Thus, whatever moral principles exist, they ‘are learnt in and from particular cases’ (Dancy, 1985a, p.151), and it is also suggested that an agent who is in possession of a ‘large list of principles … [could be] at an advantage when coming to a decision in a particular case’ (Dancy, 1985a, p.150). Notwithstanding the admission that principles can be learnt, and it can be a good thing to learn them from the point of view of moral reasoning, the role of principles is nevertheless highly restricted. Recall from Chapter 1 §1.4 that ‘a moral principle amounts to a reminder of the sort of importance that a property can have in suitable circumstances’ (Dancy, 1985a, p.150). The status of a ‘reminder’ with regard to moral principles is unclear. On one account, the purpose of a reminder is to give reasons for something and thus a moral principle, qua reminder, gives reasons. However, for the version of particularism under consideration, this would be too strong. Moral principles must not be accorded some essential reason-giving capability, but can serve to prompt an agent to recognize (or remember) that a feature or property can have a particular sort of relevance or valence. On another account, a reminder might serve to indicate how things turned out in the past, describing the sort of moral impact that certain properties had in past cases. To remain loyal to particularism, however, reminding in this sense must not be undertaken with an eye to extracting a general normative import from a catalogue of historical facts. Despite this qualified role for principles, particularism 28

Particularism and subjectivity 29

holds that there ‘is no substitute for the sort of detailed attention to each new case which an appeal to principles might lead us to shirk’ and even that the appeal to principles can lead to moral sloth (Dancy, 1985a, pp.152, 153). Particularists target the thought that we are under some sort of rational obligation which dictates that we must reach a certain conclusion about a certain case because we reached a certain conclusion about another, different, case. This is a form of ‘logical coercion’ which encourages the use of an illegitimate ‘switching argument’; the ‘attempt to determine what to say here by appeal to what we say about something else’ (Dancy, 1993, p.63, 64). Nonetheless, according to Brad Hooker this is a revolutionary thought, for switching arguments are ubiquitous in ethics. In fact, if we want to change someone’s mind about the moral relevance or force of some fact in a case under discussion, the normal way of trying to do so is to compare this case with others. But this form of argument depends on particularism’s being false. (Hooker, 2000, p.6) If Hooker is right, then a very familiar aspect of how we engage in moral thought and reasoning refutes particularism. Yet, the point is not about the inadmissibility of the act of comparison. It is quite possible to be a particularist while according a central place to the relations pertinent to acts of comparison between cases, as in circumstances where we identify and assess dimensions of similarity. I will come back to this in Chapter 3. Officially, particularism is a consequence of a picture of the nature of reasons, and, at least according to Dancy, a particularist moral epistemology could coincide with a non-particularist’s, or, at least someone who holds a form of atomism in the theory of reasons. In the case of Ross’s theory of prima facie duties, the relevant epistemology is such that we can be said to directly discern that an act, say, is right. By reflecting on the phenomenology, Ross suggests that a relevant moral epistemology would emphasize our ‘direct insight’ into the moral nature of actions, without deducing some conclusion from a principle covering acts of the relevant kind (Ross, 1939, p.171).1 In contrast, the particularist characteristics of John McDowell’s moral philosophy primarily result from a critique of what he considers to be mistaken accounts of moral knowledge.2 The last section of Chapter 1 considered the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics as they figure in debates over particularism.

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I have suggested that epistemological and metaphysical considerations are more closely connected than is typically assumed, although that suggestion does not threaten the idea that there is a distinction between them. The relevant understanding of ‘epistemology’ is thus quite broad in scope and incorporates issues about what rationality in ethics consists in, about the nature of subjectivity and about our relation to the world. These considerations are relevant to how we think about the nature of moral philosophy and, in turn, have implications for how particularism is conceived. McDowell writes that It may seem as though the very idea of a moral outlook makes room for, and requires, the existence of moral theory, conceived as a discipline that seeks to formulate acceptable principles of conduct. It is then natural to think of ethics as a branch of philosophy related to moral theory, so conceived, rather as the philosophy of science is related to science. (McDowell, 1998a, p.50) McDowell claims that, under one conception of what moral theorizing implies, a person’s taking possession of a moral outlook presupposes principles. But the conception is optional at best and thus so is the corresponding pressure towards the search for moral principles. For McDowell, the inadequacies of a principled approach in ethics are brought out by considering the nature of moral subjectivity and the nature of moral knowledge. McDowell’s particularism, as I understand it, emerges from reflecting on the nature of human beings and, especially, on the nature of the kind of knowledge and understanding characteristic of virtuous persons. Correspondingly, the question ‘What sort of person ought I to be?’ is of central importance. This sort of question is usually regarded by philosophers as a mark of a virtue theoretic approach, and what is most important is the idea that the relevant kind of knowledge or understanding is essentially perspectival in the following sense. First, it implies that philosophical conceptions of moral knowledge should be considered from the point of view of a virtuous agent or ‘from the inside out’, as McDowell suggests (McDowell. 1998a, p.50). The question of perspective is not only vital for providing insight into the phenomenology of virtue or expertise since it is also important for how we conceive rationality. Particularism in this context draws support from a distinctive conception of what rationality amounts to in ethics, and rejects an alternative conception


that imposes a deductive structure on moral thought and action which requires the existence and use of principles. An important point here is that particularist resistance to the principled account of rationality is not because ethical thought and reasoning is outside the domain of rationality. The disagreement is about the kind of rationality that is appropriate to ethics and not whether ethics is rational as such. At least for McDowell’s particularism, our moral thought can be a kind of knowledge, although that nature of that knowledge cannot be captured by general principles. McDowell shares with Dancy the thought that dominant ways of thinking about moral rationality have been unduly influenced by wrongheaded understandings of rationality. Where Dancy speaks of a ‘logical coercion’ that gives rise to a misguided understanding of ‘consistency’ in judgements across moral cases, McDowell alludes to a ‘deep-rooted prejudice about rationality’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.58). The prejudice in this context refers to a presumption in favour of deductive reasoning in the moral domain and a correlative epistemology which demands that moral knowledge, like all knowledge, be codifiable and explicable with essential reference to universal principles. McDowell describes the prejudiced view of moral rationality in the following way: Rationality requires consistency; a specific conception of rationality in a particular area imposes a specific form on the abstract requirement of consistency – a specific view of what counts as going on doing the same thing here. The prejudice is the idea that acting in light of a specific conception of rationality must be explicable in terms of being guided by a formulable universal principle. (McDowell, 1998a, p.58) According to this picture ‘virtue is a disposition … to behave rightly; the nature of virtue is explained, as it were, from the outside in’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.50). Here, the explanation of what virtue is runs in the wrong direction. Whether or not an agent is justifiably ascribed the appropriate ‘disposition’ is a question answerable only by appeal to the existence of formulable universal principles. In the conception opposed by McDowell the virtuous agent is described as that person who is in possession of a relevant disposition. This purely dispositional model of virtue, however, privileges the perspective of an ‘onlooker’ who can match instances of behaviour to a pre-existing ideal. Thus, moral reflection and ascription of virtue and moral knowledge is already external to the nature of the virtuous agent.

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In seeking to understand the central place of virtue in ethical reflection, and the attempt to neutralize any position that makes moral knowledge mysterious (if not impossible), McDowell emphasizes the manner in which the knowledge acquired by the virtuous agent is a product of seeing the moral world in a distinctive way. If one is merely disposed to do something, then emphasis on the relevant kind of sensitivity is missing. The prejudiced view of rationality requires that if the sensitivity in question is genuinely a form of knowledge, then it must be possible to articulate that knowledge in objective terms; that is, in terms that embody contextless formal patterns that operate according to deductive and syllogistic modes of reasoning. The appeal to formulable principles as a way of being guided in what to do case by case, is to get things not only the wrong way round, but also to radically misunderstand the character of what constitutes knowing how to go on. If the virtuous agent’s conception of how to go on is amenable to codification in principles, then it is natural to suppose that the possession of moral knowledge is the outcome of syllogistic reasoning. On this conception, judgement about what morally to do is deductively derived by the combination of a grasp of some universal knowledge together with a local belief. McDowell claims that to the ‘unprejudiced eye’ it should not seem at all plausible that an appropriately developed moral outlook is susceptible to being captured by the form of the practical syllogism. According to McDowell: it is only this misconception of the deductive paradigm that leads us to suppose that the operations of any specific conception of rationality in a particular area – any specific conception of what counts as doing the same thing – must be deductively explicable; that is, that there must be a formulable universal principle suited to serve as major premise in syllogistic explanations. (McDowell, 1998a, p.62) Furthermore, exercising the relevant sensitivities resists codification in principles, since what it is to exercise them and come to know what a situation demands cannot be encoded in universal terms: If one attempted to reduce one’s conception of what virtue requires to a set of rules, then, however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike us as wrong – and not necessarily because one has changed one’s mind; rather, one’s


mind on the matter was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula. (McDowell, 1998a, p.58) McDowell describes one understanding of a person’s ability and corresponding epistemic state to get things right morally speaking, as emphasizing the interplay between two cognitive tiers: a piece of universal knowledge expressed as a major premise coupled with a minor premise concerning a particular belief about a given state of affairs. A syllogism with a determinate moral judgement as conclusion follows. McDowell complains that a moral outlook does not need and ultimately resists this kind of understanding. A prejudice about rationality would in effect ensure that we are suspicious of any process of ‘reasoning’ that is not explicable in terms of a deductivist model. The relevant target, then, is a certain way of conceiving what rationality consists in, and the suggestion is that appeal to universal principles as explanatorily and normatively prior to right conduct and moral knowledge in a given circumstance is misguided. The alternative claim is that, since universal formulae do not encode moral knowledge, knowing how to respond case by case is a manifestation of reliable sensitivities that people have developed through initiation into a practice: A kind person can be relied on to behave kindly when that is what the situation requires … [that the situation requires this] … must be something of which, on each of the following relevant occasions, he is aware. A kind person has a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement that situations impose on behaviour. The deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are cases of knowledge; and there are idioms according to which the sensitivity itself can appropriately be described as knowledge: a kind person knows what it’s like to be confronted with a requirement of kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity. (McDowell, 1998a, p.51) As a suggestive characterization of a particularist epistemology, critics have focused on the phrase ‘sort of perceptual capacity’. I will discuss the perceptual account in more detail in Chapter 3. In the present context, the capacity in question implies an important and potentially overlooked role for generality. The relevant sensitivities are reliable in the sense that they operate over a range of cases, or generally. Possession of such sensitivities, involved in what is described above as ‘an outlook’,

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would equip a person with a readiness to recognize and respond to reasons when they are there. There must be a generality to this readiness in the sense that for any given case the sensitivity is manifested in particular thoughts and actions and plays a constitutive epistemological role: being virtuous means having an ability to get things right as well as actually getting it right. The question is about what kind of generality is needed here as part of coming to possess moral knowledge. It is, furthermore, answerable only from a certain perspective. There is a qualitative difference between the stances from which kinds of generality can be discerned and a difference in the nature of the relevant generalizations. The ability to think in terms of a ‘coherent scheme for a life’ (McDowell, 1995, p.213) involves uniting how the actual particular cases faced by a person, what Aristotle called ‘the that’, are immanently related to a wider and more general framework. Thinking in terms of the general here is making explicit the relations that embed particular cases within this more general scheme. Nevertheless, the perspective from which this is possible, or thinkable, is one that is already within ethical ‘practice’. It is not the case that what constitutes the material of the generalizations, the alleged principles that subsume particular cases and reveal the principled ways in which, say, natural features are tied to moral features, is accessible from a position outside of ethical practice. Minimally, the general ability to get things right is a matter of doing the same thing which is something one does over a range of cases. In other words, doing the same thing is intelligible only in a practice which frames the context within which one can in any case do the same thing. As Wittgenstein puts it: It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on. – To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs. (Wittgenstein, 1967, §199) What constitutes the kind of knowledge that a virtuous person possesses is intelligible by distinguishing between different sorts of rationality. Particularists claim that it is inappropriate to model the rationality central to the moral domain, and what constitutes ‘doing the same thing’, according to a deductivist paradigm of reasoning. The point is more than one about how different sorts of reasoning govern different


domains of our lives. It is also about what constitutes the normative constraints that enable us to tell better from worse ‘moves’ within the practice in question. An essential aspect of the relevant kind of constraint in the present context is a relevant perspective; a reflective stance that can be adopted only from within the practice itself. The perspective in question is constitutively linked to the objects of reflection to the extent that achieving an adequate understanding of the relevant range of objects and meanings requires that one possess a relevant point of view; a point of view that is a product of, among other things, initiation into the practice. A natural understanding of what this means is to take it as referring to the process of how we become educated or brought up to think, talk and act in morally relevant ways which is, presumably, a familiar process. A vital issue here is the question as to what constitutes the constraint in light of which we can arbitrate between more or less correct, appropriate and so on, and thus what it is to do the same thing or ‘go on’ in a practice.

2.2 Platonism and practice Part of what makes a practice is the feature of going on in better or worse ways. One understanding of what this means supposes that the ability for us to have a genuine grasp of the difference in question requires adopting a standpoint external to the practice. What enables the distinction between someone’s going on in an appropriate way from someone’s going astray looks to be explicable on a ‘platonist’ model, central to which is a spectatorial or theoretical perspective. This perspective does not make use of the conceptual repertoire or the normative framework being investigated, but it is, nevertheless, supposedly adequate to make discriminations between thoughts and actions that manifest that repertoire or framework. This sort of view can be attractive since it provides a direct response to the question as to how we might tell whether or not a move within a practice is correct, warranted and so on. The attraction lies partly in how a platonist perspective is independent from the normative framework actually used in the practice and so can, in a non-circular, non-prejudiced and principled way, sort correct from incorrect moves.3 Recall that particularists and their opponents share the assumption that our moral practice is rational, and both share the idea that a fundamental issue is the question as to what constitutes or what is needed for that rationality. An obvious way to construe the relation between our practice and the kind of rationality in question is to picture the latter

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as somehow residing outside of or external to the practice. In other words, that there is an architecture that ‘underpins’ our practice understood as substantive moral judgements and actions. If Margaret Little is right, then moral theory has been generally conceived as the search for this architecture and thus of the structure of the moral landscape (Little, 2000, p.278). For opponents of particularism, this structure is constituted by moral principles. Although local or substantive knowledge is required by the understanding of moral rationality modelled on syllogistic reasoning, the major premise of any practical syllogism will anchor the normative aspect of moral judgement in a non-local and de-contextualized realm. In this context, platonism about rule-following demands that in order for there to be proper constraint on the way we think, speak and act, that constraint must originate outside of the practice. If this were not so, the platonist argues, then the very idea of constraint is under threat. An alternative view of the ‘architecture’, in contrast, emphasizes the nature of participants in the practices and not the nature of a realm that hovers independently of practice. This would not simply be a re-focusing of attention onto ourselves. Rather, it would be to recognize that human subjectivity embodied in our practices is partly constitutive of the conditions that provide the relevant constraint. According to McDowell, the temptation to conceive normative constraint as ultimately residing in a practice-independent realm can be understood as a response to what Stanley Cavell describes as a ‘terrifying’ thought (Cavell, 1976, p.52): the idea that once the constraint is domesticated within the realm of our practices, we seem to thereby give up the right to think that there is any constraint at all. There is a form of anxiety that is brought on by facing the idea that there is nothing more than our practices to ensure that we continue ‘doing the same thing’ or that we carry on ‘going on’ – nothing more than mere cultural inertia to drive practices forward and keep the constraints intact and thus preserve the resources to assess our own and others’ actions and utterances. McDowell interprets the anxiety as a kind of ‘vertigo’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.61). This is an apt metaphor, I think, since – and consistently with the architectural imagery used above – it captures the idea that what is perceived as problematic is the apparent lack of foundation or underpinning which would otherwise provide support for our practice. The anxiety in question is not simply the result of a hankering after illusory foundations, and so giving up the search or trying to resist the need for foundations is not the answer. Rather, the anxiety can be assuaged by reconceptualizing what constitutes the foundation.


For Wittgenstein, whose discussions of rules and rule-following is the context of Cavell’s remarks, the foundation or the ‘bedrock’ is provided by the various elements that make up ‘forms of life’ themselves. In Philosophical Investigations, §217, Wittgenstein considers a response to a question about what enables one to follow a rule or participate in other ‘customs’. After the process of providing explicit ‘justifications’ or ‘reasons’ has come to an end, as it surely must at some point, we reach the foundation. Wittgenstein writes, If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’. (Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the definition a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing). (Wittgenstein, 1967, §217) So – in another use of architectural imagery – Wittgenstein suggests that, at the lowest level as it were, the pressure to provide definitions of what constitutes the ability to obey a rule can only be met by directly confronting a form of life. Cavell’s ‘terrifying’ thought reflects a felt need to nest a given practice within networks which are independent yet provide rational support. McDowell suggests a therapeutic technique for eliminating the vertigo: The cure for the vertigo … is to give up the idea that philosophical thought about the sorts of practice in question, should be undertaken at some external standpoint, outside our immersion in our familiar forms of life. (McDowell, 1998a, p.63) Elsewhere he suggests that we would be protected against the vertigo if we could stop supposing that the relation to reality of some area of our thought and language needs to be contemplated from a standpoint independent of the anchoring in our human life. (McDowell, 1998a, p.211) Since what it is to possess (and evaluate) moral knowledge arises from a practice, it represents an alternative to a prejudiced conception that

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supposes moral knowledge to be possible and assessable only by adopting a ‘sideways on’ perspective (McDowell, 1996, p.34).4 This is important for deciding the prospects of particularism because the question as to the location of the perspective from which it is possible to frame moral understanding clearly has implications for particularist moral epistemology. One implication is that what it is to have moral knowledge, and thus what philosophical reflection on that kind of knowledge presumably aspires to articulate, rests on a conception of the subject as a participant in a practice rather than an onlooker, or a spectator. Nevertheless, the capacity of moral knowers to recognize moral salience on each relevant occasion is a capacity that arises as interdependent with having a ‘moral outlook’ in the sense referred to at the start of this chapter. The relevant outlook obviously cannot be the immediate product of any single instance of recognizing salience (it is a ‘custom’), and nor is it the direct product of having at one’s disposal a series of instances that are subsequently brought into a relevant relation. Single moments of recognizing a normative demand or a moral reason are in an inseparable association with a wider rational framework. So, while the relation of recognition is important on each relevant occasion, so too is the relation between a single instance and a wider outlook or framework. Neither is explicable independently from the other. In contrast to the illicit view of rationality, and the misplaced constraints on genuine states of knowing, particularism, as it is suggested by McDowell, claims that Occasion by occasion, one knows what to do, if one does, not by applying universal principles but by being a certain kind of person: one who sees situations in a certain distinctive way. (McDowell, 1998a, p.73) Furthermore, although there is ‘stress on appreciation of the particular, and the absence of a decision procedure’ this need not imply, as McDowell notes, that we ought to ‘pontificate about particular cases’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.72). I understand the kind of particularism in question here to be committed to the view that a necessary condition of moral knowledge is possession of an outlook which incorporates participating in and being subject to practice. The point is that participation and subjectivity in this sense presuppose already having undergone some form of induction into a determinate way of life. The ability to be the kind of person who sees in a particular way must involve exercising a form of awareness that derives, as Sabina Lovibond


suggests, ‘from our earlier induction into the moral world as currently constituted’ (Lovibond, 1983, p.197).5 The moral world so constituted is not a blank realm which we contemplate from the outside, so to speak. This suggests, then, a nuanced conception of what counts as the real world in the moral case.6 The capacity to respond case by case, and to know what to do in a way consistent with a particularist epistemology, ‘cannot be exercised in isolation, but only within an organic grouping of persons who are participants in a common mode of activity’ (Lovibond, 1983, p.200). This would be an example of the wider network of relations that are needed for the exercise of relevant sensitivities case by case. The point is that the ability to know what to do or think is not merely helped by being responsive to intersubjective regulation, it is made possible by being part of a practice partly constituted by others, and which partly constitutes the world in which we develop as moral agents.

2.3 Practices, perspectives and the moral world Considerations about knowing how to go on suggest that while there are correct and incorrect moves in moral practice, a mistake would be to wrongly identify the viewpoint from which such correctness or incorrectness is, or can be, discerned. Practical know-how is not achievable in the moral domain (or elsewhere) if we attempt to adopt a position independent of the activities and reactions that partly constitute the practice in question. An agent’s ability to perceive what is morally required in a given state of affairs turns on whether or not that agent is properly attuned, morally speaking, to moral features. Agents must be of a certain kind in order for moral salience to impress in the appropriate manner. That is, agents have or can come to have the sort of tendency or capacity to react in a morally reliable fashion when certain moral circumstances obtain. Indeed, McDowell’s virtuous agent has been referred to as a kind of ‘connoisseur’ in this regard (Wallace, 1991, p.471).7 To situate this in context, the moral connoisseur is constituted in part by knowing how to go on in a certain way, although this knowledge cannot be simply read-off from a past case or range of cases from the outside, so to speak. This kind of particularism rejects an external or sideways-on point of view from which we can identify and understand how the relevant kind of knowledge is related to its objects. Instead, what moral knowledge consists in can only be grasped through ‘immersion in our familiar forms of life’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.63). The form of particularism under consideration denies that there are, or need to

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be, any moral principles that can serve as the rational underpinnings of action or thought and which serve as the architecture of morality. Broadly stated, when considering moral states of affairs, coming to know what is at stake, knowing that a certain response is called for, knowing how to go on ethically speaking, is primarily a matter of being sensitive to reasons in a way which can only be realized and made sense of from the perspective of moral practice. Such a particularism thus combines two thoughts: (1) Moral knowledge is a matter of exercising a form of uncodifiable expertise occasion by occasion. (2) Rational constraint on moral thought arises from, rather than transcends, moral practice. While Dancy and McDowell appear to share a broad commitment to (1), it is not obvious that their respective particularist positions both subscribe to (2), at least explicitly. Although I presume that Dancy would be sympathetic to the kind of view expressed in (2), it is more implicit in how he characterizes particularism. According to the conventional classification we could say that (1) articulates an epistemological thesis whereas (2), on the face of it, is a metaphysical claim about what provides for the rationality of our moral thought and discourse. I have previously suggested that, while there are important differences between them, we ought to avoid conceiving epistemology and metaphysics as radically distinct. The significance of this in the present context is brought out by a third feature which both ‘epistemological’ and ‘metaphysical’ versions of particularism would appear to support: (3) The world provides constraint on moral thought and reasoning. This is clearly a proposal with explicit metaphysical import. The motivation for saying that epistemology and metaphysics are closer than is sometimes supposed is partly to respond to the tendency to interpret (3) as a claim about ‘the world’ as opposed to human beings. The metaphysical import is not, I think, exclusive; ‘the world’ under consideration implicates human beings and, in doing so, requires that at the very least we are mindful that subjectivity and epistemological questions broadly understood are not relegated to as status of secondary importance. Karen Jones has recently suggested that compared to the interest in metaphysical and semantic issues, epistemological considerations are


relatively absent in metaethical discussion (Jones, 2005, p.63). What might explain this is that claims to moral knowledge presuppose commitments in metaphysics and semantics and, therefore, the defensibility or otherwise of substantive claims at the level of moral knowledge turn on the defensibility or otherwise of substantive claims in metaphysics or semantics. Very roughly, putative claims to moral knowledge that p can be assessed in large part by considering the relevant metaphysical implications; for instance, that the knowledge claim implicates or presupposes (for better or worse) a realm of mind-independent moral objects, properties or states of affairs. In short, claims to moral knowledge are dependent. Any useful analysis of moral knowledge would, then, require evaluation of the metaphysical underpinnings or implications. Although the suggestion is that metaphysics is more basic than moral epistemology, the relationship is complex. While we may appreciate quite generally that questions in moral epistemology turn very quickly into questions in metaphysics or semantics, epistemic claims or commitments in themselves provide little information about the kind of attendant metaphysics. For example, contextualism in moral epistemology is compatible with realist or non-realist metaphysics. Similarly, intuitionism comes in realist and non-realist forms, as do versions of sensibility theory. What emerges is the idea that epistemological commitments, implications and considerations are by and large of secondary importance. This is partly because they are dependent on metaphysics and partly because, since rival metaethical positions can share the same epistemology, whatever is genuinely distinctive about a particular metaethics will be exhibited at the level of metaphysics. By way of an explanation of Jones’s observation, those really serious about moral philosophy need to demonstrate their metaphysical and semantic credentials in order to explain and justify any claims at the level of moral epistemology, if indeed there are those kinds of claims at all. In fact the dialectical status of metaphysics is so weighty relative to epistemology, that one need only in fact ‘do’ epistemology if one has realist aspirations. Know implies real, at least in ethics. A familiar and influential metaphysical framework in this sense is a naturalistic one. Only objects countenanced by the natural sciences can ultimately figure, directly or indirectly, in a defensible account of moral knowledge. The case for moral irrealism is frequently based on a commitment to distinctive metaphysical claims which are supposed to be not only unthreatening to, but directly supported by, a naturalistic ontology. There is a cultural (if not logical) connection between

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naturalism and versions of moral anti-realism and between versions of non-naturalism and realism. Set in the context of trying to ‘place’ moral epistemology, this dialectical relation is also one that implies, again following Karen Jones, that the burden to engage issues in moral epistemology in their own right is one faced, perhaps exclusively, by moral realists (Jones, 2005, pp.63–4). The extent to which one faces certain epistemic questions, and whether one is pressed to engage moral epistemology at all, is determined by the nature of competing metaphysical doctrines. Put in these terms, in order to vindicate moral knowledge claims, a distinctive view about the nature of moral facts is needed. For classic antirealists, such as Hume, moral knowledge can seem a less troubling idea, since what is meant by ‘know’ (if anything) can be cashed out in terms of natural-psychological dispositions augmented by enculturation.8 The issues can be transposed to the psychological level insofar as, roughly speaking again, non-cognitivists in ethics need not be troubled by worries brought on by supposing that, in enjoying moral knowledge, we stand in a certain direct relation to the world. Blackburn has famously provided an account of how we can earn the right to think in terms of truth in ethics once we have provided a non-cognitivist construal of the assertoric appearances of moral thought and reasoning.9 Since there is a very natural sense in which talk of moral knowledge implicates talk of truth, Blackburn, although avowedly non-cognitivist, can be seen as quite unproblematically contributing to moral epistemology. Blackburn’s project, and a great deal of contemporary work in metaethics, is devoted to working through the semantic features of moral discourse, and the connection these have with candidate theories of truth such as minimalism and so on. Perhaps it is the case that a finessed version of non-cognitivism can deliver all of the features and attributes of moral thought and discourse that we, pre-philosophically, think that it possesses. There are a number of ways in which we can read ‘moral epistemology’. As a very general question, we might ask whether any proposal for such an epistemology supposes that the relevant knowledge is, for instance, a priori or not. At least this would help us begin to understand what a particularist might (or might need to) be committed to, and what would also constitute a distinctively particularist approach to moral epistemology. Other immediate thoughts would concern, for example, what the structure of moral knowledge must be like; for instance, whether there is a set of basic beliefs which provide justification but need no justification themselves, akin to plain versions of


epistemological foundationalism; a coherentist form of reflective equilibrium; a version of contextualism, and so on. These ideas, then, familiar as they are in the non-moral case, might be helpful in mapping the conceptual geography of moral epistemology quite generally, and especially of understanding particularist moral epistemology. The two strands of particularism as represented by McDowell and Dancy emphasize different aspects. Dancy’s position is founded in a global theory about the nature of reasons, whereas McDowell’s particularism is grounded in reflections about the nature of rationality and knowledge inspired by Aristotle and Wittgenstein. Furthermore, McDowell’s expression of moral particularism is a consequence of a broader conception about the nature of the world and our relation to it. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to construe Dancy’s account as if it were not similarly bound up with these kinds of considerations. This chapter has discussed the status and role of practice in relation to moral particularism and, in particular, the way in which a commitment to the centrality of practice for moral understanding and its implications for philosophical reflection can support forms of particularism. There is, furthermore, a related way of characterizing the content and significance of practice that is important for present purposes. According to Dancy, ‘[i]t is the job of the philosopher, so far as possible, to give an account of our practice rather than tell us that we all ought to be doing something else’ (Dancy, 1993, p.67). Likewise, Michael Smith believes that ‘the task of the philosopher in meta-ethics is to make sense of ordinary moral practice’ (Smith, 1994, p.11). These remarks represent a mainstream attitude to the nature of moral theorizing. What such an attitude presupposes, however, is a substantive conception of what practice amounts to. For example, Michael Smith’s well-known characterization of practice involves identifying features that are both intrinsic yet incompatible elements in moral thought: objectivity and practicality (Smith, 1994, p.11). At the very least, I would understand part of the philosopher’s job to include considerations about what constitutes the explanandum in this context – the ‘practice’. This would be simply one way to engage with the substantive commitments in philosophical psychology that are intimately related to how and why these elements in moral discourse are problematic. The kinds of problem that one regards as presented by moral practice, and thus the subject-matter of subsequent philosophical enquiry, usually reflect theorized views about the nature of the world and the nature of mind. It is, for example, from the perspective of belief-desire psychology that one can ‘make sense’ of ordinary moral practice insofar as the relevant

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mental states play an important role in how we think ‘objectively’ and how we are geared to act or be motivated in terms of ‘practicality’. I do not want to suggest that Michael Smith, for instance, considers that reflection on practice itself is somehow unimportant. What I do want to suggest, however, is that we might mistakenly assume that characterizing ordinary practice does not involve making use of commitments about the nature of our minds, about what ‘objectivity’ is and so on, some of which are, at the very least, controversial. I have suggested that appeal to our practice, insofar as it is important for the articulation of moral particularism, involves the interplay between ‘occasions’ in which someone exercises a capacity to know what to do or think, and an outlook or perspective. Moral knowledge conceived of as the capacity of agents to see a situation aright, occasion by occasion, is already related to a grasp of a wider perspective: a perspective that includes, for instance, the possibility of objects of moral experience not enjoyed as ‘directly present’ on each occasion. This suggests, at least, that it is the relations between moral cases that are important for our understanding of how such occasions are connected, albeit in unprincipled ways, and how, for example, the nature of reasons fits into rival conceptions about what the world is like.

2.4 Projectivism and normativity A relevant example of the influence of background commitments, alluded to above, is the way in which the assumed truth of certain metaphysical theses governs conceptions of the nature of reasons. The image of what constitutes objective reality as articulated by philosophers such as, for instance, J. L. Mackie and Bernard Williams, naturally gives rise to the view that our moral thought is not – nor could it be – genuinely responsive to worldly properties or states of affairs, since the world simply does not contain anything like those properties or states of affairs.10 The metaphysics of this form of naturalism has implications for how a relevant psychology is characterized. For instance, a Humean dogma in philosophical psychology is that action explanation involves identifying kinds of mental state that, when in cooperation, can bring about action and also provide first- and third-person rationalizations of it. According to this familiar picture, some of our mental states, ‘desires’, are characterized by trying to manipulate whatever properties or states of affairs are part of the world, in contrast to other mental states, ‘beliefs’, that try to correctly represent in thought the way the world is in fact. In recent philosophy, one way to parse this difference


is to picture contrasting so-called directions of fit between such states and the world. According to Mark Platts’s characterization, for example, ‘[b]eliefs aim at the true, and their being true is their fitting the world ... Desires aim at realisation, and their realisation is the world fitting with them’ (Platts, 1979, pp.256–7). So the aspiration of belief states is to be true, and a belief’s being true is, if it is, in virtue of the way the world is. In contrast, the aim of desire is to be satisfied, and as such the world is to be actively changed in accordance with the content of the desire, perhaps with the help of information provided by belief states.11 According to neo-Humean psychology, in order for an agent to be motivated to act, the presence of both belief and desire is required. If either component is absent, then there can be no explanatory or normative account of the agent’s action, if there was action at all. Beliefs are construed as passive and reflect the ways of the world and are thus inert. An appropriate desire is needed in order to provide the necessary active or ‘vital’ component that provides someone with the impetus to act. As David McNaughton puts it, ‘The combination of belief and desire is required to motivate [an] agent to act. Desires without beliefs are blind; beliefs without desires are inert’ (McNaughton, 1988, p.21). Fortunately, the blind states and the inert states not only cooperate with but also, presumably, complement each other such that there is action and we can, at least a lot of the time, make sense of it. Humean psychology and the ‘directions of fit’ account have received attention.12 An important aspect of the debate is how the relevant metaphysical claims about what can be said to be part of the world are related to claims about our moral psychology. Mackie’s influential ‘error theory’ about moral thought is the outcome of an explicit metaphysical commitment about what the nature of the world is like. Mackie explains that a condition of adequacy on any analysis of our moral thought is that it must preserve the ‘objective, intrinsic prescriptivity’ of moral claims (Mackie, 1977, p.35). These elements are incontrovertibly part of moral thinking. The only way in which Mackie thinks that these elements can be honoured at the level of second-order theorizing is by adopting an error theory which is based upon a distinctive neo-Humean metaphysics. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in the world that could possibly be objective and intrinsically prescriptive, nothing that could be external to human subjectivity, thus objective, and simultaneously tied to the human will, which it would need to be in order to possess intrinsic prescriptivity. So, although the conceptual and semantic form of moral discourse is such that we think, speak and act in terms of there being entities – values – that are objective and intrinsically prescriptive,

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the world, in Crispin Wright’s phrase, ‘lets the moral thinker down’ (Wright, 1995, p.210).13 In Mackie’s view, whether or not there are objective features of this or that kind is an issue quite distinct from our subjective concerns. Realizing that our entire moral thinking is infected with an error might cause some people to have an ‘extreme emotional reaction, a feeling that nothing matters at all, that life has lost its purpose’ but, Mackie explains, none of these things need follow from the error theory (Mackie, 1977, p.34). The claim that they do not follow rests on the assumption that the world in which we find ourselves is entirely separate from our concerns and interests, our subjectivity, and so, at least in principle, we might greet the error theory with happiness and joy rather than with a feeling that nothing matters anymore. Wright suggests that a reasonable response to the error theory would be to stop thinking in those ways that are identified as systemically in error. Furthermore, If it is of the essence of moral judgement to aim at the truth, and if philosophy teaches us that there is no moral truth to hit, how are we supposed to take ourselves seriously in thinking the way we do about any issue which we regard as of major moral importance? (Wright, 1995, p.210) What I want to emphasize is the distinctive conception that Mackie assumes about the status of our subjective concerns and ‘sense of purpose’. The assumption is that these features of our lives operate quite separately from objective reality, although they might be directed at it. This picture thus circumscribes moral thought and practice and draws a boundary outside of which resides the real world, and adopts a controversial conception of what the object of philosophical reflection is – our practice. I have tried above to call attention to how our ‘moral practice’ or our ‘moral experience’ is characterized for the purposes of philosophical reflection. This is important in the present context because it would seem as though ‘subjective concerns’ and a ‘sense of purpose’ is part of that practice. Having an understanding of the way in which we live our moral lives is not something that can be achieved by first assuming the truth of a metaphysical picture that characterizes the world as simply immune to our moral thoughts. That is not the world we are interested in here, presumably, and it is not an appropriate vantage point from which to consider our ‘moral practice’. The question is not one about how our practice fits or does not fit into a pre-established Humean


world-view and is more about the kind of world that is presupposed by our moral thinking and discourse. As Charles Taylor puts it, What we need to explain is people living their lives; the terms in which they cannot avoid living them cannot be removed from the explanandum … We cannot just leap outside of these terms altogether, on the grounds that their logic doesn’t fit some model of ‘science’. (Taylor, 1989, p.58).14 The mistake is to assume that the terms in which moral subjectivity is embodied, and those persons and their ways of thinking and acting that constitute at least part of what is presumably meant by ‘practice’, are all explicable from a point of view that occupies a position radically outside that practice, and thus outside of the world that is irreducibly related to that practice. This has implications for how we might understand how reasons have rational force for agents. If subjectivity is understood as a hermetically sealed realm within the sort of world assumed by a neo-Humean view, then it would make sense to construe the origin of moral reasons as being within that realm and the salience of such reasons to be put in ‘subjective’ terms; terms which, for instance, characterize reasons as explicable in mental terms since the mental would be emblematic of the subjective realm. A contrasting and potentially more compelling account suggests that the normative force of reasons is grounded in the way things are, or the way the moral world is, and not in the interplay of psychological states. For instance, with regard to moral duty, Dancy writes that normative force is grounded in features of the situation, not in our beliefs about how things are. It is because she is in trouble that I ought to help her, not because I think she is in trouble. What made it wrong for her to behave in this way was that she had promised not to, not that she believed she had promised not to. (Dancy, 2000b, p.52). Dancy rejects the idea that reasons can be identified merely with psychological states of an agent. Instead, reasons are substantial states of affairs that are at least part of ‘the realities that call for action from us’ and not merely a product of our minds (Dancy, 2000b, p.114). This view contrasts sharply with Hume’s picture of moral thinking and reasoning, and of thinking and reasoning as such. Hume’s question at the

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beginning of Book III of the Treatise of Human Nature asks, ‘Whether ‘tis by means of our ideas or impressions we distinguish betwixt vice and virtue, and pronounce an action blameable or praise-worthy?’ (Hume, 1978, p.456). In other words, whether moral thought can be ‘traced up’ to original moments of empirical contact with the world (or as explicable in terms of the ‘relations of ideas’). Hume’s projectivism is understood as a consequence of his belief that in certain domains of thought and judgement, including the moral domain, the mind has a ‘great propensity to spread itself on external objects’ (Hume, 1978, p.167). Hume was aware that we are likely to confuse this propensity with genuine episodes of being responsive to what is ‘out there’. Certain ‘internal impressions’ naturally come before the mind when we confront objects of perception, and the nature of these pairings leads us to suppose that the content of the internal impression is a product of genuine qualities of objects. This is a mistake according to Hume. For instance, because certain sounds and smells are always found to attend certain visible objects, we naturally imagine a conjunction … betwixt the objects and qualities … tho’ the qualities be of such a nature as to admit of no such conjunction, and really exist nowhere. (Hume, 1978, p.167) According to Hume, the psychological propensity of the mind to invest objects with qualities is, while it might be misleading, a powerful and ineliminable natural tendency. Hume famously writes that reason ‘discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution’ and, in contrast, that ‘taste’ has a ‘productive faculty, and gilding and staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner in a new creation’ (Hume, 1975, p.294). While the discoveries of reason are ‘founded on the nature of things’, and thus have their origin in the ‘operations of nature [that are] independent of our thought and reasoning’, the origin of moral perceptions is to be found in the ‘internal frame and constitution’, internal to the ‘imaginative’ human mind (Hume, 1975, p.294; 1978, p.168). This philosophical psychology, as I have suggested, is not unrelated to presuppositions about objectivity and subjectivity in the moral domain (and elsewhere). A properly objective description of the world would use concepts that are, as Bernard Williams puts it, ‘not peculiarly ours, and not peculiarly relative to our experience’ (Williams, 1978, p.244). The denial that moral features are objective involves the idea that the concepts employed in moral thinking give expression to (or


perhaps partly constitute) various forms of transient and incompatible perspectives. The way in which the objective/subjective distinction is drawn in moral philosophy can be seriously misleading. McDowell, for example, is well known for suggesting that there is a conception of features that belong to the world that are intrinsically connected to human subjectivity. For instance, he agrees that values ‘are not brutally there – not there independently of our subjectivity (McDowell, 1998a, p.146) but suggests that, at least in ethics, it ‘is a mistake to conceive objectivity in terms of complete independence from subjectivity’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.180). Recently, Alice Crary has developed the idea of a ‘wider conception of objectivity’ that aims to show how our moral judgements are ‘concerned with the world’ (Crary, 2007a, p.19). This, I take it, is partly about trying to get clear what sort of ‘world’ is relevant to our moral reflection. It is not a world, presumably, that is available for such reflection only from ‘a maximally abstract (i.e., dispassionate and dehumanized) vantage point’ (Crary, 2007a, p.20). In a similar context, Richard Norman has suggested that discourse about ‘features of the moral world’ does not refer to some extraordinary dimension of reality. Thinking and talking in terms of there really being moral features ‘out there’ ‘is essential to our making sense of the moral world’, but no ‘special ontology’ is needed to account for them (Norman, 1997, p.129).15 I will come back to this question of ‘world’ later.

2.5 Rationality, experience and uncodifiability The preceding section touched on contrasting accounts of the nature of our access to moral reality. One purpose was to bring into focus the view that we only ever have indirect access to the moral world via intermediaries such as ‘ordinary’ non-moral experience which underpins our – presumably ‘extraordinary’ – moral experience. The Humean orthodoxy in this context supposes that the nature of the intermediary here is psychological; that is, that what constitutes the transition from the non-moral to the moral level is the operation of our psychological capacities. In contrast a different view supposes that, at least in some cases, there are no such intermediaries, no such transitions in thought uniting elements through various ‘operations of the mind’. Furthermore, questions about the source of reasons map onto these considerations since philosophers similarly divide over whether they regard the existence of reasons to be in virtue of some cognitive act, such as a belief, or whether reasons are a worldly kind of thing which, at least some of the time, we immediately respond or are open to.

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A philosophical articulation of this latter view would deny that our minds are on one side of an interface, with the external world lying on the other side. At least according to McDowell, the world is not ‘blankly external’ (McDowell, 1998b, p.389), and a more promising framework is to think in terms of our ‘unmediated openness of the experiencing subject to “external” reality’ (McDowell, 1998b, p.392). I will return to this idea in Chapter 6. For now, consider the moral relevance of this account of immediate access to the world. This view rejects the claim that our perceptions and meaningful discourse are always at one remove from the world, operating in a realm divorced from the world itself and thus ‘falling short of the facts’ (see McDowell, 1998b, p.389). McDowell defends a form of moral realism, or ‘anti-anti-realism’ as he puts it (McDowell, 1998a, p.viii) and a parallel claim here would be that, at least some of the time, our moral experience does not fall short of the moral facts. Once properly attuned, agents will immediately perceive what is morally required of them. As agents, we are already in the moral world, not opposed to or merely contemplating it, so to speak. Furthermore, part of McDowell’s view is a rejection of the idea that our minds are like ‘black boxes in the world’ and the problem here, I take it, is the ‘black box’ element and not the ‘in the world’ element (McDowell, 1998a, p.358). In one place McDowell expresses the idea by alluding to Heidegger’s discussion of Leibniz: ‘we need no windows for we are already outside’ (see McDowell, 2000a, p.340; Heidegger, 1982, p.301). The notion that as subjects we are immediately open to the world through experience, and particularly McDowell’s version of it, is controversial.16 Nevertheless it is possible, I think, to draw some lessons about how we might think of ethics in a similar context since, as McDowell notices, the idea that in experience we can be open to the world has ‘obvious reverberations for how we think of action’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.358). Some of these reverberations might shape how we think about questions of codifiability, and hence questions about the plausibility of moral particularism. In Chapter 6, I will take a closer look at objections to the idea of moral conceptualism or the view that access to the moral world requires a form of conceptual articulation. What I want to emphasize here is that the image of moral agents as being already in the world and who are immediately open to moral reasons suggests that considering the nature of subjectivity, the nature of our inhabitation of the moral world, must be a crucial component in philosophical reflection into the nature of our moral thought and discourse. In Chapter 1, this idea was couched in terms of a conventional contrast between epistemological


and metaphysical attitudes in debates over moral particularism. In the present context, the point is one about focusing attention away from the questions as to whether moral thought requires moral principles, whether the nature of reasons is such as to support or undermine particularism and, centrally, the extent to which the question of codifiability is important. Instead, what emerges as vital is attending to the nature of our moral subjectivity. To be clear, what I am suggesting is not necessarily that these other considerations are simply misguided or irrelevant somehow, but that understanding their relevance is a matter of setting them in the context of moral subjectivity. Recently, Andrew Gleeson has argued that the debate over moral particularism should be reconfigured in order to consider more closely ‘what really matters in our moral lives’. He suggests that our attention has been funnelled into a ‘scholastic dead end’ of metaphysical issues about whether reasons are variant or not and, thus, to the question as to whether principles could codify morality (Gleeson, 2007, p.368). For Gleeson, even if these issues were resolved, it would leave untouched what is fundamental to our life and what is fundamental to the assessment of our moral reasoning and discourse. The particularist insistence that individual cases have authority over principles is self-standing, and its force does not rest on the metaphysical fact (even if it can be established) that reasons possess flexible valence and that they resist codification in principles. The question of how we react to moral phenomena is basic, according to Gleeson, and that is a question which is independent of whether or not reasons are by their nature invariant. According to Gleeson: The important issue is not whether there are principles that codify moral phenomena (cases) but how it is that we react to moral phenomena. Morality has to do without principles not because they are almost certainly inadequate (i.e. have exceptions because the reasons they enshrine vary) but because deciding how to act by consulting a rule is one way in which we fail properly to attend to the detailed particularity of each individual case – even if the case falls squarely under some knowable rule (and even if it does not). (Gleeson, 2007, p.364).17 Gleeson lays emphasis, then, on the nature of our attention to the particularities of each case, the exercise of a range of sensitivities that is independent of following a rule or invoking a moral principle and thus independent of the debate about the nature of reasons and their

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codifiability. What he suggests is that the debate about particularism has been misshapen by arguments and counter-arguments over the metaphysics of reasons and codifiability and, furthermore, that there is a distinctively normative aspect to the debate that has been largely ignored. This aspect reveals the morally important issue as to the source and recognition of responsibility and moral understanding. Relying on moral principles to provide justification for a particular moral belief or action is, ultimately, to place faith in and rely on the author of those principles and is thus not to take on an adequate form of responsibility for the relevant thought or action. Following rules or principles could be, Gleeson suggests, a form of ‘bad faith’ when normative authority is considered to somehow originate from the principle qua principle. As a moral agent I am responsible for whether or not a principle is relevant in a give case; I am responsible for affirming (or rejecting) a principle and implementing what it requires. The point here is more than an attempt to expose and criticize a form of laziness. I am responsible and answerable for my actions even in cases where I am the author of a moral principle. The appeal to principle is the problem, not that the principle might be inadequate in a given case or that someone else has drawn up the principle. Justifying my actions by the lights of a principle I might have previously instituted is as much an instance of buck passing as is the attempt to justify action by the lights of ‘someone else’s’ principle (Gleeson, 2007, p.372). The point, then, is that moral understanding involves recognizing and discharging a certain responsibility which cannot be achieved while operating at the level of rules or principles, however intimately one might be involved with those principles. This picture opposes the one described by Onora O’Neill as outlined in Chapter 1 (section 1.2). O’Neill claims that the burden placed by particularists on individual cases is too much for them to bear. Without principles, the very idea of particular cases does not make sense. Thus, there is a transcendental constraint on moral theorizing such that moral principles are inalienable aspects of moral thought and reasoning even if local and particular moral reactions are emphasised. Gleeson’s suggested reconfiguration of particularism is well motivated although whatever strength it has lies in its engagement with a particular sort of metaphysical particularism. It is less pertinent to less metaphysical versions of particularism. In bringing moral reactions to the forefront of the debate, or reminding us that central aspects of our moral theorizing ought not to focus exclusively on the ‘metaphysics’ of reasons or principles, the shift can supplement a form of particularism central to which is the nature and role of sensibilities.


‘Sensibility theory’ in moral philosophy, broadly speaking, claims that our sensitivity to evaluative objects and properties is centrally a matter of the operation of our emotional or affective capacities. It is not clear how best to understand this view. The ‘sense’ element in ‘sensibility’ might be taken to indicate a form of perceptual model of the relevant sensitivity. That is, our moral sense is a form of emotional awareness which can be developed in ways that afford us access to reality. This understanding, then, would compliment a form of moral realism since the central idea is that moral reasons exist independently of our minds and are accessible through our affective awareness. Knowing such reasons would be, in Daniel Jacobson’s phrase, a form of ‘seeing by feeling’ and is naturally associated with an Aristotelian ethical framework (Jacobson, 2005). Yet, the use of ‘sense’ could also be incorporated by anti-realism according to which, since our awareness of evaluative objects is constitutively organized through our sentiments, the relevant sensitivity does not reach the external world; there is no place there for evaluative objects and our moral sensibilities, and it does not figure other than as an evaluatively neutral background onto which we project moral colours, as Hume explains. What, then, do the labels ‘realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ add here since either attitude can claim that our sensibilities are fundamental to underpinning awareness of morally salient features? In part, the difference is one about the order of priority between our sentiments and the properties to which they are sensitive. One characterization of this difference claims that, for the anti-realist, moral features ‘in’ the world are the product of our sentiments whereas for the realist our sentiments are the product of the moral features. In Blackburn’s words, the realist holds ‘that the moral features of things are the parents of our sentiments, whereas the Humean holds that they are the children’ (Blackburn, 1981, p.165). As McDowell points out, there needn’t be a disjunctive choice between regarding our sentiments as either like children or like parents – perhaps the kinship relation is more like that between siblings (McDowell, 1998a, p.159). Accordingly neither our sensibilities nor moral features in the world have ‘priority’, and thus the appearances as of objective moral features and reasons need not be characterized as the shadows or reflections of some inner subjective realm (McDowell, 1998a, p.166). The alternative does not simply swing in the other direction and affirm the priority of objective moral reasons over our sensibilities and the wider framework of moral thought. Rather, understanding the origin and meaning of reasons is a matter of recognizing the cooperation between ‘subjective’ and

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‘objective’ in line with what was suggested in the previous section, and would represent a distinctive view of what it is to understand the relation between our moral sensitivities and the world. A ‘no-priority’ view is articulated by David Wiggins in an attempt to defend a form of subjectivism according to which evaluative properties are at once ‘incurably anthropocentric’ and exert rational constraint on our thought (Wiggins, 1998, p.197). Our subjectivity is inextricable from the world, at least insofar as we are interested in the evaluative world. As discussed in the previous section, the recognition of this inseparability need not imply that the world is somehow subsumed by our subjectivity, or that there is no sense in which there is a distinction between us and the world. The point is about how it is best to characterize that distinction and from what point of view it is drawn. As Wiggins puts it, [T]hought not only explores the world but colonizes it … [and] … holds itself answerable in action and reflection to the objects and properties [it] discovers, subsumes objects under standards (in some sense) of its own making, yet refrains from hubristically supposing that just because properties correspond to senses and practices that owe their existence to us, the properties thought finds in the world are its own creation. (Wiggins, 1998, p.383) The views expressed by Wiggins and McDowell, although not the same, share the broad idea that our sensibilities are inextricably involved with our ability to recognize and respond to reasons in the world. What I want to emphasize is that, understood in light of Gleeson’s critique of particularism and the privileging of the nature and role of our sensibilities, our reactions, this does not thereby signal a turn away from considerations about the nature of reasons ‘as such’, or away from the world. Discussion of the place of moral reactions for the debate over particularism does not simply assign priority to our ‘inner’ emotions and feelings. Moral reactions are not simply data for the kind of anthropological approach to morality that Hume pursued in the Treatise of Human Nature, and nor are they best considered from a perspective consumed by questions of codifiability. Particularists sometimes explicitly utilize a sentimentalist articulation of our moral experience of the world. For example, David McNaughton suggests that ‘a way of seeing a situation may itself be a way of caring or feeling’ (McNaughton, 1988, p.113). The point here is not so much about how affectivity is a necessary (if not sufficient) structural


condition for our being susceptible to morally salient aspects of the world. The point, from a particularist perspective, is that our sentiments and sensibilities ground the perceptual capacities which operate occasion by occasion. The relevant way of seeing is an affective mode of awareness that is answerable to the demands presented case by case. Putting it like this, however, involves vagueness about the dialectical status of such seeing or sensing. Gleeson, for example, is suspicious of appealing to a ‘moral sense’ in this context since what is at issue is the fact that we discern reasons without needing rules or principles. Citing a moral sense as responsible for our unprincipled awareness of moral features and reasons is simply a shorthand way of referring to the fact (if it is one) that we do have this sort of awareness, and does not constitute any sort of explanation of the relevant kind of awareness (Gleeson, 2007, p.371, n7). Gleeson’s proposal is that the focus should be placed on our reactions and I have tried to show how that suggestion can engage with an important strand in particularism that has received less attention from philosophers. Gleeson suggests that, if not described in detail, the idea of a moral sense is not helpful. Nevertheless, particularism has very often been allied to a perceptual account of moral knowledge and it is this that I will now turn to.

3 Perception and the Myth of the Moral Given

3.1 Moral perception Particularism often incorporates a perceptual model of moral knowledge. McKeever and Ridge suggest that this is partly because moral knowledge is often seemingly unlike rule-governed activities such as following a recipe, and that a natural way of describing our moral experience and the justification of moral judgements is in perceptual terms (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.76). We see that Robert is cruel, or that a certain action is kind, just as we see that the tree is there. The thought is that there need be no principles which serve to rationalize our moral perceptions or constitute the basis of inferences to moral knowledge. Rather, moral knowledge is enjoyed through exercising an awareness which does not need to be articulated by invoking principles.1 In a stronger version, such knowledge cannot be articulated in a principled way. The strong version raises an immediate concern: if this sort of bald perceptualism were true, then in what sense can the relevant sort of knowledge be articulated? The worry is that it might be very difficult to make sense of how such knowledge is shared – how it is passed on to children, for example. The essential communicability of moral knowledge seems immediately to tell against any account of moral epistemology that is exhaustively perceptual. This is the kind of view that suggests that moral knowledge can be accounted for entirely in terms of ‘just seeing’ – a ‘pure particularism’, as Richard Norman puts it (Norman, 1997, p.122). It is important that the scope of a perceptual account is clarified since, as McKeever and Ridge point out, emphasis on moral perception does not by itself indicate adherence to particularism. It is at least consistent with generalism that moral perception plays a very important role. So, 56

Perception and the Myth of the Moral Given 57

what distinguishes a particularist’s appeal to moral perception from a non-particularist’s use of it? It would be a mistake to take the emphasis on moral perception as if it was a free-floating and independent commitment, which can be interpreted as contributing to, for example, a particularist position only if combined with holism in the theory of reasons. ‘Moral perception’ is not simply an insulated commitment which, if we could consider it somehow on its own, would have no intrinsic relevance for any philosophical position whatever. In saying this, I want to emphasize how there are different ways to highlight the place of moral perception overall, just as there are different ways of expressing what moral perception itself is and, indeed, what non-moral or ‘ordinary’ perception is. Discussions of moral perception often come with plenty of warnings that what is meant is not really perception. Some philosophers are accustomed to think that ordinary perception is sense-perception. Presumably, in the absence of hallucinations and errors we ordinarily see or perceive when we see that here is a table, or that Bronwen is standing over there, or that the washing machine is empty. A familiar enterprise is that of comparing kinds of perception in order to show that moral perception is, in the very best case, simply a façon de parler and the metaphor of perception or of moral vision reduces to a claim about the non-inferential character of at least large amounts of moral knowledge. McKeever and Ridge suggest that no one – not even the most ardent defender of the perpetual model of moral knowledge – ought to think that there is a ‘literal moral sense akin to the sense of sight’ (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.77). A way to defend the idea of moral perception is to respond to the allegedly unfavourable comparison with uncontroversial examples of perception, and to point out that the differences between them are not as relevant or as significant and as has been supposed. As Sarah McGrath has suggested, the idea that we can perceive that it is time to water the plants does not seem implausible, and perhaps the idea of moral perception is a variety of the kind of ability exercised in coming to perceive facts or states of affairs like that. Someone wanting to pursue this idea might want to say that in many cases of ‘perception’ or ‘experience’ there is an ability which requires ‘some degree of sophistication, training, or skill’ (McGrath, 2004, p.221). This emphasizes the broad commonalities between kinds of perception, and implies that denying moral perception relies on an unargued assumption, or rests on an impoverished conception of what perception could be.2 Others, such as David McNaughton, have argued that too austere an account of what can be admissible as falling under the umbrella of

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perception implies that many ‘ordinary things’ such as the cliff’s being dangerous, are rendered unobservable (McNaughton, 1988, p.57). The upshot is that characterizing this experience of the cliff as a perception is a façon de parler. So too is describing seeing a face as a perception, and perceiving a person, a table or that Tobias is shy. I take it that there is a genuine issue here about what philosophers have tended to regard as the gold standard of perception, and it is right to acknowledge the fact that what ‘ordinary perception’ amounts to remains deeply ambiguous.3 However, this will not impress those who worry that noting commonalities between kinds of perception on a broad level fails to preserve adequate constraints on what could possibly be perceived. It may be suggested that even though the objects of perception and our perceptual capacities are different from the austere account that McNaughton has in mind but, nevertheless, there is still no room for taking moral perception seriously. Becoming less austere ought not to mean becoming extravagant. Simon Blackburn has raised a version of this type of concern. There is a problem with the idea that the moral features of things are available to us via the exercise of perceptual capacities. Blackburn writes that ‘theoretically low-grade’ talk of perception, which incorporates the sense in which we can perceive what we ought to do as well as perceive that 17 is a prime number, is perfectly anodyne (Blackburn, 1997, p.170). However as it becomes more serious, ontologically speaking, such talk is theoretically misguided and, potentially, morally suspect.4 A familiar worry for the perceptual model, when viewed from a (socalled) Humean perspective, is that no sense can be made of what could count as the relevant object where that object is to be understood as a properly external constraint on thought. Notwithstanding the phenomenology, the objects of moral perception turn out to be ‘new creations’ put into the world by the same sort of psychological activities which are responsible for our ‘experiences’ of causation. It is not at all obvious, however, that the perceptual model is in any case extravagant unless one is tempted to let philosophical theory determine in advance what is or is not to be considered a case of perception.5 In McGrath’s discussion, she describes a tendency (citing Anscombe’s parallel worry about Hume’s account of causation) of philosophers to go looking for something despite already having decided in advance that the thing being sought is nowhere to be found (McGrath, 2004, p.221).6 As suggested, other variations of the argument for moral perception emphasize the non-inferential character of how we come to have


moral knowledge. Rather than being based on some prior ‘theory of experience’, phenomenological considerations are instead advanced in support of the perceptual view.7 I will come back to discuss moral phenomenology in more detail in Chapter 5. In the present context, invoking phenomenological considerations is one way to bring out the contrast between inferential and non-inferential reasoning. This contrast is important for the debate over particularism, and especially for the dialectical status of the perceptual model. Commonalities between moral perception and other kinds of perception emphasize the structure of perceptual experience which is common across different realms. For instance, seeing a chair as a chair implies a host of background factors such as being brought up in such a way so that one is able, noninferentially, to know that here is a chair and not just fuel for the camp fire or simply a curious arrangement of pieces of tree, cloth and nails. Sometimes in the foreground, as it were, there are other factors which are relevant to the experience and its connection to action and a variety of normative constraints. Consider Timothy Chappell’s example: As any visitor to stately homes knows, some things that are undeniably chairs cannot be so used. Such experiences are entertaining, and enlightening, because they remind us what it would be like to be from a non-chair-using society. It would mean that we were put in a position where we could not just see things as chairs, and had to decide what counted as a chair by the very different method of inference. (Chappell, 2008, p.425)8 Here, the ability to see chairs does not imply the existence of some mysterious ‘sense’, undetectable by science, which enables us to see chairs. Chappell’s point in this context is that our ability to recognize particular kinds of patterns is a skill which is exercised in our seeing faces, chairs and in our ability to read words on a page. The strategy is to deflate the suspicion that our ability in these cases is quite unlike our ability to see morally relevant objects or state of affairs. In short, our pattern-recognizing capacity can incorporate a range of subjectmatters and it is a prejudice that blocks our accepting the model in the case of ethics. If moral perception is a façon de parler then, potentially, so is chair perception. If this is the result, then the issue also becomes a deeper one about the aspirations of philosophy in this area, rather than about what kinds of things we can be said to see. Adopting the

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strategy of seeking to draw favourable comparisons between perceiving apparently unproblematic objects and moral perception is helpful. Nevertheless, it cannot simply be a matter of concluding that moral perception is in perfectly good order since it has relevant similarities with other kinds of perception. McKeever and Ridge explain that the central tenet of the perceptual model is that our basic moral knowledge is a species of non-inferential knowledge. Particularists do not need to insist that moral perception is literally a form of sense perception; the key point is that our moral knowledge is non-inferential. This, in turn, raises the question as to what advantage it would be for particularists to emphasize the fact, if it is a fact, that our basic moral knowledge is non-inferential. In particular, what is the structure of this kind of immediate knowledge?

3.2 Perception contra particularism Although moral perception is typically part of a particularist’s range of arguments against their opponents, there are a number of questions about the extent to which, if at all, moral perception is a help to the particularist’s cause. One of them is about whether the kind of perception that particularists might emphasize is the product or output of principled understanding. So, rather than an epistemology based on moral perception standing in opposition to an epistemology using moral principles, it could be that what philosophers refer to as perception in this context presupposes the kind of general structures described and defended by principlists. If so, then the rhetoric of seeing, perceiving and immediacy in this context succeeds only in referring to a thin phenomenological veneer; while it seems as though there is some direct and immediate contact with moral reasons, this masks a deeper truth that, say, non-inferential knowing by moral perception is only made possible by conditions that are difficult to square with core particularist commitments. The concern is that if particularist moral epistemology turns on perception, then defenders will have to show how their preferred framework does not presuppose a tacit principlist epistemology. In other words despite whatever attraction there may be, from a particularist’s perspective, to cast moral knowledge as perceptual and as non-inferential, the very idea of moral perception itself might be unintelligible other than in terms of its being a way of knowing that ultimately needs a non-particularist explanation. Lawrence Blum has provided a detailed description and analysis of the status and role of moral perception as an alternative way of


moral knowing to that provided by principles-based theories (Blum, 1991). Although he claims that moral perception in his sense contrasts with judgement and with rules- or principles-based accounts, Blum also writes that ‘moral perception is formed and informed by general principles’ (Blum, 1991, p.702). Blum wants to articulate and defend a perceptual account of moral knowledge by emphasizing the distinctive particularity of moral perception, and the correlative failures of principles-based theories ‘to recognize the importance of the operation of moral perception’. Nevertheless, ‘the boundaries are not sharp between those capacities involved in moral perception and judgment and those more commonly associated with the moral agent portrayed in principle-based theories’ (Blum, 1991, p.702). In this context Blum’s focus is on those capacities exercised by moral agents rather than on the questions directly about the metaphysics of reasons, or directly about the kind of constraint needed to ensure that moral thought and discourse is rational (that is, non-whimsical). The sort of consistency and potentially substantive co-operation between moral perception and moral principles that Blum suggests is connected to the discussion of ‘moral vision’ provided by McKeever and Ridge. They argue that, once unpacked of its metaphorical content, the notion of moral perception provides only indirect support for relatively weak forms of moral particularism and, in particular, that once unpacked ‘it turns out to make morality seem much more like a rule-governed activity than one might have thought’ (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.92). As noted at the beginning of this chapter, McKeever and Ridge explain that since moral judgement often does not seem to involve the application of principles, and is instead naturally described in perceptual terms, there is at least prima facie support for the view that a good deal of moral reasoning is unlike rule-governed practices and activities. Nevertheless the capacity for moral perception, once analysed, may itself be underpinned by knowledge of and expertise with moral principles and rules. Discussions of moral perception often incorporate a developmental aspect such that the goal of moral education or forms of initiation into moral practice and thought is the onset of the relevant perceptual capacity. One account of this aspect would hold that exposure to an initial stock of moral principles is a condition of entering the domain of moral thought and discourse, so to speak. As expertise develops, the rules and principles provided to the learner might become more numerous and more complicated with perhaps many qualifications and ceteris paribus clauses invoked, all of which need to be mastered. We could

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imagine that the point of this kind of training, the learning of rules and principles with an ever increasing level of complexity, is ultimately to equip a person with the ability to transcend rules and principles and to operate, epistemically speaking, solely by employing a form of perception. Given this, it is perhaps natural to say that the capacity for moral perception emerges from, but is not rationally supported by, the existence and use of principles. In arriving at the level of understanding and knowledge characteristic of the phronimoi, those who have achieved practical wisdom and who ‘see aright’ as Aristotle says (Aristotle, 1980, p.153), a person must have passed through previous and more principled ways of thinking even if, qua expert, they do not need to make any use of moral principles at all. This in turn suggests that understanding the relevant kind of expertise, and so making sense of the notion of moral perception, cannot be achieved without recognizing the irreducibly important role of moral principles (even if such principles are phenomenologically off-stage at the expert level). This is an important point to maintain, since simply opposing an epistemology of moral perception to an epistemology of moral principles thus cannot be right. The existence and use of moral principles is presupposed by the capacity for moral perception. Insisting on this status for moral principles need not by itself constitute a threat to moral particularism as long as particularism is not cast as a nihilism about principles or rules. Nevertheless, there are those who argue that although the existence and learning of rules and principles constitute an important aspect of learning to become an expert, expertise itself is marked by the abandonment of such rules. In their discussion of moral vision McKeever and Ridge turn to the case of chess, a topic that has received attention in wider discussions of expertise and the status and role of principles, rules and perceptual knowledge. McKeever and Ridge suggest that [ J]ust as in the moral case, experienced chess players sometimes find rule-based approaches do not fit their own phenomenology very well. They find their assessment of a given position to consist not in the application of various principles or rules of thumb … but in an appreciation of the nuances of each particular position. (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.85) McKeever and Ridge explain that chess experts describe the phenomenology in such a way that seems to lend support to the particularist’s case. A principles-based approach does not seem faithful to the ways


in which experts describe how their experiences and success in chess is often the outcome of exercising a form of awareness of the ‘shape’ of a particular game, of what a particular situation requires them to do or think. The visual or perceptual phenomenology common between expertise in chess and ethics is, as McKeever and Ridge point out, used by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus to propose an account of expertise which looks to be a form of particularism in all but name. McKeever and Ridge quote from the Dreyfus brothers: On analogy with chess … it would seem that the budding ethical expert would learn at least some of the ethics of his community by following strict rules, would then go on to apply contextualized maxims, and, in the highest stage, would leave rules and principles behind and develop more and more refined spontaneous ethical responses. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, pp.236–7) Dreyfus and Dreyfus propose, then, that although rules and principles are crucial to the initial stages of developing ethical expertise, a correct characterization of what it is like to be an expert need not mention those rules or principles. Furthermore, Hubert Dreyfus has more recently suggested that not only does reliance on rules and principles fade as one progresses nearer to the level of expertise, but also that reasons drop away too. He writes, [A]lthough many forms of expertise pass through a stage in which one needs reasons to guide action, after much involved experience, the learner develops a way of coping in which reasons play no role. After responding to an estimated million specific chess positions in the process of becoming a chess master, the master, confronted with a new position, spontaneously does something similar to what has previously worked and, lo and behold, it usually works. In general, instead of relying on rules and standards to decide on or to justify her actions, the expert immediately responds to the current concrete situation. (Dreyfus, 2005, p.53) Reasons have not simply disappeared as such, although they have disappeared from view, as it were, in expert performance. Dreyfus recognizes that reasons might be appealed to in cases of ‘retroactive rationalization’ where agents can ‘retrieve from memory the general principles’ that they

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used in previous less-then-expert performance (Dreyfus, 2005, p.54).9 Part of Dreyfus’s objective is to argue against rival accounts according to which expertise is not only rationally grounded through the invocation of reasons, rules and principles retrospectively, but is so grounded when an agent is considering prospective action and also, presumably, while in the grip of actual performance.10 McKeever and Ridge are right that some of the things Dreyfus says about the place of rules and principles and their relation to perception naturally implicate a form of particularism. But the relation is complicated since a central move in Dancy’s account of moral knowledge, and in particular what motivates his focus on judgement as opposed to perception, as we will see, turns directly on our capacity to ‘think in terms of reasons’ which is a capacity downgraded by Dreyfus’s account of expertise (Dancy, 2004, p.146).11 McKeever and Ridge argue that the parallels between chess and morality must be understood in light of a crucial contrast between different interpretations of principles or rules. The distinction most relevant for the present context is that between principles as standards and principles as guides, where the former are ‘generalizations which … provide the truth-conditions for the application of a moral concept’ and the latter ‘provide useful direction to a conscientious moral agent’ (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.7, p.8). The idea is that, understood as standards, principles are immune to the particularist critique based on the perceptual model of moral knowledge. The instructive parallels between the role of perception in chess and morality provide support for a modest form of particularism about principles as guides but cannot support a form of particularism which targets principles understood as standards. The prima facie correctness of describing some of our moral knowledge in terms of perception does nothing to answer the question as to whether there can be a principled articulation of an ultimate moral standard. (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.89, p.91). So, overall, there is no quick route from a perceptual model of moral knowledge to particularism. McKeever and Ridge pose a problem for the particularist defender of moral perception. It is a problem which is related to Blackburn’s worry sketched above, although it is less immediately focused on metaphysical issues about the plausibility of there being moral properties which we can perceive. Although the perceptual looks on the face of it to constitute a compelling non-principlist epistemology, the contrast between perception and paradigmatically rule-governed judgement ‘evaporates’ when we consider the nature of our immediate insight into hypothetical cases or into those actual cases with which we do not enjoy ‘direct acquaintance’ (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.82). In the next section,


I look in more detail at the kind of ‘immediacy’ that might be involved in a particularist’s account of moral knowledge. In particular, I try and describe a problematic scenario in which a particularist’s account of moral knowledge, based as it might be on a perceptual model, would run afoul of a moral equivalent of what Sellars described as the Myth of the Given. This, in turn, provides the rationale for developing a more positive account by drawing out relevant features of the space of moral reasons. As outlined, one prominent strand in particularist writing involves the appeal to moral perception in an account of moral knowledge. Denying a necessary role for principles in moral reasoning can naturally lead to an emphasis upon the perception or the discernment of particulars. The metaphor of moral vision has been variously used to try and capture the sense in which moral knowledge and agency rest upon episodes of successful seeings: seeings that here is a reason to ϕ. As a counterpart to a metaphysical doctrine of valence flexibility, holism in the theory of reasons, the appeal to moral perception serves a way of getting hold of moral knowledge. If the nature of reasons is such that instantiations of valence are metaphysically dependent on context, then this seems to imply that knowledge of actual valence must be the product of some direct sensitivity; successful operations of which, if all goes well, will co-vary with differential instantiations of valence. At one place, Dancy considers his version of particularism to be ‘a form of empiricism’ (Dancy, 1993, p.68) which could encourage the thought that knowledge of moral reasons is a matter of having the right sort of experience of contingent facts. Considered in the spirit (if not the letter) of Hume, moral knowledge subsequently looks to be the product of a form of reasoning according to which inferences from knowledge of previous matters of fact cannot rationally support our knowledge of any other particular matter of fact considered as such. Knowledge of the way that previous considerations have functioned as reasons cannot itself warrant the belief that such considerations may continue to function as reasons in the same way, or that they will function again as reasons at all. The modal character of a metaphysics of valence flexibility entails that while a consideration functioned here as a reason to ϕ, it might not have done. In Hume’s words: ‘whatever is may not be’ (Hume, 1975, p.164).12 Thus knowledge that here is a reason to ϕ can be achieved only by putting oneself in contact with it. Modelling moral knowledge on some form of perceptual capacity is, then, perhaps especially suited to particularism understood as emphasizing case-by-case experience.

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From a particularist perspective, possessing knowledge of what to do or what to believe demands a ‘sensitive and detailed examination of each individual case’ (McNaughton, 1988, p.190). The rejection of principles naturally invites an account of the route to moral knowledge that stresses attention to the details of an unpredictable moral landscape. Typically, the activity of attending to detail engages cognitive capacities in ways that the so-called passive reception of sense-data does not. Moral perception, then, is more like conception than reception. Someone can see that the little girl is shy by engaging contingently accumulated concepts that play an essential role in enabling her to see the girl as shy. Deliverances of moral perception must have content adequate to sanctioning rational relations between that content and belief or action. Moral perception must be reason giving. If moral perception is going to provide the basis upon which belief and action and perhaps knowledge rest upon in some appropriately normative sense, then it would have to be a relevantly rational mode of awareness. As discussed in Chapter 3, getting things right involves exercising an inculcated capacity to be reliably sensitive. A particularist’s appeal to the role of appropriate sensitivities and of the abilities of agents to discern the moral world accurately represents a way to bypass the appeal to principles. Overall, McDowell’s expression of moral particularism involves an emphasis on the role of perception as a corrective to the misguided picture of reasoning implied by a prejudiced picture of rationality. This corrective re-emphasizes the role of subjectivity in moral knowledge, but employs the idiom of moral vision not just because it seems phenomenologically most faithful. For McDowell, exercising a capacity to be perceptually sensitive to normative states of affairs in a manner which is not underpinned by codifiable principles is a morally relevant application of an alternative conception of what rational thought and its relation to the world consist in.

3.3 Looking and ‘looking away’ In a related way, Dancy seeks to undermine ‘coercive’ assumptions about what it is to be successful in reaching judgements about a given case by utilizing the idea of ‘looking’. Rejecting the thought that general principles rationally constrain our moral thought, and provide the conditions under which moral discourse is possible, implies that knowing about moral reasons arises through scrutinizing the contingencies of the moral world. Dancy explains that agents have an epistemic duty to look ‘really closely’ at each case (Dancy, 1993, p.63).


According to Dancy: Particularism claims that generalism is the cause of many bad moral decisions, made in the ill-judged and unnecessary attempt to fit what we are to say here to what we have said on another occasion. We all know the sort of person who refuses to make the decision here that the facts are obviously calling for, because he cannot see how to make that decision consistent with one he made on a quite different occasion. We also know the person (often the same person) who insists on a patently unjust decision here because of having made a similar decision in a different case. It is this sort of looking away that the particularists see as the danger in generalism. Reasons function in new ways on new occasions, and if we don’t recognize this fact and adapt our practice to it, we will make bad decisions. Generalism encourages a tendency not to look hard enough at the details of the case before one. (Dancy, 1993, p.64) ‘Looking away’ from an actual moral case with an eye to establishing a warranted belief or judgement with regard to the actual case can be evidence of an adherence to an atomistic theory of reasons. Looking away might be tempting when agents face difficult moral circumstances; where agents look to see how other cases have been considered in order to determine moral judgement concerning the case at hand. The complaint here is that this is a bad way of reaching moral judgement in practice and that it rests upon a misguided conception of the nature of moral reasons and of moral reasoning. Positively, and along with others who stress the importance of moral vision, Dancy explains that ‘looking closely’ at a moral case is an important component in an account of knowledge from a particularist’s standpoint. Negatively, agents must seek to avoid ‘looking away’ from the details of the case. These injunctions give rise to significant epistemological implications when considered against the backdrop of a holistic metaphysics of reasons. The account can look like a form of atomistic moral empiricism which renders deeply problematic, if not incoherent, the manner in which agents can be justified or be able to justify a claim that here is a reason to ϕ.13 A form of atomistic moral empiricism would involve the claims that moral knowledge is possible only through experiential contact with actual instantiations of valence, and that what constitute the grounds for such knowledge are discrete deliverances. Normatively speaking, agents are entitled to

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draw on nothing but the content of the deliverance. Failing to respect this condition would imply that possessing a justified belief about an actual reason here and now to ϕ is something that could be achieved by consulting a description of how reasons have functioned elsewhere. In other words, it would be to look away. Atomistic moral empiricism, according to how it has been sketched here, claims that justification and knowledge do not require external-to-context constraints on our activities of experiencing. For instance, that the existence and suitable manipulations of principles fix the valence of moral reasons independently of contextual instantiation and serve to rationally constrain any candidate beliefs or actions in a given circumstance. Onora O’Neill remarks that a radical particularist epistemology which denies a role to constraints on thought and action which are in any way independent of the present context, implies that moral knowledge could rest on nothing more than ‘mere, sheer perception’ (O’Neill, 1996, p.86). O’Neill fears that if a principles-based approach to moral thinking is rejected the possibility that moral disagreement can be adequately resolved is jeopardized. In such a condition agents would remain behind the veil of appearance, so to speak, merely describing the way things look. What O’Neill means by ‘mere, sheer perception’ is presumably some episode of immediate seeing that delivers everything by way of relevant data; all rational content is deliverable by looking at this case here and now. This picture of the perceptual model, although I think ultimately a caricature, involves a recurring worry about the alleged epistemological implausibility of particularism: the idea that agents can know about moral reasons by just looking at them when they are there. Suppose that we are inclined towards some form of perceptual account of moral knowledge supported by the belief that there are no principles which govern the rationality of moral discourse, and no reasons whose nature is atomistic in the sense that they retain normative force whether instantiated contextually or no. A scepticism with regard to principles and to an atomistic metaphysics may fail, however, to silence the thought that a perceptual account of moral knowledge is insufficient for the task of accounting for the manner in which agents are furnished with reasons, and for the task of providing the basis upon which agents can engage in deliberation and moral argument. The thought in question here is that although it is possible to concede the metaphysical claim to particularism, a moral epistemology is needed to make sense of how factors other than those ‘presently’ available make an inalienable contribution in the achievement of moral knowledge. The issue here is


that a particularist moral empiricism seems to imply that S can be justified in having the moral belief that p if and only if S is in the presence of p. It is this epistemological presentism that is one central component of what Sellars described as the Myth of the Given.

3.4 The Myth of the Moral Given Sellars claims that the Myth of the Given closely resembles the naturalistic fallacy in ethics (Sellars, 1997, p.19). It is mistaken to analyse epistemological or normative facts in terms of descriptive facts, just as it is mistaken to analyse moral facts in terms of natural facts. For Sellars it was the foundationalist’s mistake to demand that experiences, in being the mysterious ‘unmoved movers of empirical knowledge’ (Sellars, 1997, p.77), play two distinct and simultaneous yet incompatible roles: to impact on the mind in a fashion that presupposes no prior knowledge or possession of concepts, but in such a way that is adequate to provide for rational relations such as reasons to believe, say. In short, to provide actual or possible justifications. According to one interpretation, the particularist’s critique of ‘looking away’ complains that agents have a tendency, encouraged by a wrong-headed metaphysics of reasons, to fit the present case into some system of prior knowledge. It seems to me that criticizing a model of reasoning that would encourage agents to ‘look away’ is both defensible and desirable, but I do not think that things are symmetrical here. Even though we should resist looking away, we should not thereby infer that we must all go about looking toward, so to speak. In other words, resisting atomism about reasons which could otherwise encourage agents to pass over what is actually in front of them is not best achieved by imploring agents to fixate upon what is actually in front of them. According to Sellars, an unfortunate legacy of foundationalist empiricism is the thought that experiential content can be delivered to a subject independently of that subject exercising conceptual capacities, and that such deliverances can serve as the independent basis of all knowledge states or claims. This has occasioned a misguided conception of the relation between empirical content and knowledge, and has resulted in rendering mysterious how the deliverances of experience could stand in a justificatory relation to beliefs, either individually, or in co-operation as part of a wider ‘world view’. In a famous passage Sellars writes that The essential point is that in characterising an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that

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episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says. (Sellars, 1997, p.76) The sort of characterization that Sellars rejects here involves a conception of experience as an impression devoid of conceptual structure and logically prior to and independent of beliefs. Sellars writes that the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by [supposedly] self-authenticating episodes. These ‘takings’ are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the ‘knowings in presence’ which are presupposed by all other knowledge … Such is the framework in which traditional empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation of empirical knowledge. (Sellars, 1997, p.77) Sellars’s analysis of the relation between a misconceived notion of experience and justification is relevant to the present context in the following way. An epistemology of ‘knowings in presence’ seems to be just that sort of picture to which particularism is committed. According to this picture, a morally relevant episode of knowing in presence means that what it is to be justified, and what it is to possess knowledge, can be analysed in terms of merely enjoying the presence of an object; an object whose nature is such that it must be rationally potent to the extent that it must provide reasons and whose nature is such that an agent need have at their disposal no prior concepts with which to recognize that object as a reason. The implication of a particularist moral epistemology is that agents can be impressed by the rational content of reasons independently of knowing what it would mean to be so impressed on other occasions. Further, agents must consciously resist drawing inferences from those other occasions in order to rationally support beliefs about this here present reason. Agents need have at their disposal no prior concepts or knowledge with which to recognize a moral reason as a moral reason while being rationally impressed by its content. This picture is untenable because of the dialectical weight attributed to the notion of presence but it can be encouraged by particularists who lay epistemological emphasis on the ‘authority of the present case’ (Dancy, 1993, p.65). The untenable picture is what we could call the Myth of the Moral Given. It is a myth to suppose that looking really closely at a moral state of affairs can exhaust what it is to know that here is a reason. Sellars is


hostile to the epistemological presentism of traditional empiricism and moral particularism can seem like a presentism of an ethical variety. The idea that one can be impressed by the normative authority of the present case by looking at it cannot be sustained while denying that agents need prior abilities that equip them with the resources to see a reason as such. The normative authority of the present case cannot be gleaned from the moral equivalent of a ‘bare presence’ (McDowell, 1996, p.19). The phrase the ‘authority of the present case’ sounds like the sort of thing that Sellars might have called ‘a mongrel resulting from a cross-breeding of two ideas’ (Sellars, 1997, p.21): that an agent can be in a state of knowledge and subject to rational authority by being in the presence of an object, while at the same time have at their disposal no prior conceptual resources or capacities with which to be able to tell that something is a reason for something else. I suggest that we give up the idea that it is the sheer presence of reasons that provides for their rational authority. There is an alternative way to characterize the conditions that provide for the possibility of moral knowledge. Dancy suggests one such alternative. His idea is that a particularist moral epistemology should not pivot around experience but around thought. The moral epistemology outlined in Ethics Without Principles gives central importance to what it means for us to ‘think in terms of reasons’ (Dancy, 2004, p.146). Thinking in terms of reasons is to think in terms of relations of normative significance. Thinking in terms of reasons plays a transcendental role in our moral thought and reasoning; it is a framework within which a particular reason has, in part, normative purchase in the way that it does and without which we could not enjoy sensitivity to or knowledge of any particular reasons. We must be able to think in terms of reasons in order to be rationally responsive to any particular reason. In this sense, then, the capacity to think in terms of reasons is a condition of knowing what is a reason for what or that here is a reason to ϕ, and is something enjoyed by an agent with conceptual capacities and who is able to respond rationally to a reason when she comes across one. The idea that I want to stress here is this. The transcendental role that thinking in terms of reasons plays is one in which subjectivity is inalienably implicated. We think in terms of reasons. The conceptual capacities brought to bear in moral thinking are capacities possessed by agents embedded in the world. The capability of agents to think in terms of reasons is something that is achieved through participation in structured conditions that are already normative and is something that agents learn to do. The Myth of the Moral Given obscures the thought that a backdrop of conceptual activity is presupposed by particular moments of

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reason discernment, and in so doing, it blocks the insight that appreciating moral reasons is parasitic on the ability to think in terms of reasons. Abandoning the Myth of the Moral Given makes room to deny that the foundations of moral knowledge are constituted by self-authenticating and isolated moral experiences. This is one reason why, in Ethics Without Principles, Dancy denies that moral knowledge is a matter of experiencing reasons and claims that knowing is a matter of judgement.

3.5 From experience to judgement Recall that metaphysical moral particularism is a doctrine about the holistic nature of reasons, whether reasons are theoretical or practical. This global account of the nature of reasons is influential in the present context because a particularist epistemology aspires to be likewise global in scope. Our capacity to appreciate reasons is not restricted to the ethical domain. We appreciate reasons to believe that the pillar box is red as well as moral reasons to act in such and such a way. A commitment to a global account of what our ability to appreciate reasons consists in should be inclusive with regard to the different sorts of reasons that are available. In consequence, Dancy claims that a sense-based account will be inadequate. He explains that though we can indeed discern reasons … our ability to do so is not sensory; it is not sensibility that issues in the recognition of reasons (though sensibility may be required along the way). It is rather our capacity to judge that is at issue. (Dancy, 2004, p.144) The discernment in question here is a skill; an achievement in a way that so-called ordinary perception is not.14 The skill in discerning reasons is an appreciation that there is something to be said for x in light of y and this is a matter of judging that things are thus and so (Dancy, 2004, p.144). Exercise of this skill presupposes that we are thinking in terms of reasons and knowledge of the sort that this favours that response is a fortiori not something we can enjoy just by ‘gazing at it in a receptive frame of mind’ (Dancy, 2004, p.142). Recognition that here is a reason, then, is not just a vertical matter of being passively impressed by an aspect of the world. A condition of being able to discern and have knowledge of moral reasons is not a matter of experiencing or being able to individuate ‘epistemological atoms’ (Dancy, 2004, p.149); this could return us to the Myth of the Moral Given.


Possessing the right sort of conceptual resource to judge that things are thus and so here in terms of reasons requires knowledge of the conditions which are appropriate for telling that there is a reason for such and such. Roughly speaking, we need a horizontal competence that will be sensitive to the epistemic relevance of counterfactuals, for example, if we are to exercise some vertical competence with regard to knowing, as a matter of fact, that here is a reason to ϕ. So, the picture of what it is to know a present moral reason is not a mongrel conception because there is no requirement for a present reason to be rationally self-standing and ‘sufficient unto itself’ (Dancy, 2004, p.150) or to be some unmoved mover of moral knowledge. Dancy draws an analogy between our judgements that things are similar and our judgement that affords knowledge of basic moral facts. Consider a case where there are four objects; a house and a block of flats designed by one architect and a house and block of flats designed by another. Suppose we want to know whether the houses are more similar to each other than the flats. What is the nature of our ability to assess and attain knowledge of such similarities? Dancy explains that In order to answer this question, we need a posteriori knowledge of the independent natures of the four buildings; but that knowledge is not itself enough. Nor would it be enough to have listed the points of similarity and dissimilarity on either side of the two comparisons. The difficulty is that some similarities are more telling than others. No list of points of similarity will suffice for a judgement about which of those points is the most telling in the present comparison. The matter is reserved for judgement, perfectly properly, and that judgement is one for which there is no method; but such judgements can yield knowledge. (Dancy, 2004, p.148) One point to the analogy between knowledge of basic reasons and knowledge of similarities is to show how such episodes of knowledge are not related to experience in a direct way, unlike cases where our knowledge that p is positively grounded in experience. In the example, assessment of relevant knowledge claims – of whether two buildings are more or less similar to another two buildings – is not based or grounded on sense experience in the way that knowledge of the ‘independent natures’ of the buildings is (Dancy 2004: 148). Judgement that a is similar to b is structurally different from the judgement that p where this judgement is solely based on or is grounded in ordinary experience.

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Sense experience may well be required in both cases. But while perhaps necessary and sufficient in the cases of knowledge of the buildings it is not sufficient for knowledge of their similarity. Now, this analysis is Humean to the extent that no amount of experimental reasoning could possibly be adequate to know some relation: the relation that x caused y, or that a is similar to b, for instance. In spite of this sometimes at least we know that a and b are similar and knowing that is a matter of judgement in a way that knowing the independent natures of the buildings is not, or at least does not have to be. So, what is it that makes one similarity judgement more or less correct than another? Presumably there is something that explains why one is better and presumably we need some account of what it is to know similarities if the analogy with knowledge of basic moral facts is to hold. According to Gareth Evans, relations of similarity claimed of objects when expressed in utterances of the form ‘x looks like y’, are akin to ascriptions of secondary qualities to objects in the following sense. Similarities and secondary qualities hold of objects in virtue of the effects they have on human beings (Evans, 1982, p.292). Evans explains that when a relation of similarity is claimed of two or more objects the relation is ‘a reaction which those things occasion’ in a perceiver (Evans, 1982, p.293). Similarities, then, would not appear in what Bernard Williams would call an ‘absolute conception’ (Williams, 1985, p.139) of the world because they are constitutively perspectival; only creatures who inhabit the relevant ‘similarity space’ (Evans, 1982, p.293) could think and speak about objects which are more or less similar. Likewise, secondary qualities figure in the thought and speech of only those creatures who do or can experience them. It is a conceptual truth that what it is to be a similarity, like what it is to be red, makes essential reference to the manner in which the relation or property is experienced by us. The concepts ‘similarity’ and, say, ‘red’, are phenomenal and experience-dependent and thus cannot be grasped by creatures devoid of the capacity to have things appear to them as red or have things appear to them as similar. It could be argued that the experience-dependent nature of similarities threatens the tenability of Dancy’s proposed analogy. Recall that one purpose of the analogy was to demonstrate that knowledge of basic moral facts is not dependent on experience. An objection could be that if similarity is a phenomenal concept, then there is a conceptual connection between what it is to be a similarity and what it is to experience the similarity. Thinking in terms of similarity, then, is in some sense analytically connected to experience. However, as it stands, this sort of objection is not sufficient to count decisively against Dancy’s analogy.


It may be true that similarity judgements, like moral judgements, are experience-dependent. Nevertheless, this does not license the claim that similarity judgements are like experience-based judgements proper. Dancy wants to resist the thought that moral judgements are solely based on purely empirical episodes of reception. So the claim that experience is an irreducible element in what it is to make judgements of similarity, is not to claim that experience is exhaustive in this respect. One pressing question here is whether in the case of knowing similarities our capacity to judge plays a constructive role. Suppose that in the case of our capacity to make judgements based on experience (for example, that the independent nature of one of the four buildings is thus and so) our judgements track the facts of the matter. In the case of knowing similarities there are no facts of the matter of this sort to track. In order to defend the thought that our capacity to judge is a relevantly different sort of capacity from the capacity to sense, it is natural to suppose that the objects of similarity judgements enjoy a relevantly different mode of existence. If it is the case that similarity judgements do not simply track independent facts, then the correctness conditions to which such judgements are subject will differ from those that pertain to judgements based on experience. According to Evans, the nature of similarity claims is such that they can be regarded as something other than judgements: It is essential to this way of looking at similarity, and a general feature of a conception of a quality as a secondary one, that the reaction which the object occasions in human beings can be regarded as something other than a judgement. (Evans, 1982, p.292) Judgements are possible only if they could be in error and so if utterances of the form ‘x looks like y’ are merely expressions of reactions it can seem difficult to explain how they could possibly be mistaken. Evans claims that, with regard to the analogy between similarity and secondary qualities, the most important way in which we are entitled to speak of error and thus to rehabilitate some use for the notion of judgement is ‘the control provided by the reactions of other people’ (Evans, 1982, p.294). The utterance that ‘a is similar to b’: constitutes a judgement about the world when it is issued subject to the control of human agreement – when the speaker is prepared to

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acknowledge he is wrong by withdrawing his remark in the face of an incapacity to get others to agree with him, to see things his way. (Evans, 1982, p.294) So, something will objectively look like something else if it strikes people as like that other thing … b is objectively more like a than is c if and only if b strikes people as more like a than c does. (Evans, 1982, p.292) Judgement, in contrast to mere reports of how things seem, is dependent on the rational constraints provided by like-minded others. Put like this, whatever else judging that things are similar amounts to it signals that an agent is subject to a mind-independent normative authority. Thus, a subject who is not responsive to whether her utterances diverge or otherwise from her fellows, who is not responsive to and in command of what this means, fails to inhabit the space of similarities. We could say that our capacity to make judgements about basic moral facts is genuinely exercised only when these judgements are subject to a normative authority external to the mind of the judge. Translated into the framework sketched earlier with regard to the Myth of the Moral Given, the objective purport of moral judgements is not manufactured on the basis of a more primitive level of awareness. It is a mistake to suppose that inner facts about how things seem can rationally support knowledge claims about the way things are. In terms of our ability to assess similarities, the judgement that ‘x looks similar to y’ is not inferred from awareness of more basic facts. Likewise in the moral case, a judgement that here is a reason to ϕ is not inferred from awareness of more basic facts. Dancy suggests that agents can ‘directly discern’ the overall rational import of a circumstance (Dancy, 2004, p.149). Yet describing knowledge of moral circumstances as ‘direct’ is not another form of presentism. Knowledge that here is a reason requires knowledge of ‘which conditions are conducive or antipathetic to sound moral judgment’ (Dancy, 2004, p.149). Direct discernment does not involve being struck by ‘situations unrolling before our eyes’ (Dancy, 2004, p.147); it is an achievement which requires an understanding of those conditions under which normative objects and their normative relations are discernible at all. Judgement concerning what is a reason for what is not a matter of submitting to the authority of the present case.


In Dancy’s analogy knowledge of basic moral facts is like our knowledge that things are similar. They are alike because experiential content, although important, cannot exhaust the account of what knowledge consists in. Although we have experience of, for example, the independent natures of the relata, the relevant relation between them is not just one more object capable of being sensed. Similarity judgements and judgements concerning basic moral facts are not just analogous in terms of the epistemological status and role of empirical content. Knowledge of the conditions under which sound moral knowledge is best effected is knowledge that cannot be gleaned entirely from the present case. According to Dancy’s model, although it is possible to directly discern reasons, subsequent knowledge is dependent on a network of rational relations that structure the conditions under which direct discernment is possible. One objection here could be that this concedes that particular judgements are not self-standing. If judgement is dependent on a structure that is independent of a particular case that structure could, potentially, be articulable in principles. Read in a way relevant to our present concerns, knowledge of the conditions conducive or antipathetic to sound moral judgement could be expressed in a principled way. So, knowing about the conditions under which moral cases are similar is also logically presupposed by judgement on particular occasions. Overall, this sort of objection expresses the thought that if two moral cases are similar then judgement of the one is conceptually connected to judgement of the other. It is surely right to say that whatever kind of discernment is operative according to a particularist epistemology, it does not involve simply being struck by situations which we find ourselves, every so often, confronting. The model of ethical awareness that particularism suggests is a distinctive way of conceiving the ‘patterns’ that we recognize and institute in our moral lives.15 Seeing or recognizing that things are similar, for instance, involves the existence of patterns. We might suppose that recognizing the importance of patterns is already a concession in favour of generalism since such patterns may be just the sort of thing that admit of a principled articulation. However, this would be a mistake. In Dancy’s appeal to judgements of similarity the purpose, partly, was to explain that how knowledge of certain features is not entirely sense based, although sensory awareness is an important element. But our awareness and understanding of similarities is more than just an analogue of our knowledge of moral features. In confronting the temptation to think that there is and must be some essence to language, Wittgenstein famously described the range of

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‘family resemblances’ which capture the relations that unite the various things that we call ‘games’. In tracing through examples of games, cardgames, ring-a-ring-a-roses, Olympic games and so on, ‘similarities crop up and disappear … we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’ (Wittgenstein, 1967, §66). Although the content of similarities changes, the status of similarities and how we identify and use them is basic to our lives. The identification of similarities is not a matter of imposing some pre-existing conceptual framework onto a examples, and employing that structure to generate reasons. It is rather, as Wittgenstein puts it, a matter looking and seeing: How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: ‘This and similar things are called ‘games’. (Wittgenstein, 1967, §69)16 This activity of looking and seeing, the practice of seeing similarities, is what grounds the normativity of patterns rather than vice versa. A generalism about reasons could suggest that the normativity governing correct or incorrect moves within a practice somehow exists independently of that practice. If things are seen as similar, then this is explained and justified by the fact that the similar objects, and the act of seeing them as similar, indicate moments of correct hook-up with a practice-transcendent realm. Alternatively, seeing similarities does not reflect pre-existing patterns or a pre-existing realm which confers normativity upon a practice. Generalism in this context might explain that there is a relation between a concept or reason and a transcendent pattern that governs better or worse extensions of that reason or concept. The existence and normative force of a pre-existing pattern explains and justifies what it is to possess and use concepts or to respond to reasons successfully. The contrasting conception denies this, while maintaining that patterns are fundamental to what it is to respond to reasons or to possess competence with concepts. This conception retains the normative potency of patterns, but claims that such patterns are not basic with respect to seeing how to go on using a concept or seeing how to respond to a reason. According to Michael Luntley, that an agent can successfully use a word or concept, or appropriately respond to a reason, is demonstrated by the fact that two things are seen as similar (see Luntley, 2002, p.281). Crucially, the normativity of the patterns that characterize


correct use and appropriate response is not explicable independently of the conditions and activities that constitute the practice of seeing similarities.17 It is significant that giving similarities this kind of primitive role enables a different way to conceive of our role in authoring similarities and thus our role in the metaphysics of reasons, so called. The extent of similarity relations is open-ended, and it takes persons to creatively discover novel networks of similarities and relations. That is a capacity alongside the capacity to assess similarities or to be responsive to when relevant relations ‘crop up and disappear’.18 This suggests, again, that the distinction between the epistemology of reasons and the metaphysics of reasons is not clear cut. Denial of properly external patterns is a metaphysical issue, but knowing how to go on using a word or concept, or knowing what is a reason for what (or that there is a reason at all), is at least partly an epistemological issue even though metaphysical considerations are still relevant. While it is the case that ‘we’ can be said to author patterns, and it is ‘we’ who come to see similarities, this is best understood not to imply that patterns come about through pure acts of projection onto a disinterested external world in some quasi-Humean way. This is too psychological an understanding of pattern authorship, but it is perhaps a natural conception to arrive at if a distinction between epistemology and ontology is drawn too sharply. According to Luntley: Treating seeing the similarities as primitive reconfigures our sense of the conceptual connections between our ideas of perception, conceptualisation, the role of rules and the place of judgement. It requires a reconceptualisation of the role of judgement in concept possession. Properly understood this bears directly on the debates about particularism in ethics. (Luntley, 2002, pp.274–5) Luntley describes a form of ‘limp empiricism’ that fails to acknowledge the essentially practical aspects of word use and concept possession (Luntley, 2002, p.277). According to this Humean descriptivism, patterns in moral reasoning emerge if they emerge at all by picking out putative similarities in our responses or when we, as a matter of fact, used a word. Fundamental to this Humean account is the idea that patterns can be peeled away from the instances of response. In contrast, the Wittgensteinian suggestion is that the emergence of patterns as a part of what it is to respond rationally.

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3.6 Subjectivity and judgement Metaphysical moral particularism, like the atomism about reasons which it seeks to debunk, makes claims about the modal nature of reasons. Broadly speaking, radical particularism about reasons defends the metaphysical thesis that nothing about the fact that a consideration functioned as a reason to ϕ implies that it must function in that way again. Epistemologically speaking nothing about our knowledge that a consideration functioned as a reason to ϕ implies that we know how it must function on a different occasion. Nevertheless, it is an incontrovertible fact about moral thinking and discourse that, in trying to find out what is morally relevant in particular circumstances, we draw on morally relevant knowledge that cannot arise from scrutinizing the present case at hand. We may think in terms of similarities and seek to achieve knowledge of a particular case by trying to clarify the ways in which it is similar or dissimilar to other cases. Dancy explains that in trying to find out what matters in a circumstance morally speaking, agents may indirectly appeal to the way things were or the way they might be on other occasions. [O]ur judgement can be informed, and indeed defended, by seeing the way in which a feature functions in situations that resemble the present one in various ways … Argument between two people who differ on the way to see the present case can make progress as each brings to bear other situations that are both appropriately different from and also appropriately similar to the one before them. (Dancy, 2009) There need be no principles that play a substantial role in this process; no principles that articulate the conditions under which moral cases are similar and which structure the dimensions of similarities to be taken as salient independently of judgement (see Dancy, 2004, p.131). Recognizing the role that similarity judgements can play in our moral thought is, I think, an important aspect in avoiding the Myth of the Moral Given. Revealing similarity relations between this case here and other cases actual or otherwise is crucial for moral discourse. In addition it is part of what it is to think in terms of reasons at all. What is the relation between our ‘indirect’ appeal to similarities and the ‘direct’ nature of our discernment of basic moral facts? We should resist a conception according to which the indirect appeal to similarity relations between moral cases is parasitic on the ability to directly discern moral saliences. Failure to do so could encourage the thought


that the ability to directly discern normative facts is basic, and that the ability to think in terms of similarities is a useful skill only under certain conditions; when people disagree, say. Dancy rejects the claim that, when engaged in dispute, particularists ‘are reduced to saying “I see it this way”’ (Dancy, 2009). A particularistic account of moral argumentation can emphasize the role of similarity judgements. Such an account must demonstrate, however, that such judgements are not rationally constrained by principles codifying the conditions under which cases are similar. Further, similarity judgements are not logically independent of moments of direct discernment. Similarity judgements are not episodes of indirect discernment. If they were, that would threaten the tenability of Dancy’s analogy between our knowledge of basic normative facts and our knowledge of similarities. Thinking in terms of reasons in a way that draws upon the nature of similarity judgements retains a distinctive particularist understanding of moral knowledge. The fundamental status of similarities should not be construed as a concession to a form of generalist constraint on moral thought and discourse. Holism in the theory of similarities suggests that the valence of such similarities, so to speak, resists context-free codification in principles. The constraints on what is similar and why are contextually grounded and available to agents who are actually or potentially in command of the rational relations that constitute candidate similarities. A form of conceptual connection between two cases revealed by a similarity can be granted, without this compromising the denial of an atomistic metaphysics. Nevertheless, the primitive status of the relations which can constitute the object of knowledge suggests that atomistic empiricism is inadequate. The Myth of the Moral Given threatens if we fail to give due weight to the status and role of basic relations that underpin the possibility of participating in moral thought and reasoning. Successful participation need not be calibrated by analysing the extent to which concrete judgements satisfy the normative constraints provided by external principles. Part of what it is to possess and effect a capacity to judge is provided for only by skills inherited from and contributed to practice. The incoherence of the Myth of the Moral Given, and the mistake of insisting that the rationality of moral thought need be underwritten according to a principles-based account, can be avoided by calling attention to what it is to possess the capacity of judgement. A judgement-centred account of moral knowledge seems likely to satisfy the demand that a framework of moral reasoning is free from an atomistic metaphysics, and free from an atomistic epistemology.

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The ability to engage in similarity judgements is interdependent with the ability to directly discern basic normative states of affairs. We need not categorize the former as an ability exercised only in conditions of ‘dispute’. The point is about the conditions for moral thinking. Thinking and judging in terms of similarities is a fact about our moral practice. It is also an ability that can help deflate the charge that particularist epistemology is structurally akin to the presentism of atomistic empiricism. A naive perceptualist account of moral knowledge apparently forecloses moral discussion and criticism because it allegedly rests on nothing more than discrete and inarticulable moments of discernment. Against this, the possibility of making similarity judgements is grounded in a holistic metaphysics of reasons which is intrinsically relevant to moral epistemology. One of the criticisms against a particularist account of knowledge is that it fails to provide an adequate account of moral deliberation and argument. Thinking in terms of the way things might have been, or could be, is not just a useful pedagogical device; it is part of the metaphysics of moral epistemology and of what being in the game of giving and asking for moral reasons consists in. In Dancy’s hands, moral particularism is an application to the ethical domain of a distinctive theory about the nature of reasons. A moral epistemology that respects this metaphysics can look problematic. Particularists who trade explicitly or otherwise on a perceptual model of moral knowledge, it has been suggested, imply that agents can do no more than try and scrutinize each moral case that comes along hoping to extract everything relevant to possessing knowledge on that basis alone. Recall from Chapter 2, section 2.2, McDowell’s warning that a ‘stress on appreciation of the particular’ can be misunderstood as advice to ‘pontificate about particular cases’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.72). This is not what particularism recommends. I have suggested that we resist the thought that particularism must conceive of the present moral case as epistemologically basic. This presentism, especially when in tandem with the demand to avoid ‘looking away’ to other moral cases on different occasions, can be a source for the Myth of the Moral Given. The epistemology of Ethics Without Principles places our capacity to judge as central, and this is consistent with the emphasis I have previously placed on the role of the subject and implies that we need to avoid factoring-out subjectivity and the source of judgement from any ‘metaphysics of moral reasons’. I now turn to consider moral judgement in more detail.

4 Moral Judgement

4.1 Judgement and moral epistemology On the face of it, moral perception looks to be a more troubling idea than moral judgement. Talking of moral judgement is not already philosophically problematic in a way that moral perception seems to be, since, for example, it does not immediately imply a controversial metaphysics. Although philosophers disagree about what they regard as the nature of moral judgement and how best to characterize it, the idea of moral judgement as such is, apparently, uncontroversial. Moral judgement can, following Garrett Cullity’s suggestion, refer to (at least) four things (Cullity, 1998). First, a certain kind of deliberative activity; second, a psychological state that can result from the activity; third, a content not an activity: that a is F; fourth, as a virtue: one aspires to have moral judgement (judgement is intrinsically valuable). In the case of particularism, the appeal to moral judgement refers to our capacity for rational thought that is interdependent with forms of empirical awareness. To repeat: ‘it is our capacity to judge which is at issue’, as Dancy says (Dancy, 2004, p.144). In emphasizing our capacity to judge in this context, Dancy draws attention to our ability to discern moral reasons by operating at a level which may require, but cannot be explicated solely in terms of, ordinary empirical awareness. Furthermore, judgement is an activity which enables discernment of (moral) reasons for which there is no method and through which we can enjoy moral knowledge. Philosophers often use moral judgement to refer to the data of moral theory. Used in this way, moral judgement is more or less interchangeable with other terms such as ‘moral experience’ or ‘moral practice’. According to this sense, ‘moral judgements’ are objects of 83

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investigations – they are what we study. Nevertheless, the particularist uses judgement in a different sense. For instance, particularist accounts of moral knowledge have recently been articulated by drawing on the notion of a priori justification. As we have previously seen, part of the positive defence of such an account of moral knowledge from a particularist perspective is to emphasize that what is necessary (if not sufficient) for moral knowledge is the ‘capacity to think in terms of reasons’ (Dancy, 2004, p.146). In previous accounts, Dancy (and others such as McDowell and McNaughton) has emphasized our capacity to sense reasons, at least to the extent that that notion is understood as a kind of moral perception. The evident move away from the senses and towards thought in this context is not about recasting what is the object of our moral knowledge; that, presumably, has remained the same. What has changed is not what we know but the way in which we know. One of the principal aspects of a judgement-based epistemology is that it can serve to assuage some doubts about moral perception. A natural question is to ask about what underpins judgement. It is important in the present context because, in a manner analogous to the semantic critique of particularism offered by Jackson, Pettit and Smith (2000), if the conditions of judgement, like word-use, are principled, then it would seem as though the prospects do not look bright for this way of defending particularism. As touched on in Chapter 3, Dancy proposes to defend the thought that our knowledge of ‘basic moral facts’ is contingent a priori by presenting a case in which our capacity to judge is used to discern relative similarities between objects. In his example, Dancy seeks to bring out the way in which knowledge of similarity is a priori and so, at least to some degree, our moral knowledge is itself a priori. Some find this unconvincing. McKeever and Ridge, for instance, say that knowing the relevant dimension of similarity is dependent, a posteriori, on knowing what the purposes are for which the similarities are salient (McKeever and Ridge, 2008, p.114). This point about purpose here is important, and worth focusing on, since it is this and our general interests that serve as the background for judgement. McKeever and Ridge claim that knowledge of purpose is not a priori, and hence the defence of a particularist account of moral knowledge as a priori fails overall. This point criticizes Dancy’s proposal for a particularist epistemology. But little is said about the notion of judgement as such and, it seems to me, that once this notion is clarified the prospects might look a little better for particularism.

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In Ethics Without Principles, Dancy appeals to judgement to explain how our ability to discern reasons is not a matter of just sensing them. Elsewhere, Dancy writes that Experience is necessary, of course, since we have to learn about the details of the situation before we can even begin to work out what is a reason for what here. But once experience has provided what it can, we have to do something new. Judgement is required of us, and if that judgement delivers knowledge, it will have to be thought of as a priori. There is dependence on experience, but it is not dependence of the right sort to render it a posteriori. So what we have here is a priori knowledge of particular, contingent truths. (Dancy, 2006, p.103) So, we must add something to the materials delivered by the senses. This is reminiscent of the Kantian idea according to which the empirical evidence of the world, so to speak, is morally blank – we need to provide the moral ingredients. Dancy’s a priori account of moral knowledge is a consequence of the denial that such knowledge positively depends on experience.1 Since moral knowledge is not a posteriori, it is a priori. Another reason for making use of the idea of judgement is to provide a way of knowing that is an alternative to a subsumptive model. The nature of moral judgement is such that it is unprincipled, and what it is to learn moral judgement is not to be instructed with rules or principles. Dancy expresses this point by saying that there is no method for moral judgement, something that I will come back to later in this chapter. One of the most significant things that has emerged from the limited discussions of this kind of epistemology is the emphasis that is implicitly placed on us, rather than aspects of reasons as such or reasons out there or the metaphysics of reasons. Recall: ‘we have to do something new’ in the light of materials presented to us through the senses. We could say that this different emphasis is nevertheless involved with metaphysical considerations since we are now reflecting on the metaphysics of persons or agents rather than on reasons. There is nothing surprising about the idea that when it comes to discerning anything, we play a central role or that, when it comes to judgement we play a central role too. We are the creatures that make judgements, and we are the creatures that discern things. Whether or not this is the implication, it seems perfectly right to say that, speaking very generally, to emphasize judgement is to emphasize human beings. Equally generally, it suggests that particularists and their opponents are right to centre their debate

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on issues in the metaphysics of reasons, but they should also take into account issues in the metaphysics of persons. In the present context, this means that we ought to be looking at ways of understanding judgement that tie in with our understanding of persons and subjectivity. According to Frege, We are probably best in accord with ordinary usage if we take a judgement to be an act of judging, as a leap is an act of leaping … With an act there also belongs an agent, and we do not know the act completely if we do not know the agent. (Frege, 1997, p.42n) If Frege is right, understanding the activity of judgement is intimately bound up with understanding the actor, and understanding that is, inter alia, understanding a host of things that enable and equip a subject with the ability to judge, as well as think and act. This, of course, opens a huge amount of issues. One of them that I am interested in here concerns mentalist accounts of moral judgement. Some philosophers might want to reserve moral judgement as if it were some mental state divorced, somehow, from its ontological commitments. The Fregean notion of judgement, at least in this context, implies the idea that to understand judgement demands that we understand persons. A next step is then, presumably, to ask whether that kind of understanding can be achieved and philosophically articulated according to (or at least consistent with) particularist standards and strictures. In those places in which Dancy himself offers guidance as to what a particularist account of knowledge would be like, he suggests a narrative conception of judgement and justification. According to Dancy, such a conception provides a distinctive alternative to a subsumptive account – the sort of account implied by a generalist metaphysics of reasons.2 Broadly following Kant’s distinction between reflective and determinate judgement, it looks as though a particularist moral epistemology would be an example of the former, if it would make sense by the lights of this distinction at all. Kant distinguishes between ‘subsumptive’ or ‘determinate’ judgement, and ‘reflective’ judgement. Roughly speaking, the difference rests upon the relation between the capacity for judgement and the materials which are given to judgement. Kant writes, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment: The power of judgment in general is the faculty of thinking of the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule,

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the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it … is determining. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting. (Kant, 2000, pp.66–7).3 Now, Dancy’s account of moral justification eschews a subsumptive model and suggests that justification is not about arguing for a conception of the particular case by subsuming it ‘under some general principle which commands rational support’ (Dancy, 1993, p.113). Rather, a particularist alternative is to achieve justification through ‘description’ of the case in such a way that situates or ‘lays out’ the relevant features of the case. This process is a form of narration in which our attention is drawn towards features in a particular way (including, perhaps, the order in which they are mentioned) that, ideally, reveals an internal coherence which ‘compels assent’ (Dancy, 1993, p.113). Dancy suggests that one of the things that stands in the way of appreciating this kind of justification is an inappropriate distinction between description and justification. According to this, the possibility of moral justification is grounded in the existence of principles under which particular cases are subsumed. Description, in contrast, is an activity which does not purport to subsume anything under anything else, and so cannot provide justificatory support. Dancy’s particularism as articulated in Moral Reasons denies this distinction, and argues for the claim that moral justification does not imply subsumption under principles, but involves providing reasons for how and why one ‘sees the situation’ in a way that is persuasive.4 What implications does this have for a judgement-based account of moral knowledge from a particularist perspective? If a particularist model of moral justification involves a narrative conception, then it seems natural to think, in light of Kant’s distinction between forms of judgement, that the particularist ought to opt for reflective judgement; that is, the kind of judgement that begins with the particular. Now, there is no easy way to map Kant’s distinction onto the dialectic concerning the prospects for a particularist moral epistemology here, since what Kant is suggesting is that even though reflective judgement ‘begins’ with the particular, it does not necessarily end with it, as it were; it searches for the universal. While there need be no subsumption here, it is nevertheless the nature of reflective judgement to aspire to unite the particular with the relevant universal. This is an important feature of moral judgement, and I will come back to it.

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4.2 Judgement, rules and examples Both determinate and reflective judgement can be, as Onora O’Neill has emphasized, forms of ‘theoretical’ judgement (O’Neill, 2007, p.159). In the moral case, what we are bound to consider is practical judgement. We inevitably act in specific and contentful situations, and it is a condition of judgement that there are things which are already the case and so judgement requires a situation in which it can be exercised. For instance, we already need, at least according to this version of the Kantian picture, to judge that things are thus and so to have an understanding of what the situation is like in order to have even a first inkling about what possibilities for action are in the offing, let alone what possible actions we ought or ought not actually to perform. Judging that things are thus and so is, according to an orthodox way of parsing that nature of moral judgement as suggested in section 4.1, a cognitive representational activity. Following the orthodoxy, this kind of judgement affords agents with knowledge of what is the case, but not what ought to be the case. This picture emphasizes the theoretical over the practical in the following way. A condition for the possibility of practical (moral) judgement is that there is knowledge of what is the case. This is suggestive of a broadly Humean analysis according to which there is an important difference between, on the one hand, our judgments concerning matters of fact and ‘real existence’, and those judgements that concern those thoughts and (apparent) objects that originate in the productive faculty of our minds. In her reading of Kant, O’Neill proposes that a crucial way to distinguish between the different instantiations of ‘theoretical judgement’ is to concentrate on what is or is not ‘given to’ a judgement and what, on that basis, it is legitimate to claim. O’Neill casts the distinction on Kant’s behalf as one between directions of fit. Moral judgement seeks to shape the world rather than to represent it. The difference is, at least partly, one of constraint. On the one hand, the normativity of non-moral representational judgement is such that the world determines the correctness or otherwise of such judgement. Moral judgement is also constrained, but the normativity here is derived not from the relation between the nature of the external world and the content of a judgement, but from the logic inherent in the judgement itself. This is a familiar Kantian point about the moral justification of particular judgements being a matter of the universality of judgement as such. The sort of discipline involved in moral judgement is revealed, Kant thinks, by understanding the ‘law of

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freedom’ as he puts it in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. The standards to which moral judgement are subject are derived not from knowledge of the world but from knowledge of the form of the moral law. The rationalism here denies that such standards can be derived from anything that Hume would call ‘experimental reasoning’; that is, knowledge of the way the world already is. Thus, O’Neill writes, If moral … judgement is a matter of seeking to shape the world to certain standards, we cannot coherently derive those standards from the way the world already is … What actually happens or is done … may be instances either of right action or moral failure. Morality cannot be derived from examples. (O’Neill, 2007, pp.158–9) As it stands, this might sound like a version of what underlies a variety of Hume’s so-called sceptical arguments. Recall from Chapter 1, section 1.5: ‘What we learn not from one object we can never learn from a hundred’ (Hume, 1978, p.88). Any instance, considered as such, whether moral or otherwise, cannot ground an ought, moral or otherwise. This idea, at work in both Hume and Kant, is also central to Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following. Hume’s naturalism in this context is, I think, potentially much deeper than is typically acknowledged. Our practices themselves do not receive an externally grounded vindication other than what is laid down by nature. The origin of the relevant oughts are nowhere else other than in the practices themselves. It would at least be problematic, then, to claim that instances or examples can be faithfully described in such a way that renders them normatively inert, or, in O’Neill’s words in an ethical context, ‘morally impotent’ (O’Neill, 2007, p.159). There are sound textual reasons for agreeing that Kant regarded a moral example as important only if we have first entered a prior judgement that it is indeed an example by bringing to bear moral principles. The idea that examples can ground moral principles or that they can be worked up in such a way that would licence generalizations, gets things the wrong way round. In the Groundwork, Kant writes that we could not ‘give worse advice to morality than by wanting to derive it from examples’ and that, contrary to an Aristotelian conception: ‘Imitation has no place at all in matters of morality, and examples serve only for encouragement’ (Kant, 1996, p.63). O’Neill is critical of particularism in a number of ways. One of them can be understood as an attack on what she calls a ‘Wittgensteinian’ tendency to burden particular examples with the task of providing

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all of the resources we might need for moral deliberation. She uses a related distinction between what she calls ‘hypothetical’ and ‘ostensive’ examples (O’Neill, 1986). O’Neill seeks to shed light on the difference between Kantian and Wittgensteinian differences in how examples are used in moral theory and in how they are brought to bear in the explication of the capacity for judgement. O’Neill notes how Wittgensteinian philosophers tend to utilize literary examples as a way of revealing irreplaceable aspects in a philosophical account of concept-mastery or competence in judgement. Although part of her point here is that principles undergird the rationality of moral thought and reasoning, it is worth noting how she distinguishes between open (hypothetical) and closed (ostensive) examples. She writes, The literary examples discussed by Wittgensteinian writers on ethics are distinctive, nuanced, and well articulated by the authors of the literary works from which they are drawn. It is hard to challenge the articulation of such examples and all too easy to agree … that each is sui generis and in itself a complete example of moral thinking which can provide no basis for prescribing for others, and so, more generally, that moral theories are redundant, since no task remains to be done once examples have been fully articulated. On the other hand, the fact that works of literature (and especially novels) tend to be preoccupied with private rather than public crises has produced in Wittgensteinian ethical writing a focus on inwardness and personal relations and a lack of attention to the dilemmas of public and working life. (O’Neill, 1986, p.12) O’Neill targets moral theorizing which emphasizes the particularity of moral thought and discourse and which explicitly resists abstraction and ‘theory’. The so-called ostensive examples central to such theorizing are used to honour the detail and contextual nature of moral subjectivity but risk obscuring an equally central aspect of the moral life: [I]n respecting the integrity of literary examples, the depth and ubiquity of moral disagreement are obscured. Yet without a focus on literary examples, with their artificial exclusion of many types of moral disagreement, it is hard not to be sceptical of many Wittgensteinian accounts of moral deliberation. For these accounts suggest that we can deliberate only in so far as we share the practices

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of those with or about whom we deliberate. This position leads readily to both moral conservatism and to moral relativism. (O’Neill, 1986, p.14) O’Neill complains that any account of the rationality of thought and discourse which construes the role of context-bound education and initiation as fundamental, must ultimately concede either that deliberation and reflection will end in local consensus or in a silent stand-off; both of these are potentially morally and politically dangerous. She cites Wittgenstein’s claims in Philosophical Investigations (§241–2) as embodying such an account: ‘in the end there must be agreement in judgement’. But, in a sense, in the beginning there must be a form of agreement as well: ‘what we learn are correct judgements’ as Wittgenstein writes, in the same place. Recognition of the ubiquity of judgement in this sense could be blocked by a tendency to focus on the objects of our thought, deliberation, reflection and action over and above its conditions. Wittgensteinian literary examples are ‘closed’ because they tend to recycle familiarity and confirm its status as familiar and as authoritative. To break the cycle here, we must insert some critical leverage at the point where the familiar becomes the authoritative, and open a normative space of criticism between what we take-in as recipients of existing moral thought and what we ought to be thinking and doing in response. O’Neill’s suspicion in this context is directed more towards how the ostensive examples she has in mind are too inward-looking, too private. However rich in detail and imaginatively portrayed, the content of such examples fails to enable those who articulate or read them to track the generalizable implications for other people in different circumstances. Despite there being reasons from a Kantian perspective to eschew the dialectical role of examples as they might be used by particularists, Kant himself also held that our possessing a form of ‘mother-wit’ was important for our ability to ascertain when an object falls under the extension of a rule. We need this ability since mastery of how to apply rules – that is, how to use concepts – cannot consist in mastery of further rules for the application of the initial rules. The capacity to regard an object as falling under a concept or as falling within the extension of a rule cannot be the product of instruction with rules but it can, nevertheless, be enhanced and finessed through exposure to and deliberation about examples. An important question here is the extent to which ‘rules’ are part of the condition of judgement. It is natural to think that particularism

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can gain direct support from Wittgenstein’s work on this topic. The denial that moral deliberation is rule-governed might seem to fit squarely with the aspirations of particularism; to free moral thought from the idea that it is merely the application of moral principles or rules to individual cases and, just as Kant seems to suggest, that the very possibility of there being ‘individual cases’ presupposes principles. But this is too quick. Wittgenstein himself, like Hume in his own way, is at pains to point out that there are rules – only that we need to think about them in the right kind of way. The relation between rules and judgement is complicated. It is important to clarify it since it would have significant implications for Dancy’s use of the idea of judgement to ground a particularist epistemology.

4.3 Particularism, judgement and experience O’Neill remarks that John McDowell and David Wiggins cast moral judgement as ‘theoretical’, by the lights of Kant’s distinction. In the context of discussion of the nature and role of moral judgement, this implies that the role of judgement is to learn aspects of the way the world is. This role, whether subsumptive or reflective, is theoretical since it is guided by the world and does not seek to shape the world in accordance with some principle or theory. Some particularists emphasize how we discern the nature of the individual case before us without the need to rely on principles. Whatever else is wrong or suspect about a perceptualist account, in this context it fails to respect the basic distinction between theoretical and practical judgement. In other words, the account of moral judgement in play here regards it as taking in states of the world, rather than being that through which an agent can determine what she ought to do, and thus what the world ought to be like. Moral judgement is a species of practical judgement whose job, so to speak, is to determine what one ought to do. A basic necessary condition of this kind of determination is that one knows what the world is like in order for the relevant context of action to be understood. This factual, world-guided understanding is the product of theoretical judgement which may be either determinant or reflective. Yet it is certain that this kind of judgement is ‘preliminary’, in O’Neill’s words, to moral judgement proper. Theoretical judgement, either in its subsumptive or reflective version, requires that the particular is given in the sense that what rationally constrains judgement in this mode is the world. But this is not so in the moral case. Practical judgement is, of course, rationally constrained but

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not by the world. The particular is not given in moral judgement, but is sought. O’Neill is critical of those, McDowell and Wiggins for instance, who construe moral judgement as ‘situational appraisal’, since that would imply that the relevant object – the situation or case – already exists and is there waiting for us to appraise it (O’Neill, 2007, p.159). But that cannot be since there is no moral case or situation in that sense. What ought to be done needs to be conceived not received. Recall that one of the challenges faced by a perceptual model of moral knowledge is to ensure immunity from the Myth of the Moral Given. One of the possible ways to do this, shadowing Sellars’s suggestions about the nature of experience, is to acknowledge the conceptual nature of empirical awareness. It is significant that according to McDowell’s neo-Kantian conception of the relation between concepts and experience, the capacity to judge is central. It is significant because if it can be shown that there is a very close connection between judging and experiencing, then this could help explicate the manner in which the appeal to judgment as a distinctive capacity which supplements experience and ultimately represents the origin of moral knowledge. McDowell claims that conceptual capacities are operative in experience, albeit ‘passively’. He explains that a proper understanding of what this amounts to would recognize how empirical concepts are integrated into rationally organized networks of capacities for active adjustment of what one thinks to what experience provides (McDowell, 1996, p.29). This active adjustment involves the capacity for judgement and the activity in question is an exercise of freedom. While the content of experience is ‘not under one’s control’ we have freedom as to whether we accept or reject that content, that is, accept or reject the way things appear to us in experience (McDowell, 1996, p.11). McDowell claims that the content of an experience can, at least sometimes, be the same content of a judgement as when someone decides that things are the way they are presented in experience (McDowell, 1996, p.26). This thought is connected to McDowell’s claim that empirical content can be an aspect of the ‘layout of reality’, and so ‘that things are thus and so’, can be content of an experience in which our conceptual capacities are passively drawn into operation, the content of a judgement in which we accept that content and actively exercise our conceptual capacities, and an aspect of the world – what is the case. A particular issue with regard to the nature of answerability is whether or not empirical thought is answerable to the world or to experience. If we are committed to the idea that external constraint is a necessary condition of rational thought and action, and to the idea that the constraint

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must be of a rational or normative sort, then the question of whether or not the world can play this constraining role is important. Asserting that the external world itself is adequately constituted to exert rational constraint might imply a metaphysics grossly at odds with, say, influential forms of naturalism. If such a metaphysics is too off-putting, then perhaps a retreat to experience as constraining rationally would be more acceptable. McDowell explains that our rational openness to the world is direct in the sense that our rationality is at work in experience itself, not just in response to experience in the form of, say, beliefs (for example, McDowell, 2007a, p.345). McDowell’s view of the relation between experience, judgement and the world incorporates the idea that there is ‘no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought’ (McDowell, 1996, p.27). Broadly speaking, the idea is that, at least some of the time, our thinking and, presumably, experiencing, does not operate in a way that, even in the very best case, is but a faithful representation of an external world. There is no ‘ontological gap between … the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case’ (McDowell, 1996, p.27). Nevertheless, there is presumably a different kind of distance or separation between an experience and a judgement such that one has room to reflect on and make a decision about that content. McDowell alludes to Gadamer’s notion of a special kind of ‘posture’ towards the world, a ‘free, distanced orientation’ that embodies our ability to have, on McDowell’s interpretation, an ‘orientation to the world’, and thus on occasion to enjoy awareness of ‘that bit of objective reality that is in [our] perceptual and practical reach’ (Gadamer, 2004, p.442; McDowell, 1996, p.116). Christine Korsgaard describes a related form of distance and characterizes the relevant posture as distinctive of human life and as embodying a special kind of ‘problem’ that other animals do not have, those animals that, presumably, inhabit an ‘environment’ rather than ‘having a world’, as Gadamer puts it (Gadamer, 2004, p.441). Korsgaard writes, I perceive, and find myself with a powerful impulse to believe. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance. Now the impulse doesn’t dominate me and now I have a problem. Shall I believe? Is this perception really a reason to believe? I desire and I find myself with a powerful impulse to act. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance. Now the impulse doesn’t dominate me and now I have a problem. Shall I act? Is this desire really a reason to act? … The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such.

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It needs a reason. Otherwise, at least as long as it reflects, it cannot commit itself or go forward. (Korsgaard, 1996, p.93).5 According to Korsgaard, the reflective mind requires reasons for commitment which it accepts or rejects. The impulses she refers are not ‘up to one’ in McDowell’s sense, and the relevant role of judgement would be to call a halt to the reflective capacity which considers the content of the impulse to believe or act, and affirms one response rather than another. McDowell draws together experience, judgement and the world in the sense that the same content can figure in passive experience, active judgement and as part of reality. Furthermore, judgement is one way in which our freedom is exercised. Although, with McDowell, we might say there can be shared content between experience and judgement, the nature of how our freedom figures with regards to that content is different. We are unfree, for instance, as to what we are presented with in experience, or as the content of an impulse, but free to reflect and decide what to do or think about it. It is, McDowell thinks, a result of the idea that our conceptual capacities are passively draw into operation in experience, that we can ‘satisfy the craving for a limit to freedom that underlies the Myth of the Given’ (McDowell, 1996, p.10). The point is not so much that the limit to freedom has been removed, and that our thinking is unconstrained. As I understand it, the point is that what limits our freedom or provides the context within which we can exercise it no longer invokes some alien realm that simply compels us. Although McDowell emphasizes the freedom that is exercised in judgement, one difficulty is portraying the right way in which that freedom is related to experience. For example, Richard Gaskin takes issue with how McDowell sometimes characterizes this relation (Gaskin, 2006, p.71). A passage focused on by Gaskin is this: Suppose … there is an inclination to apply some concept in judgement. This inclination does not just inexplicably set in. If one does make a judgement, it is wrung from one by the experience, which serves as one’s reason for the judgement. (McDowell, 1996, p.61) Gaskin claims that if the relation between experience and an inclination to make a judgement is such that the latter is wrung from the former, then that not be an example of an exercise of freedom. Although Gaskin notes that it is not entirely clear whether this is how we are to interpret

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McDowell in this context, he goes on to register the objection that, if that is a correct interpretation, then it would pose a severe problem for the idea that we are free to accept or reject the what we are presented with through the senses. In any case, the main thrust of Gaskin’s objection is that this picture of free judgement as it relates to the experience is that is mischaracterizes what is enabled by the freedom that we posses: [o]ur freedom, insofar as we have it, is freedom not to judge on the basis of experience but to act on that basis; it is not as subjects of experience, and thinkers who can base judgements on our experience, that we enjoy freedom, if and to whatever extent we do, but as agents. (Gaskin, 2006, p.72).6 According to Gaskin, McDowell mistakenly identifies freedom with the freedom to make judgements, and in doing so fails to appreciate that it is through our agency and action that we most realize our freedom, insofar as we have it at all. Gaskin writes that a serious practical gap opens ‘between the materials on the basis of which we make judgements, on the one hand, and the judgements themselves on the other’. Crucially, and of particular relevance for the present context: ‘while a decision is required of subjects there is no principle to guide them in making it’ (Gaskin, 2006, p.73). There is a practical analogue, then, to the question as to how we are meant to decide whether to accept or reject what is made available through experience. Although there is room to make use of freedom in one way rather than another, to accept or reject the way things appear, there is, Gaskin suggests, no principle in light of which we ought to realize in judgement one of our options as opposed to another. In other words, there can be no way for a subject to tell whether, in any given situation, she is to accept or reject the appearances. In the practical case, this manifests as a subject being unable to have any principle in light of which she can answer the question as to whether any particular course of action is better than any other, despite having the freedom to choose between competing options. This state of affairs is, Gaskin writes, a ‘strange form of punishment’ (Gaskin, 2006, pp.73–4): McDowell’s experiencing and judging subjects are, like the forlorn agents of existentialist theory, exiled from rationality because condemned to a freedom which they have no rational means of exploiting. (Gaskin, 2006, p.73)

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This presupposes that a responsible exercise of freedom and what it is to be within the space of reasons is to have access to a further court of appeal, as it were, in light of which we can arbitrate between possible judgements. This suggests that rationality is intimately connected to awareness of principled connections that can take someone from a state of bare freedom, so to speak, to a particular and justified decision which expresses that freedom, whether that is a decision about what to think or about what to do. However, the presupposition that rationality requires principles in this sense, and especially in the case of practical knowledge, is one of the things that particularism denies. In the ‘Preface’ to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant reports that ethics, as a discipline, is analogous to scientific inquiry into the laws of nature insofar as it is concerned with the ‘laws of freedom’ (Kant, 1996, p.43). In order for freedom to be authentically realized it must be constrained, and in principled ways. Law in the Kantian tradition is part of the grounds for the possibility of moral thought and action and is that through which rational thinking can flourish. To anticipate a discussion in Chapter 6, there is a related confusion that we need to avoid which could emerge from McDowell’s contrast between the space of reasons and the ‘realm of law’: the contrast between two different ways in which we make things intelligible. One way is through placing objects in rational relations, and the other is through placements in the so-called realm of law, as we do when we make things intelligible from the perspective of the natural sciences. At least we have now seen that judgement is intimately connected – perhaps irreducibly so – to the idea of experience as it is enjoyed by creatures with concepts and conceptual competence. But we now need to show how it is that a moral particularist can make distinctive use of the idea of judgement. Before outlining such ways, there is a wider and potentially fatal problem in that the appeal to moral judgement may itself an inappropriate way of characterizing moral knowledge.

4.4 Judgement and justification A particularist could appeal to the notion of judgement as a way of achieving moral knowledge that bypasses rules or principles. The issues examined in section 4.3 paid attention to the close connection between judgement and experience, and the suggestion was that, although in significant ways they are different, the capacity for judgement is not radically separable from the capacity for experience. The issue now is the relation between judgement and rules. According to Dreyfus and Dreyfus, the capacity of

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judgement is an upper-level cognitive achievement, the possession of which is marked by the ability to bracket the more basic rule-governed learning and activity distinctive of lower-level cognitive activity.7 A natural reading of moral judgement involves the thought that it is needed in cases where the rules are insufficient or where, perhaps, there simply are no rules. In the first case, rules are important in setting up the framework in such a way that implies judgement is needed as a form of cognitive supplementation on behalf of the agent in order for him to reach a decision about what to think or what to do. It is, then, the nature of the rules in such a context which partly provides for the possibility that judgement is required and for the substantive ways in which it is required. In the second kind of case, judgement is all we have, and rules have not even played a part in setting up the context in which judgment is needed. One standard account of judgement understands it as a way of reaching or formulating a conception of some object that leaves rules behind. For an expert, say, although they have been trained through using rules of inference in reaching decisions and acquiring knowledge, a new capacity emerges which enables them to transcend the rules in some sense and employ skills of discernment and of knowledge-gathering that do not seem to rely on rules. On the face of it, this is one reason why particularists may have inclinations towards the capacity of judgement; moral knowledge is a matter of judgement and not a matter of following rules. Judgement, according to Kant, is a ‘special talent’ and a kind of ‘mother-wit’ and particular cases or examples in ethical deliberation are the ‘leading-strings of the power of judgement’ (Kant, 1998, pp.268–9).8 Furthermore, Onora O’Neill claims that ‘rules are not the enemy but the matrix of judgement’ (O’Neill, 1996, p.85). As I have outlined, O’Neill has presented a series of challenges to what she sees as a mistaken drift towards particularism which has been guided by a misunderstanding of judgement and of the role of particulars and examples in ethics. There are a number of levels, then, on which O’Neill finds particularism unsatisfactory, including the alleged misrepresentation of judgement and the place of rules, and the problematic ways in which particularists (especially those who take inspiration from Wittgenstein) lay emphasis on the interiority of deliberation and the so-called inarticulable nature of moral insight and knowledge. This is morally objectionable according to O’Neill, as it undermines the basic publicity of argument and dialectic which requires a sense of open participation and engagement. To my mind, as I have suggested, it is a mistake to think that a good way of distinguishing particularists from their opponents rests on the

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extent to which rules are considered as basic or ineliminable. It is quite possible to maintain a commitment to the importance of rules and defend particularism. Although much turns on the interpretation of rules, it sometimes seems as though the debates in this context are caricatures of philosophical positions. On the face of it the notion of judgement seems to fit uneasily with the typically non-inferential account of moral awareness defended by some particularists. Unless a good portion of moral thought and discourse is judgement in disguise, then the distinctive character of judgement will be expressed by its being typically and explicitly deliberative. Letting a deliberationist account of judgement have too wide a reign is criticized by the ‘coping skills’ model proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus. Nevertheless, I do not think that we need to feel pressured into a view here which either asserts that there are lots of judgements in disguise, or that judgement must be explicitly deliberative. We can make a distinction here without it being absolute. According to Charles Larmore, moral judgement ‘responds to the particularity of a situation’ not because it operates in ways that are entirely lawless, but because it ‘transcends the explicit or tacit rules on which it partially depends’ (Larmore, 1981, p.281; p.294). Larmore explains that judgement is neither thoroughly rule-governed, nor some blind leap of faith, since it embodies rationality to the extent that it responds to, and with, reasons (Larmore, 1981, p.294). So the kind of understanding exemplified in moral judgement is not a mysterious sui generis ability that is employed in ways that are opposed to rules. Yet, at the same time, judgement is not exercised in light of some pre-existing matrix of rules. In falling between a leap of faith and being thoroughly rule-governed, judgement resists an explicit characterization, but it would be wrong to infer that a particularist appeal to judgement is thereby obfuscatory. Larmore writes that Although we can understand … what kinds of situations call for moral judgment, the kinds of tasks which it is to accomplish, and the preconditions for its acquisition, there is very little positive we can say about the nature of moral judgment itself … We appear able to say only what judgment is not, and not what it is. (Larmore, 1981, p.293).9 But, Larmore explains, the inability to give a general account of what the exercise of judgment consists in ‘is not lamentable, but exemplary’ (Larmore, 1981, p.293). Larmore suggests that moral judgement can seem a potentially mysterious way of understanding if considered solely from the point of view of ‘theoretical’ rationality or understanding. In

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other words, judgement appears to escape description and even comprehension if we expect that the ability to exercise judgment can be reconstructed in terms of an objective theoretical model; a way of understanding moral practice that consists in reconstructing the explicit and implicit formal rules which characterize moral practice (Larmore, 1981, p.294). But we need not think that theoretical understanding is the best or the only way of understanding, especially in ethics. The suggestion is, overall, that too restrictive a conception of what rationality and understanding consists in renders moral judgement simply an inscrutable capacity to get it right. To that extent, Larmore’s suggestion mirrors the critique of the ‘prejudiced’ view of rationality provided by McDowell and how what Dancy regards as a ‘logical coercion’ puts illicit generalist pressure on how we are to regard what it is to act or think consistently. In Ethics Without Principles, Dancy remarks that the kind of judgement exercised in coming to enjoy moral knowledge has no method (Dancy, 2004, p.148). This could be read as denying that there is anything to say about what judgement is or how we exercise it, a kind of mere concessive quietism. But that is not right, since what is meant by ‘method’ here refers to one among other ways of gaining knowledge. Dancy does not articulate in great detail what the nature of judgement is, how we acquire the capacity of judgement and how we exercise it. This does not imply, however, that the appeal to judgement signals a form of dialectical surrender. In the first place, we need to recognize that ways of knowing are more diverse than either being exhaustively rule-governed or just mysterious. Despite any worries that arise from the fact that moral judgement does not conform to the model of theoretical understanding, or from recognizing that there seems to be no ‘method’ behind judgement, ‘we do know that moral judgement exists and we do know how to recognize it when it occurs’ (Larmore, 1981, p.295). This point is more than dogmatically insisting on the truth of something that has not been and perhaps cannot be established. What Larmore refers to here is, I think, exemplary in his sense. On the basis of doubts about what lies behind judgement and whether we can offer any principled method for it, we might conclude that our practice of judgement, which incorporates that we know what judgement is and how to recognize it, is operating without any grounds whatsoever. But this would assume that what constitutes the grounds must be something that we can make explicit and also that, in so doing, we can reveal the implicit justificatory relations that unite the grounds of judgement to the use of judgement in particular cases. The point here is connected to one discussed in Chapter 2. Relinquishing the search for an external ground would be ‘terrifying’, according to Cavell, as long as we

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retain the belief that there is and must be such a ground. In trying to clarify moral judgement a similar picture might be applicable. Wittgenstein remarks that when justifications for following a rule, using concepts and also, presumably, employing judgement, come to an end, we face the immediacy of practice – ‘this is simply what I do’ (Wittgenstein, 1967, §217). What ‘I do’ in the relevant sense cannot be made intelligible as either a list of discrete instances or as instantiating pre-existing rules or principles. It is a ‘custom’ which involves a form of blind understanding, but not in the ‘leap of faith’ sense suggested by Larmore. In Larmore’s discussion of moral judgement he rightly criticizes a disjunctive picture which forces the choice between conceiving of judgement as either thoroughly rule-governed or thoroughly arbitrary. Nevertheless, Larmore appears to identify ‘arbitrary’ here with a blind exercise of judgement, and to that extent his remarks might be misleading (Larmore, 1981, p.294). Although Wittgenstein writes that when one follows a rule one does so blindly in the end, his thought is not that one ultimately follows a rule arbitrarily and so somehow is following the rule, if one is at all, by complete accident. ‘This is simply what I do’ does not pick out arbitrary thoughts or actions. David Bell puts it in the following way. Even if it is true that one ultimately follows a rule blindly, one does not thereby follow it mindlessly. He writes, That our thought conform to the rules, principles, concepts, and criteria constitutive of objectivity, but that it also be grounded in a spontaneous, blind, subjective awareness of intrinsic but inarticulable meaning – these are not conflicting requirements ... for when I follow a rule, although ultimately I do so blindly, I do not do so mindlessly, or merely mechanically. A middle path needs to be charted between the pessimism of the belief that all human thought is ultimately ungrounded and arbitrary, and the incoherence of the belief that it can be given a final justification in terms of the existence of objective rules for application of which would require still further rules, and so on. This middle path avoids the mindlessness of a mechanical following of rules by taking seriously the idea that there is an art of judgement and thought. (Bell, 1987, p.241).10 Larmore points out that theoretical or objective understanding is not adequate to capturing the kind of understanding that is embodied in the exercise of judgement. According to Bell, the ‘subjective’ aspects of judgement, our immediate awareness of meaning, is akin to our grasp of aesthetic awareness and he cites both Kant and Wittgenstein as

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philosophers who show the importance of kinds of understanding. Bell concludes that we need to conceive of judgement as an ‘art’ rather than as a ‘science’, in the sense that it is through judgement that we become aware of immediate and inarticulate meaning; ‘inarticulate’ insofar as any elaboration of that understanding is not possible, and ‘understanding’ insofar as it is a way of knowing. Bell’s discussion involves attempting to answer a Kantian (and Wittgensteinian) challenge; that of providing an account that recognizes the essential role that subjectivity has in judgement without jeopardizing the possibility that judgements can be objective. Bell’s own answer turns on the role of ‘the productive imagination [and] the nature of aesthetic experience and creativity’ (Bell, 1987, p.222). It is only through a kind of aesthetic response to experience, he suggests, that a person can think about themselves and their environment. There are other ways, though, to explicate the essential role of subjectivity in judgement as such and in moral judgement in particular. The appeal to a form of inarticulate though mindful awareness could be another way of expressing the idea that, in moral judgement, we do not employ a method, but nevertheless can possess knowledge. Presumably, the kind of method that Dancy denies underpins judgement would be a mechanistic application of formal rules or principles. This denial would, ideally, need to be compensated by something more positive, otherwise it risks the interpretation that the appeal to judgement is obfuscatory. Kant had identified a certain ‘embarrassment’ about judgement: since judgement requires a principle in order to be guided, another capacity for judgment would be needed to provide the principles according to which judgement is correctly applied and would thus involve a form of regress (Kant, 2000, p.57). Kant explains that the power of judgement ‘cannot be taught but only practiced’ (Kant, 1998, p.268). Furthermore, as Gadamer describes, it can only be ‘practiced from case by case … and cannot be learned’ (Gadamer, 2004, pp.27–8). The sense of ‘learned’ here is a technical one and refers to how one might be ‘taught in the abstract’ (Gadamer, 2004, p.27). But, presumably, one can become better or worse at making judgements even if we grant that there is some special talent that lies behind judgement as such. Wittgenstein suggests that some kinds of knowledge and understanding involve learning through experience as opposed to taking a course, as it were, and learning ‘in the abstract’. He writes, What one acquires … is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and

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only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculatingrules. (Wittgenstein, 1967, IIxi) It is not immediately clear whether Wittgenstein means that correct judgements are the objects of learning or whether correct judgements are the outcome of what is learnt. It is, perhaps, both of these things and is analogous to how Wittgenstein describes his concept of understanding, which incorporates both an explicit rule-governed or theoretical sense of understanding, in the abstract, and embodied, practical and perhaps inarticulate understanding. He writes, We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.) In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem). Then has ‘understanding’ two different meanings here? – I would rather say that these kinds of use of ‘understanding’ make up its meaning, make up my concept of understanding. For I want to apply the word ‘understanding’ to all this. (Wittgenstein, 1967, §§531–2).11 The particularity of understanding that Wittgenstein describes not only involves the employment of a method or technique, but is the kind of understanding that embodies modes of our subjective awareness rather than competence in manipulating general and context-free formulae. Nevertheless, others have suggested that, by conceiving moral judgement as the principal mode of moral thought, moral theorists have understood what can count as moral thinking in too restrictive a way.

4.5 Beyond judgement? In a recent book, Beyond Moral Judgment, Alice Crary has analysed how a preoccupation with a conception of moral judgement has restricted the focus of contemporary moral philosophy. Her thought is that the received interpretation of judgment is one which fails to enable an understanding of the diversity of moral thought and discourse and, consequently, the different ways in which we can be said to achieve

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moral knowledge and understanding. Moral judgement, according to Crary’s critique, has been largely (although tacitly) understood along the lines of concept-subsumption; that is, the way in which agents perform acts of moral judgement through the employment of concepts whose role is to subsume under them the apparent objects of moral attention. Crary’s overall target is the thought that the primary datum for moral philosophy is moral judgement, where judgement is considered as the central concept which captures the state of mind of a moral agent and which represents the goal to which we are, in practice and in education, aiming toward. Her suggestion is that there are ways of being, of reasoning, of learning, of participating and of knowing and understanding in the moral dimension to our lives that cannot be understood as instances of judgement. The philosophical orthodoxy directs attention too narrowly on moral judgement and forecloses the possibility of appreciating the significance of the richness of moral subjectivity. On Crary’s account, moral judgment is a general organizing concept which aspires to encompass all other moral activity – whether ‘actions’ or ‘thoughts’. Crary writes, moral philosophers generally agree in assuming that the moral work of language is the prerogative of moral concepts … [and] generally agree in assuming that moral thought invariably comes in the form of moral judgements. (Crary, 2007a, p.1) Crary suggests an alternative approach to moral thought, according to which ‘ethics is distinguished by a preoccupation not with judgements in one region of discourse but with a dimension of all of discourse’. The view she recommends claims that ‘a responsible ethical posture involves forms of attention that, far from being restricted to moral judgements, extends to webs of sensitivities informing all of individuals’ modes of thought and speech’ (Crary, 2007a, p.3). These ‘webs of sensitivities’ and ‘forms of awareness’ have not been adequately described by particularists, partly, perhaps, for fear of relying on generalist assumptions about the architecture of moral thought, even if not explicitly set out in the form of principles. In Moral Reasons, Dancy explains that what would constitute a ‘responsible ethical posture’ in the current sense involves the exercise of capacities and sensitivities to discern moral features. While we would need a ‘full range’ of such sensitivities, they ‘have no content of their own’. He writes: ‘There

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is nothing that one brings to the new situation other than a contentless ability to discern what matters where it matters’ (Dancy, 1993, p.50). In the context, Dancy emphasizes the importance of education, in its Aristotelian sense, for what equips some of us with such sensitivities. The problem, Pekka Väyrynen suggests, is that the account is silent about what in fact constitutes the relevant capacities and what would explain how we acquire them (Väyrynen, 2008, pp.95–6). For present purposes, a similar problem is visible in the context of judgement as it figures in Ethics Without Principles. That is, the appeal to judgement seems unable to provide any more content to the picture of what in fact constitutes the ability to get things right case by case. It is at least clear that the particularist epistemology, to go beyond the insights set out in Ethics Without Principles, will need a substantive engagement with the idea of moral judgement as a capacity distinct from, yet connected to, the relevant forms of sensory awareness which contribute to moral knowledge. So far in this chapter a central issue has been the relation between judgement and experience. According to Dancy’s account, judgement is a capacity which helps to turn matters of fact into reasons; recognizing that this feature favours that response ‘is to judge that things are thus and so’ (Dancy, 2004, p.144). A relational fact such that a favours b is made available for thought via judgement rather than experience, unless, that is, we are inclined towards a richer and more productive account of experience, the resources for which are found in Sellars and others. If Sellars is right (and Dancy think he is) that experience contains claims in some sense, then we might say that experience can deliver the sort of relation at work in a rational relation of favouring.12 After all, a basic condition of adequacy is that experience must provide reasons and the sort of relation in question is a reason. Experience of relations can provide reasons as well as non-relational experiences unless there is something off-putting about the idea that we can experience relations. In light of the varying uses of judgement and the number of things to which it can refer, there is a tendency to connect very closely moral judgement with the output of a deliberative episode. That is, that judgement is a matter of weighing-up factors and reaching a sort of decision. This episode or process, though, need not be exclusively intellectual or computational; we judge all the time when we move about in a room or walk down the street. To the question: ‘Why did you not stop at the traffic lights?’ one answer might be: ‘I judged that it would be dangerous given the road conditions and the car was passing through the lights as they turned amber’. This sort of ‘judgement’ is implicit in my thought

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and action – embedded in my driving along and taking innumerable factors into consideration; not all at once and not all of them consciously. So considering the nature of moral judgement as a species of judgement as such is useful because of the ways in which the connection with perception, experience and moral experience can be made clearer. This chapter has so far suggested that moral judgement ought to be considered as a distinctive way of achieving moral knowledge and not as one among other ways of reporting a state of moral mindedness. The discussion in the previous section suggests that any simple separation of experience and judgement if calibrated solely along an active/passive dimension is problematic. McDowell’s account of judgement is, as outlined, connected to his defence of a version of conceptualism about empirical content. Recall that the sort of conceptualism in view maintains an identity between the content of an experience and the content of a judgement. Alongside considerations about content in this context, another important issue is the whether we consider judgement as a form of direct input, as it were, or as output. In this context, another contrast with experience is helpful. The sorts of things that experience or perception can deliver can sometimes be reasons. Earlier, I discussed the basic condition of rational constraint by experience. Reasons for action or moral reasons generally do not seem to be quite distinct from reasons for belief. Any metaphysics which finds problematic the thought that experience can furnish agents with moral beliefs might also find problematic the thought that experience can deliver any reasons whatsoever. Yet, scepticism about the idea that perception can deliver reasons for action or perhaps moral reasons more generally does not imply a scepticism about the rationality of perceptual content per se. Nevertheless, at least we can say that there is a distinctive set of objections to the idea that perception can deliver moral reasons, in contrast to those objections to the idea that non-moral perception can deliver non-moral reasons. Among the number of possible objections here is one that focuses on the issue of whether perception in this context is best understood as the brute input for thought, or whether the relevant perceptual content is evidence for a particular judgement. If perception delivers reasons in a way that presents an agent with evidence for some subsequent judgement, say, then there is an apparent problem with finding a non-arbitrary connection between that content and the subsequent judgement in the way outlined in the previous section. In other words, unless there are principles available to take an agent from a particular content to a judgement, the mechanisms by which the judgement is

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ultimately reached are too wide in scope. My own view here is that these difficulties can be overcome or at least made to be less difficult in light of alternative conceptions of how judgement can be justified and how it figures in the wider context of being a subject. For Crary, moral thought involves more than moral judgement in the sense of the application of moral concepts, although it includes that as well. As she puts it, It would seem absurd to deny that moral thinking sometimes consists in the application of a moral concept, or moral rule, to some aspect of a situation. For it clearly often does. But we can acknowledge this while also claiming, not only that moral thinking takes other forms but, moreover, that these other forms qualify as moral in the same way that moral judgments do. (Crary, 2007a, p.40) In this passage Crary suggests that judgement is the application of a rule, and I have raised some questions about whether that is the best or an adequate understanding of judgement. For a particularist, it would seem as though the ‘application of a rule’ is not a defensible way to characterize moral thought although, as I have suggested, the issue is not best regarded as one about whether there are rules or not. Crary’s critique of judgement involves highlighting the breadth of moral thought, the idea that there is more to moral thought than rules, concepts and their application in judgement. The point that our moral lives involve more than what can be captured by judgement in this technical sense is, surely, right, and, for the prospects of moral particularism, the other forms of awareness need not be indicated merely formally. For instance, as Väyrynen notes, a significant contrast between Dancy and McDowell is that the latter explains that there is a non-formal specification of what the phronimos brings to a situation, in the sense Dancy uses above (Väyrynen, 2008, p.105). Phronesis involves the shaping of the practical intellect such that a person is equipped to get things right and this, at least according to McDowell, is a matter of the practical intellect ‘having a determinate non-formal shape’. The capacity to get things right involves having the practical intellect formed in such a way that motivational and evaluative propensities are moulded appropriately (McDowell, 1998a, p.185). Such propensities would not all be characterizable as exercises of judgement in Crary’s sense, and they would, presumably, be candidates for those forms of awareness that qualify as moral in her sense. If we interpret Dancy’s sense of ‘our capacity to judge’ in a fairly permissive

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way, it is possible to recognize that the capacity in question does not spontaneously arrive in a person’s life, so to speak. Rather, the capacity to judge and to think in terms of reasons requires ethical formation, in a broad Aristotelian sense.13 Dancy invokes the idea of a ‘successful moral education’ as what explains the onset of the ability to get things right on a case-by-case basis (Dancy, 1993, p.50). If the permissive interpretation of how judgement figures in Ethics Without Principles is right, then some analogue of this education or process of formation is at least intelligible. The capacity to judge requires the development of forms of awareness and webs of sensitivities of the sort Crary points to. In Mind and World, McDowell explains that in the ethical case a specific shape is given to the practical intellect through education, broadly understood, and he claims that that process is a particular case of a general phenomenon. We can generalize the Aristotelian model of ethical formation, McDowell suggests, in order to help make sense of the idea that we have our ‘eyes opened to reasons at large’ and how we become responsive to rational demands besides those of a particularly ethical kind (McDowell, 1996, p.84).14 The capacity for moral judgement, then, should not be regarded as somehow independent of the conditions that explain how we come to possess it. So, as well the breadth of features here we can also see that there is depth too, so to speak. In other words, there is a background which specific judgements and what it is to think in terms of reasons presuppose. In the present context, it is natural to assume that this background is partly constituted by ‘pre-judgements’ or ‘prejudices’ in Gadamer’s technical sense of the term (Gadamer, 2004, p.278). Thinking in terms of reasons and the capacity for judgement require a wider context of upbringing and participation in substantive ways of life. Dancy’s particularism makes use of the appeal to judgement as a way of knowing which, as I understand it, is not principled, does not employ a method, but is not thereby arbitrary. The appeal to judgement is very important for how moral particularism can be developed in the future. I have touched on the way in which practice is, again, important to this debate and represents an alternative conception of the grounds, both metaphysical and epistemic, that constitute what judgement is and how we might use it. Chapter 3 discussed how a particularist might appeal to moral experience and how, at least according to Dancy’s version, a sense-based account of our sensitivity to reasons is not adequate by itself to provide a compelling characterization of moral knowledge. The idea that the capacity of judgement is vital for ‘thinking in terms

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of reasons’ is right. It is right not simply because judgement might be a more plausibly rational way of knowing normative relations than is sensory relatedness to the world. The idea is also helpful, I think, because it provides a way to reconceive what ‘moral experience’ might amount to. Although McDowell and Dancy lay emphasis on different aspects of how judgement figures centrally in our moral lives, they both can be interpreted as suggesting, more or less directly, ways to understand moral experience. There is a more narrow sense in which Dancy uses experience, as an important but insufficient element in our moral knowledge, but there is also a wider sense too. Part of the point, as I understand it, of drawing on Aristotelian conceptions of education and the forming of our practical intellect, is to provide a way to characterize how our moral thought and action is immersed in and responsive to a world. Understanding what that means involves a different approach to moral experience, and that is what I turn to in Chapter 5.

5 Moral Phenomenology

5.1 Phenomenology The nature and role of moral experience has a central place in the history of moral philosophy. In Chapter 3, and the themes extended to some of the discussion in the previous chapters, moral experience has been discussed in the context of moral particularism. Although for the most part implicitly, the discussion has raised important questions about how to interpret and analyse moral experience which bear upon the received traditions of moral theorizing, as well as on the more local issues about how moral experience stands with regard to particularism. Towards the end of this chapter, I consider the relation between moral phenomenology and moral particularism and whether there can be phenomenological support for particularism in ethics. Overall I argue that, once properly understood, phenomenology can help clarify the positive ways in which particularism can be developed, as well as reinforce a number of criticisms that have been raised against anti-particularist positions. This chapter, then, takes a step back from the specific issues about the nature of experience as it figures in particularism, and I will spend some time discussing the place of phenomenology in moral philosophy and address some objections to the very idea that phenomenological considerations are relevant in ethics. It is worthwhile taking some time to do this before returning to the specific relation between phenomenology, moral experience and particularism. The positive ways in which particularism can be supported by characterizing moral thinking as within the space of moral reasons rely, partly, on correcting misunderstandings about the nature and role of phenomenology. Presumably, many would agree that careful and honest description of our experience and reflection upon it are important elements in 110

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philosophical activity. Yet this can mean a number of different things. It can, for instance, refer to the disciplined reflection on the structure of experience according to the tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl, and appropriated by Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and many others. It also can refer more broadly to the reflective study of our experience, whether or not we choose to employ the technical vocabulary and conceptual apparatus of, say, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. More narrowly, the term can also refer to the objects or ‘data’ of philosophical inquiry; ‘the phenomenology’ of, say, an experience ‘as of a red squirrel’. This latter sense is typically used to pick out those aspects of our experience that are immediately introspectively accessible; those subjective elements that constitute the interior of our experiential lives. This sense of phenomenology can encourage the thought that it is the qualitative dimension to experience, the ‘what it’s likeness’, that exhausts the relevant data. The danger is that this obscures the importance of structure. Phenomenology, at least as I understand it, involves reflecting on and trying to bring out the structure of experience as well as aspects of its content. Despite a tendency to equate the phenomenology with the so-called raw feel of an experience, a more fruitful interpretation of phenomenology concerns the structure of experience rather than, or at least as well as, the content of experience. One reason why structural analyses of experience are more appropriate is that such an approach helps to avoid the mistake that a phenomenological account of some aspect of our lives implies reporting various kinds of mental manifestations.1 This mistake is not unconnected to a central topic of Chapter 3 and Sellars’s response to what he regarded as the misplaced emphasis on presence, and the way in which presences are supposed to rationally support a subsequent body of knowledge. A structural rather than purely content-focused approach for phenomenology is able to capture a range of irreducible aspects of experience that are missed, or tacitly presupposed by, a merely introspectionist account. As I look at a chair, the experience incorporates a variety of aspects that would be excluded if we restricted our focus in the attempt to reveal some raw and subjectively accessible ‘chair-ness’ quality to the experience. The experience of the chair is, in part, structured by an awareness of the practical possibilities that such a thing affords to me and other people; principally, perhaps, sitting opportunities. The experience of the chair is enjoyed, most of the time, as being in a room or communal space, among other furniture, in a house, and so on. On one level, all of this is quite uncontroversial and perhaps

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even mundane and does not, presumably, require any special training in or prior commitment to Husserlian phenomenological method, for instance. Nevertheless, none of these things is even intelligible if we understand by experience or ‘the phenomenology’, simply a subjective qualitative feel. Phenomenology should not be restricted to referring to those ‘sense data’ that are exhausted by their being made manifest to consciousness. At least for present purposes, the point here is one about how to characterize experience, rather than one of finding the best definition of ‘phenomenology’. In addition, focusing attention on the structural aspects of experience need not imply that we ought to disregard experiential content as important or as somehow unworthy of attention. There has recently been a renewed interest in moral phenomenology.2 Despite this, some philosophers are sceptical about any appeal to phenomenological considerations to support or criticize substantive philosophical claims. In an extreme form, this scepticism extends to the idea that there is anything that could possibly serve as relevant data for a phenomenological approach in the case of ethics. Partly, the scepticism is because of the tendency to identify the meaning of phenomena with something like ‘qualia’. The relevant scepticism is encouraged by the thought that there is no stable and essential ‘what-it’s-likeness’ to moral experience, and so nothing that we could learn or infer from the nature of moral experience itself. But his kind of scepticism presupposes a distinctive and optional attitude to philosophical reflection on the nature of experience and, in any case, implies that what it would be to find the nature of experience edifying at all in the relevant philosophical sense is for it to have a distinctive and exclusive content. ‘Moral experience’ is a vacuous notion unless it has a content common to all and only all such experience. There are a number of potential worries here. Suppose that it is agreed that moral experience does indeed have such a distinctive and exclusive content. This immediately raises the issue of what kind of distinctive content that moral experience is supposed to possess and of its relevance for philosophical argument. On the one hand, perhaps the phenomenology is intrinsically such that it favours some philosophical way of ‘providing an account of’ or ‘making sense of’ our moral experience in the way discussed in Chapter 2 (section 2.3). If that is true, then appealing to experience in order to defend, say, moral realism, is circular. On the other hand, if the moral phenomenology is in itself ‘neutral’, then any appeal to the phenomenology is only indirectly relevant for establishing a philosophical thesis. Either moral experience


has a common and exclusive content and has a substantive and intrinsic dialectical status, or it does not.

5.2 Scepticism about moral phenomenology Moral philosophy must start from somewhere. Since starting from ‘outside’ ethics seems untenable in his sense, Bernard Williams proposes that one option is to start with ethical experience itself. According to Williams: ‘Ethical experience’ can cover many things. There could be a way of doing moral philosophy that started from the ways in which we experience our ethical life. Such a philosophy would reflect on what we believe, feel, take for granted; the ways in which we confront obligations and recognise responsibility; the sentiments of guilt and shame. It would involve a phenomenology of the ethical life. This could be a good philosophy, but it would be unlikely to yield an ethical theory. Ethical theories, with their concern for tests, tend to start from just one aspect of ethical experience, beliefs. (Williams, 1985, p.93) So ethical theory, as understood by Williams, cannot make good use of the moral phenomenology because a phenomenological approach would involve reflection on aspects of moral subjectivity untranslatable into the psychologistic framework of ‘beliefs’. Ethical theory is too austere to recognize, let alone find interesting, the range of features brought to light by a phenomenological approach. The variety of moral experience resists the ambitions of moral theory. So phenomenology helps to reveal the diversity of moral experience and in doing so provides us with reasons to be sceptical about moral theory. Nevertheless, others have argued that the diversity of moral experience provides reasons to be sceptical about a phenomenological approach. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, has recently claimed that the methodological constraints on a phenomenological approach in ethics fail to provide the scope required to adequately account for the diversity of moral experience. The claim is that morality lacks the unity required for there to be a useful moral phenomenology. For Sinnott-Armstrong, moral phenomenology would involve introspecting on one’s own experience, describing what that experience is like, and doing so while remaining agnostic about whether or not those experiences correspond to or accurately reflect anything external

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(Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008, p.85). For there to be a recognizably phenomenological approach in ethics, it must be the case that we can identify something important and illuminating common and peculiar to all moral experience. This is not possible, according to Sinnott-Armstrong, and so moral phenomenology as a method of moral inquiry is unworkable (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008, p.91). Central to this sort of scepticism about moral phenomenology is the inability to introspectively identify the distinctive and common features of moral experience. This allegedly poses a dilemma for any would-be moral phenomenologist. We might choose to focus on a narrow set of cases of moral experiences, such as moral experience of ‘anger’ or ‘disgust’ as Sinnott-Armstrong suggests, and provide a description of what unites these experiences. There might be something that unites these and similar experiences, but this approach would not cover the variety of moral experience. Alternatively, we could adopt a broad approach aiming to cover the range of moral experience, and focus on experiences of ‘appropriateness’, say. This would let in too much and would not be restricted to the distinctively moral, and thus it would not be moral phenomenology. So the variety of moral experience on the one hand undermines moral theory, and on the other hand undermines moral phenomenology. For Williams, moral phenomenology provides reasons to be suspicious of moral theory and, for Sinnott-Armstrong, moral experience shows moral phenomenology as an enterprise to be a mistake. My view is that while it is incontrovertible that moral experience comes in many forms, and that ways of philosophically inquiring into ethics are and should be diverse, there is no need to feel that the sheer fact of variability implies that phenomenology can only be of limited value. For instance, one horn of Sinnott-Armstrong’s dilemma is the threat that, in our search for the unifying elements across moral experience, we lose sight of what is distinctively moral and our inquiry becomes unfocused or undisciplined. This rests on a problematic assumption about the metaphysics and epistemology of morality and moral experience. Perhaps we ought to interpret the dilemma as saying that while there is an ontological difference, so to speak, between moral and non-moral experience, a phenomenological approach is ill-suited to tracking this difference on an experiential level. Another interpretation is that there is no such ontological difference, and that a phenomenological approach supposes, wrongly, that there is. It thus fails because it has a confused understanding of its own nature and purpose. But I think that this presents an unsatisfactory picture of what moral phenomenology can amount to. In addition to the varieties of moral


experience, we should also speak of the varieties of moral phenomenology. That is, the many ways in which a phenomenological approach can contribute to the ways in which philosophical questions are posed and responded to and, in particular, to illuminating concealed prejudices and assumptions about the content and structure of moral inquiry, as well as about the content and structure of moral experience. Sinnott-Armstrong writes that phenomenology is about describing what it is like to enjoy experience at the same time as remaining neutral about whether or not such experiences are successful in the sense of providing faithful access to the way things are in the world (SinnottArmstrong, 2008, p.85). For there to be a phenomenological approach to some area of our lives, the object of that approach must be mental (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008, p.85). That is, that the object of phenomenological analysis must be constituted by various states or episodes which are enjoyed by minded beings and, perhaps, restricted to what that mindedness delivers by way of content. Consider trying to send an email. There are many features of this process that fall into what this understanding of phenomenology allows. We try and send the email by clicking the button, and have the belief that the message is sent and that it will soon arrive in the recipient’s inbox. There is, accordingly, a phenomenological account of trying to send an email, of believing that this has been successful, and of it seeming to you that you have succeeded in sending an email. As Sinnott-Armstrong writes, ‘There is a phenomenology of trying, seeing, and believing, but no phenomenology of succeeding’ (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008, p.86). What this is intended to reveal is that what is available to introspection cannot include the fact that one has succeeded. A phenomenological approach is interested in mentally accessible features such as trying, seeming, and believing, whereas facts pertaining to whether or not things are as they seem, or are as we believe them to be, or are as we experience them, are not phenomenologically relevant. So the phenomenologist, by definition, is interested only in the mental realm. The view under consideration says that since phenomenology is of the mental, there cannot be phenomenology of morality, unless morality is mental. But moral realists, for example, think that morality is not (wholly) mental, in so far as the objects of our moral thought and reasoning are not exhausted by certain mental acts, states or episodes. Furthermore, one need not be a realist to deny the idea that morality is wholly mental. The thought is that occurrent mental states are what the phenomenologist is interested in and that the extra mental, for example, that

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realm of moral properties that exists and provides the rational constraint in virtue of which our moral thought and discourse is sometimes successful, is not introspectively accessible and so is not the object of phenomenological investigation. Moral realists are not, and they cannot be, phenomenologists because they think that moral thought and discourse is experienced in a way that may or may not accord with how things actually and really are in the moral universe. So, moral realists argue for the primacy of that which is mind-independent in order to provide an account of what disciplines moral thought. They are concerned, we might say, with worldly and so phenomenologically irrelevant considerations, more than with mental or subjective states. This is significant because moral realism has been defended, precisely, on the basis of certain phenomenological considerations. The orthodoxy is that ‘the phenomenology’ provides at least default support for a realist interpretation. On this view, moral experience is intrinsically realistic, and the philosophical project of realism is a systematic attempt to clarify and affirm the pre-philosophical features which are, arguably, simply part of our moral experience. Consider, for example, Dancy’s approach here. He tells us that the ‘main argument’ for realism is a form of argument from phenomenology (Dancy, 1986, p.172).3 Nevertheless, this orthodoxy has been challenged by those who think that even if moral realism turns out to be a defensible account, arguments in support of it must be provided independently of sheer reflection on the nature of moral experience. So critics of realism deny that the onus-of-proof is on them. Presumably, alternative accounts must be defended on independent grounds, and so everyone shares the onus-of-proof. So, in some sense, moral experience is neutral, or at least is metaethically neutral in the sense that the nature of that experience, as such, does not incline toward, or away from, any particular philosophical account. Other philosophers suggest that the argument from moral experience to moral realism is not compelling unless it proceeds via an independently plausible premise that supports the view that morality is constituted by a mind-independent realm of fact (for example, Loeb, 2007). That is, we might be subsequently persuaded that realism best captures what is, in fact, a neutral object of philosophical inquiry, but being so persuaded is not achieved simply by reflecting on the nature of moral experience as such. This objection against a presumption in favour of realism is related to other sorts of accounts which can admit the objective-seeming character of moral experience without appeal to some realm of fact properly external to us as moral agents. One need not be a moral realist to account for the way in which moral experience


seems to be.4 The debate over whether or not experience provides a presumption in favour of moral realism clearly involves an understanding of what moral experience is. Yet, it does not seem very easy to achieve such an understanding. As Aristotle explains, the onset of rational powers and capacities of discernment provide persons with the ability to ‘see’ accurately. As he says of the experts in Book VI.xi of The Nicomachean Ethics, ‘because experience has given them an eye they see aright’ (Aristotle, 1980, p.153). So there are at least two senses of experience here that are relevant and which track the different senses of how moral phenomenology has been understood. Very broadly, on the one hand experience refers to the history of practice, thoughts and judgements, which in part constitute a sort of biographical history. On the other hand, experience is understood as that which is enjoyed by agents in particular cases. These two senses are related in as much as what it is to see aright is dependent on the types and range of experience one has been subject to through upbringing. This cooperation between a retrospective sense of experience and the claim that preparation through cultural initiation opens one to the world is, for some, untenable. Among other things, it supposes that transformations of inner subjectivity through upbringing somehow co-vary harmoniously with what is in any case objectively right and true. One implication here is the depth to which a phenomenological approach might reach. Moral experience is extremely diverse and we need a range of ways to think about it. But this immediately raises some problems. One is a problem about the aspirations of a phenomenological approach to ethics. The other is a problem about what such an approach takes as its objects. The first problem is not something which, if it is indeed a problem, is one which is peculiar to phenomenology.5 This problem or challenge takes the following form. An orthodox characterization of the nature of moral philosophy is that its task is to account for our experience or practice, as discussed in Chapter 2, section 2.3. Since moral phenomenology involves an attempt to describe our experience or practice, it will have nothing to say about what does or could account for our experience or practice. This might be a fatal objection, because phenomenology can only deliver descriptions of our experience or practice; phenomenology can never get underneath the surface level of the appearances or how things seem. So, moral phenomenology might be helpful to gather information about the variety of moral experience but is toothless when it comes to contributing to moral philosophy.

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What is most significant for present concerns is the idea, common it seems to many approaches in moral theory, that higher-order theoretical accounts ought to be constrained to a significant degree by the nature of the moral phenomenology. One way in which this thought is often expressed is that the phenomenology of moral thought contains a very puzzling tension between various elements that seem at once intrinsic and incompatible. In order to make intelligible the relevant tension, phenomenology is used in a very broad sense to cover such things as ‘ordinary practice’ or the way things are with ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. But the ordinary is massively perplexing. In a familiar passage, Michael Smith writes that [T]he problem is that ordinary moral practice suggests that moral judgements have two features that pull in quite opposite directions from each other … The objectivity of moral judgement … enables us to make good sense of moral argument … but it leaves it entirely mysterious how or why having a moral view is supposed to have special links with what we are motivated to do … the practicality of moral judgement suggests just the opposite, that our moral judgements express our desires. While this enables us to make good sense of the link between having a moral view and being motivated, it leaves it entirely mysterious what a moral argument is supposed to be an argument about … Nothing could be everything a moral judgement purports to be. (Smith, 1994, p.11) This problem about moral practice threatens to make the whole thing incoherent, and frames the task for the moral philosopher who is to make sense of our practice, to make sense of our ordinary moral life. This might further complicate matters, though, as it seems to imply that the phenomenology is at the same time philosophically problematic in this present sense, and also philosophically neutral to the extent that if realists are not correct in claiming that experience as such inclines towards realism then, presumably, everyone shares the onus of proof equally.6 The tension which Smith’s book succeeds in putting centre stage is between the objectivity and the practicality of moral judgements; between the representational aspirations of moral judgements and their role in making us act. These two aspects make for uncomfortable partners because the metaphysical backdrop, against which the pretensions to objectivity can be vindicated, fits uneasily with the requirements that


being in a moral state of mind would need to satisfy in order to vindicate the motivational nature of thinking in terms of ethics. In discussions of contemporary analytic moral philosophy, the debate over the place of phenomenology often takes as its point of departure Mackie’s influential defence of what he called moral subjectivism, against the ambitions of realists to defend the thought that moral values are mind-independent. In the present context, the important thing to emphasize is the dialectical role accorded to ‘the phenomenology’. The phenomenology in the sense of ‘the way things seem’ is crucial in Mackie’s construction of his so-called error theory of moral discourse. The kind phenomenological reflection central to Mackie’s account need not exhaust what it is to reflect on our moral experience. It is incontrovertible that moral values and features show themselves in our lives as, at least, demands which are not of our own making. It is this that figures in Mackie’s characterization of experience, but it has been more thoroughly worked through in the work of other philosophers and, in particular, in Maurice Mandelbaum’s book The Phenomenology of Moral Experience.

5.3 Mandelbaum’s moral phenomenology Maurice Mandelbaum’s attempts to provide a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the ways in which, as moral creatures, we make moral judgements (Mandelbaum, 1969). His objective is to provide a method of doing moral philosophy which is not, as he says, restricted by prior acceptance of substantive philosophical theories about the fact/value distinction, or certain psychological or sociological assumptions about the nature of human beings, or metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and related epistemic assumptions about the character of objective knowledge (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.15). ‘No matter where we start’, Mandelbaum writes, we must in the end reconcile our conception of value … with what we conceive to be true of the world … Only the most violent diremption enables us even to suppose that reality and value are antagonistically related. (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.17) In this context, Mandelbaum is pointing out that a so-called metaphysical approach in ethics is motivated by considerations which hope to show how the nature and normative force of values flow ‘from the underlying properties of being’ (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.17). Nowadays,

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though, adopting a metaphysical approach to ethics can seem rather different.7 Critics of neo-Humean metaphysics suggest that there are problematic assumptions about what the world is like and what the world contains and hence of the ways in which we can come to enjoy knowledge of it. For Mandelbaum, the difficulty of a metaphysical approach is that it does not square with the moral judgements which we actually make. This difficulty is, for instance, what makes metaphysical moral particularism hard to accept. Inquiry into ethics, or moral philosophy, is about investigating the judgements which we actually make and not about claiming that a system of ethical obligation, say, is entailed by the nature of ultimate reality (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.17). According to Mandelbaum’s phenomenological method, we ought to direct attention towards moral judgements and moral experience in a way that resists understanding them in light of prior commitments in psychology, sociology or metaphysics. Yet, this sort of ‘bracketing’, as we might call it, is only an initial ‘severing’, as he says, of the ethical from the non-ethical (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.31). A phenomenological approach to ethics seems severed from psychological, historical and ontological issues not because of something essential to the phenomenological approach, but because of the tendency towards the ‘dichotomizing of disciplines’ (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.32). Mandelbaum cites Hume as an example of combining a phenomenological approach with a willingness to connect ethical inquiry to non-ethical hypotheses.8 So there is more to neo-Humeanism than projectivism and scientistic assumptions about the nature of the world and our faculties of knowledge and understanding.9 Mandelbaum’s preferred approach to the phenomenology of moral experience is a structural one. A ‘structural approach’ (or a ‘situational’ or ‘contextual’ approach as he calls it (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.314) seeks to unite the content of judgements and the characteristic attitude of the person making the judgements. It unites them by including the nature of the situation in which the judgement is made. For Mandelbaum, in what he calls ‘direct moral experience’ such as being faced with someone in need, the structure of a person’s moral experience involves a ‘felt demand’ on the part of a subject, which is in an inseparable relation to the situation or broader context in which that demand can be felt at all: In this type of case … it becomes clear that the element of moral demand presupposes an apprehension of fittingness: the envisioned


action places a demand upon us only because it is seen as connected with and fittingly related to the situation which we find ourselves confronting. (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.68) It seems to me that what ‘the situation’ means here need not just be another way of referring to a particular case. In addition to individual circumstances that we find our selves confronting in this sense, we find ourselves already in a world. This is, presumably, part of what Mandelbaum means by suggesting that only through an act of abstraction could we rive a wedge between ‘reality’ and ‘value’ and, similarly, that situations are not confronted in radical isolation from each other. As such, this kind of phenomenological approach does not simply reduce to inward-looking contemplation as a kind of retreat from the world. However, Mandelbaum’s approach is criticized for being overly intellectual in virtue of the emphasis placed on judgement; a criticism raised by others who, nevertheless, share a broadly phenomenological approach. Dreyfus and Dreyfus, for example, claim that Mandelbaum wrongly equates moral experience with moral judgement (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.230). This objection is important for what follows in the following Chapter, but for present purposes it is worthwhile considering in more detail what an alternative phenomenological approach in this context might recommend.

5.4 Dreyfusian moral phenomenology Despite Mandelbaum’s attempt to regain the proper starting point for ethical inquiry, a starting point constituted by moral judgements which we actually make, Dreyfus and Dreyfus complain that Mandelbaum dismisses the importance of ‘our unreflective … responses to the current interpersonal situation’. They ask: ‘Why not begin on the level of this spontaneous coping?’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.231). This alternative approach is keen to protect the central place of spontaneous coping embedded in the structures of interpersonal contexts and to resist forms of intellectualism or conceptualism about knowledge and expertise. These latter approaches go wrong because they not only falsify how we in fact deal morally with the world and each other, but they also mischaracterize the kind of expertise with which our moral thought and action is performed. This, at least for Hubert Dreyfus, is because the intellectualism or conceptualism demands processes of self-monitoring which adjudicate between better or worse thoughts or

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actions. Sometimes, as Dreyfus recognizes, we can and should monitor ourselves, as in cases when we are trying to hone some new skill or solve a problem. But such monitoring indicates less-than-expert performance. There is a different level at which our embodied skills are enacted when we are fully absorbed in them; this does not require cognitive supervision and functions independently of the framework of propositions which some philosophers think underpins rational human thought and action. Perhaps this form of anti-intellectualism is right. We mischaracterize and thus misunderstand the nature of moral experience if we try and provide an account of it in terms of ‘mindedness’. The point here, like the question over foundationalism about the non-inferential/inferential relation, is about whether we see non-cognitive skills constitutive of embedded or absorbed coping or mindlessness as primitive in some sense, or we understand mindfulness and the correlative possession of concepts and intellect as the bedrock. It would function as the bedrock if unthinking success emerges from cognitive training and effort. My interest in it here is with the light it throws on how we can understand what ‘structure’ amounts to for moral phenomenology and for moral particularism. We have moral experience, in part, as direct and explicit moments of ‘felt demand’ or something like it, and in ways that are seemingly objective.10 Such moments require a context in which to exist and in which to manifest their normative character or to be meaningful. This context serves as the background against which explicit moral experience occurs but is itself a feature of moral experience. There is a background of normativity which is presupposed by concrete ‘actual’ experiences. If this is the spirit of Dreyfus’s criticism against Mandelbaum then it is along the right lines, it seems to me. The process of being initiated into ways of thinking and ways of acting, presupposes a background against which explicit episodes of moral knowledge and moral experience can be enjoyed. One aspect of moral phenomenology, then, can help deflate the assumption that moral experience is exhausted by reporting on the range of experiences available to introspection. Instead, phenomenology can help us to think again about the nature of the world in which we can have moral experience at all; a world shared with others and permeated with actual and possible values, thoughts, actions and reasons. To take account of this background, it is important that the present or actual experience of a moral situation one is currently facing is not abstracted from the range of interconnections which, at least in part, provide that situation and experience with meaning. Radical moral


particularism, for example, or a familiar caricature of existentialism, which pictures moral thought and judgement as taking place in radically isolated moments, cannot take account of this wider context. This context or background includes enabling participants to find things meaningful in ways that are not easily translatable into a framework of explicit principles. So, while this point might tell against a form of principlism, it also registers how a radical particularism is, perhaps ironically, unable to account properly for the content and significance of context. Moral experience involves considering the ‘actual present case’ as it might be connected in complex ways to other cases and sometimes to the broad shape of a life. Moral experience involves experience of these relations. These are made available through taking up a place in the world with others and through becoming sensitive to patterns of normativity and expectation which shape individual experiences and give them a meaningful place in our lives and projects. Thus, the structure of moral experience is provided, in part, by a crucially intersubjective element; a point which makes sense of the broad but important thought that moral subjectivity involves relations with others, but also one that draws out the place of language and what it is to have awareness of and be responsive to meaning. As Richard Norman puts it: This process of finding a sense and a meaning in our experience is closely tied up with coming to understand … the meaning of language … making sense of … experiences is at the same time coming to understand the meaning of words such as ‘grief ’ and ‘bereavement’, coming to see what is meant by talk of the ‘sacredness’ of life or of the ‘uniqueness’ of an individual life … it is through the availability of such words in our language that we are able to make sense of our experience. A child learning the meaning of the words is at the same time learning how to understand the world, learning the meaning of human actions and what makes them intelligible. (Norman, 1997, p.126) Recall from Chapter 4 the ways in which moral judgement is in very close connection to experience. The claim was that the logic of experience shared something very basic with the logic of judgement in the sense that while the states of experience and judgment were different in terms of things such as psychic control, commitment, and so on, the content of an experience and a correlative judgement is, at least in veridical cases, the same. There is a set of arguments, however, that are geared

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to undermining the sense that judgement is either a basic constituent of theoretical competence, or that judgement is a fundamental aspect of moral phenomenology in a way that differs from the critique of judgement provided by Crary as outlined in Chapter 4. Dreyfus and Dreyfus argue that even if moral judgement does play an important role in moral subjectivity, its status is not primitive in the sense proposed in Chapter 4. The challenge to a judgmental account of moral experience turns on the claim that the function of judgement, and the intelligibility of ascribing the capacity of judgement to moral agents, presupposes a sophisticated and relatively abstracted understanding of moral phenomenology and the nature of moral subjectivity. Overall, the idea is that moral phenomenology can be used to show how moral judgement, if it is needed at all, is a higher-order capacity that is operative only in special circumstances, and is not a basic constituent of our dealings with each other or with the world. As noted at the beginning of this section, Dreyfus and Dreyfus claim that the idea of judgement has eclipsed a more basic dimension to moral thought and reasoning. Mandelbaum is criticized for subsuming ‘all moral experience’ under the notion of judgement, and for claiming that the task of moral philosophy, even when provided with an emphasis on phenomenology, is that solutions to moral problems can be gleaned from an analysis of moral judgement, rather than from other features and aspects of moral thought, discourse and subjectivity which are not only different from, but are presupposed by, the capacity for moral judgement. Dreyfus and Dreyfus argue that moral experience outstrips moral judgement; that is, that the range of considerations which plausibly constitute an analysis of moral experience cannot be reduced to or exhausted by the notion of moral judgement. There is an ‘intellectual prejudice’ in the thought that the notion of judgement can capture everything that goes under the name of moral experience (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.230). The possibility of, and some attendant problems with, subsuming experience under judgement, or failing to distinguish between experience and judgement in the relevant way, has already been outlined. In the present context, the issue has a different focus, although I think that it is related. For Dreyfus and Dreyfus, too broad a conception of judgement indicates that the notions of deliberation and choice are misread as basic features of moral subjectivity. They do not deny that the capacity of judgement and the constituent abilities for deliberation and choice are important; the claim is that the conditions under which deliberation and choice appear are not paradigmatic or characteristic of our moral lives. Dreyfus


and Dreyfus claim that our ‘everyday ethical skills’ and our ‘ongoing ethical coping’ should not be obscured by the peculiarly philosophical mistake of construing the activity of judgment, such as deliberation and choice, as fundamental to moral thought and reasoning (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.232). For Dreyfus and Dreyfus, moral philosophy has suffered because it has focused on judgement and justification to the exclusion of our ordinary skills and capacities at developing and exercising expertise. For the expert, in ethics as in chess, the spontaneous responses which embody expertise in a given domain are not acts of deliberation and judgement which happen very quickly. When an expert is engaged in activity, their thoughts and actions are not the outcome of inferential processing, but intuitive reactions and spontaneous responses. The phenomenology of expertise, if it is to be faithfully characterized, must not insist that deliberation, decision and justification drive the expert thoughts and acts; comportment to situations is typically reactive but not cognitive.11 In other words, expert comportment is a form of attunement to the context and not a conclusion. Although it is true (it is also part of the phenomenology) that in some challenging situations, deliberation and decision and perhaps a host of explicit inferences are used it is nonetheless a mistake to read such deliberative structures back in to the range of spontaneous responses (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.238). Dreyfus and Dreyfus claim that ethical comportment of an expert kind is irreducible. Nevertheless, even though it is phenomenologically basic, this does not mean that it is a sui generis ability; it rests on a rich and lengthy process of training and developmental stages. It is important not to misunderstand what is meant here by ‘rests’. Even while the processes of development and education undergird expertise, the content of the development is not explicit in expressions of expertise. Defenders of the intellectualist approach assume that the developmental background stands to the expert performance as principles stand to particular cases: the relevant object of understanding is rendered intelligible and its justificatory relation secured by the logical connections that bind the background to the foreground. Dreyfus and Dreyfus suggest that a phenomenology of expertise can be adduced in a way that sheds light on ethical expertise. They suggest a five-fold account according to which levels of understanding and skill can be delineated in terms of the ways in which agents cope with the relevant subject matter. Agents move through stages of novice to expert through intermediate stages of advanced beginner, competence and proficiency (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, pp.232–6).

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As experts, agents unthinkingly succeed. The five-fold model suggested includes the thought that at the initial stage the novice, who has his sights on expertise, learns the ethics of his community by following strict rules, learns to contextualize them, and then ultimately can ‘leave rules and principles behind and develop more and more refined spontaneous ethical responses’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.237). Dreyfus and Dreyfus claim, rightly, that the developmental analysis viewed in terms of epistemic states distinguishes between knowing that and knowing how, and they suggest that the latter best captures the ‘thoughtless mastery of the everyday’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.236). It may be quite true that expertise is thoughtless in this sense, but that is why, for the rest of us who are at best budding experts, rules and principles must not be left behind (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.218). This suggests, then, that whatever value this version of moral phenomenology might have in describing the relevant kind of expert performance, such descriptions might not penetrate to the level at which it can provide reasons to reject a generalist epistemology. In other words, even if the surface level of the appearances are as of principles-less spontaneous coping, that might not provide us with an account of the epistemology of such coping. It might not, that is, inform us as to whether an (ethical) expert’s thinking and action is warranted or justified unless, that is, we already assume that justification is intrinsically part of what it is to be an expert, or inherently part of what it is to spontaneously cope in the relevant sense. But that assumption is, presumably, not one that we should adopt since even experts get it wrong and make mistakes. In the ethical case, particularly, this possibility of error is at the same time vital and notoriously difficult to articulate. Experts get it right more than most, perhaps. Although the explanation will be different, the possibility that experts get it wrong is not somehow of a different kind than the possibility that non-experts get it wrong. Expert performance does not somehow simply constitute what it is to get things right but rather registers success more frequently than a non-expert would. According to the Dreyfus brothers, the phenomenology of ethical expertise is more than an attempt to describe what expertise feels like, as it were. It is intended, by virtue of its description, to thereby present a critique of rules, principles, concepts and thought-based accounts of what will, in Chapter 6, surface as mentalistic approaches to our ethical thought and practice. The description, then, is not somehow neutral, and is at least normative in a minimal sense. What this kind of phenomenology of moral experience amounts to is, at least, an attempt to clarify what needs to be explained. But selecting what stands in need of


clarification is not obvious. A narrow focus on the experience of expertise might suggest that rules and principles are absent, but it is a further step to draw conclusions about moral experience or moral thought as such on that basis. Dreyfus and Dreyfus have provided an influential account of the phenomenology of expertise but the characterization of the explanandum is not untainted by various assumptions. For some philosophers, these assumptions can contain tacit commitments to substantive moral theories, and thus can prejudice from the outset how experience is described. For instance, Michael Gill suggests that the kind of approach adopted by Dreyfus and Dreyfus with regard to providing a phenomenological account of ethical comportment would, as much as any other appeal to the phenomenology, be infected by a host of prior beliefs and commitments. Gill suspects that phenomenology cannot serve as a pre-theoretic starting point or anchor in the consideration of rival moral theories because moral phenomenology is itself theory-laden … how people experience morality is often infected by their theoretical beliefs or prior commitments concerning the nature or origin of morality … moral phenomenology lies downstream of moral theorizing. (Gill, 2008, p.100) Gill explains that philosophers inclined towards a phenomenological approach might favour an introspectionist methodology for revealing the core features of moral experience. Adopting this method would involve attending to one’s experience as carefully as possible and then carefully describing how things seem. But whatever content is revealed through that process would provide no reasons to think that anyone else has the same experience, and thus the approach cannot play any substantive dialectical role in defending a thesis about the content and significance of moral experience outside the sphere of one’s own inner life. Gill suggests that doing phenomenology by introspection is particularly problematic if there is no neutral access in the sense that experience is already ‘theory-laden’ (Gill, 2008, p.101). This is one version of the thought that our experience is intrinsically related to background beliefs and concepts, perhaps embodying a ‘theory’ about the origin and nature of morality. As such, experience cannot be used to arbitrate between competing theoretical accounts, even in cases where the phenomenologist is introspecting privately and trying to decide between such theories for herself on the basis of how things

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appear. Phenomenological reflection need not be exhausted by introspecting one’s inner mental life, but the idea that our inner experience does not constitute an independent and indubitable starting point for inquiry is important. The point that inner experience is already embedded in a web of relations is a problem if we are attempting to justify our beliefs or ground knowledge on the basis of such experience conceived of as independent of such relations. But that is the idea that I think we ought to reject. For Sellars, reporting the way things appear on the basis of ‘inner’ experience presupposes a grasp of the way things are which incorporates an ‘outer’ awareness of the world. The ability to make the distinction between looks-talk and is-talk, as Sellars puts it, comes with a recognition that our experience of the world can be mistaken (Sellars, 1997, p.43).

5.5 ‘Looks’ Bernard Williams famously suggested that ‘ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems’ since it purports, among other things, to be a way of thinking about how the world really is and at least sometimes it correctly represents how things are (Williams, 1985, p.135). Williams suggests that there is a fundamental difference between explanations of convergence in outlook in the ethical and scientific case. Very roughly, even if there is convergence in the way human beings think about ethics that convergence will not be because our ethical outlook has been guided by the way things actually are. In contrast, convergence in scientific inquiry can be explained by the guiding role of worldly facts or starts of affairs. As Williams notes, this means that we need to distinguish different senses of convergence and different ways of explaining why convergence occurred or did not occur (Williams, 1985, p.136). In addition to how Williams characterizes the logic of convergence in science and ethics is the distinction between appearance and reality, or the way things seem and the way things are. The form of this distinction is very familiar and is needed in order to make sense of the idea that we can get things right or wrong. Without a way of thinking in terms of the way things are in contrast to the way things seem, there is no place from which to discriminate between more or less correct ways to think and behave. In such a condition, it is difficult to make sense of the idea that we could reasonably think or act at all. Recall that in Chapter 3 I argued that, by drawing on Sellars’s critique of the epistemology of traditional empiricism, a certain account of a particularist moral empiricism would need to be rejected as it stands.


Part of Sellars’s work is motivated by the way in which he thinks that the is/seems distinction has been muddled. It was the foundationalist ambitions of traditional empiricism which, at least in part, generated the Myth of the Given. Foundationalism is not just a yearning for grounds, it also involves an attempt to articulate the basis upon which subsequent knowledge could be rendered intelligible and justified. In the case of the inverted order of priority between seems and is, empiricallyminded foundationalists seek to justify empirical knowledge on the basis of the way things appear partly because of the allegedly apodictic nature of the appearances. Sellars claims that appearances do admit of analysis and are related to (not ‘rest’ upon) claims about the way things are.12 In fact, more than this, appearance claims are parasitic on thought and discourse about what is the case. The thought is this. Discourse and awareness of appearances depends upon discourse and awareness of things being the case. Appearance-talk is a retreat from something primitive, not the starting point for investigation or the ground upon which an edifice of knowledge could be constructed. Sellars is sceptical of the Cartesian thought that knowledge can be constructed on the basis of self-evident truths immediately accessible to the mind via the very act of thought. The foundationalist’s mistake is to require that there is (there must be) a level of thought and knowledge which is distinct from other levels of knowledge, where the distinction is drawn in terms of the origin of entitlement. In other words, thoughts which are constitutively knowledge-conferring do not depend on the possession of any other knowledge – this lack of dependency qualifies them as foundational. Now, as Sellars argues, an empiricist version of this thought makes certain episodes or states the ‘unmoved movers’ of a structure of knowledge and his scepticism about the intelligibility of such a model is motivated by the way he understands the relation between linguistic competence and concept mastery. Sellars denies that language-games and hence concept mastery are things which can be successfully understood and co-operatively developed in radical isolation. Since the language-game and hence conceptual mastery of appearances involves the capacity to withhold commitment or endorsement with regard to the content of an appearance, the capacity itself rests on, or is at least is interdependent with, the language-game, conceptual mastery and awareness of thoughts and claims about what is the case.13 This suggests a different but related way to understand how particularism would fail if it mischaracterizes the background of concepts and meanings that provide the wider context for our sensitivity to reasons.

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5.6 Particularism and moral phenomenology In addition to contributing to the ways in which we can frame moral experience and its relation to candidate forms of realism or anti-realism, a phenomenological approach can shed light on the prospects for moral particularism. There are no ‘qualia’ that might, if they existed, have satisfied introspectionist accounts of moral phenomenology. Still, given introspectionism does not exhaust phenomenology, one way in which phenomenology can contribute here is by helping to show how certain claims that particularists make are close to what Maurice Mandelbaum says about the problem of Ross’s account of prima facie duty. As Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons point out, Mandelbaum’s critical comments can be translated in to the language of contemporary particularism, since they are directed against a so-called atomistic theory about the metaphysics of reasons (Horgan and Timmons, 2008a, pp.129–30). There are ways to provide support for particularism in this context. As suggested, it is not a requirement that in order to vindicate moral particularism on the basis of phenomenological reflection we need to reveal some core element of inner experience. Far from a concession to those sceptical of moral phenomenology as such, and thus to how it might be of help in a discussion of particularism, this enables different ways to characterize the claims particularists make about our moral awareness and subjectivity. For instance, McDowell’s critique of principlist moral epistemology is based on account of our moral experience as enjoyed by persons in the course of a life, in the midst of living. These considerations do not augment a particularist account of our moral knowledge, but rather form part of the articulation of such an account. What I am suggesting is that reflecting on the wider conditions that enable moral subjectivity as such, does not somehow thereby signal a move away from particularist moral epistemology. I will come back to consider these conditions in more detail in Chapter 6. As McKeever and Ridge point out, in complex and controversial cases our experience is less immediate and perception-like and involves processes of explicit cognition and deliberation (McKeever and Ridge, 2006, p.78). It seems right to say that in such cases we need to do a lot of thinking and deliberating. But, in the context of how this figures in the debates between principlists and particularists, what sort of contrast does this mark with seeing that such and such is the case? One question here is this. Are episodes of seeing part of a capacity which is the product of thought, in the sense that expertise manifested in non-inferential


judgements is underpinned by comparison, deliberation and forms of explicit belief-formation? This question could be posed as being about which way of knowing, seeing or thinking, is basic, but it seems to me that the issue is not simply one of priority. Particularists suggest that principles-based approaches wrongly suppose that moral thinking involves performing correct patterns of inferential reasoning in order to work out what to do or what to think. This, critics suggest, gets the phenomenology wrong as well as implying that the constraint which disciplines moral thought is constituted by a range of principles and a set of rules which help us discriminate between more or less correct inferences. So, on the one hand, the debate is about the metaphysics of moral knowledge in so far as principlists and particularists differ over what they think needs to be the case in order for moral thought and discourse to be rational. In addition, and something which is overlooked in comparison to the amount of attention given to the metaphysical consideration, the debate is over the experience of moral subjectivity. I do not want to suggest that considerations about the ‘experience of subjectivity’ imply epistemological considerations to the exclusion of metaphysics. As I have suggested in Chapter 2, and elsewhere, while important questions need to be asked and answered about the metaphysics of moral facts, of moral reasons, and of moral principles and laws, we miss a range of crucial territory if we take such issues as primary or foundational, or at least as somehow already governing the debate or setting the agenda between particularists and their generalist opponents. How would a phenomenological approach to a epistemological variety of moral particularism proceed? I have suggested that proceeding straight to issues about the metaphysics of reasons or of the nature and scope of ‘principles’ can mask a set of issues that are important. Nevertheless, the motivation for proceeding like that is partly shared by particularists and their opponents. That is, that the structure of moral thought and discourse is rational to the extent that it is non arbitrary. The differing contributions here are articulated as responses to the question: ‘What does the rationality of moral thought and discourse presuppose?’ The shared assumption here about moral thought and reasoning tends to place questions like: ‘Could we get by without moral principles?’ or ‘Can we sustain the idea that moral thought and reasoning is in perfectly good order without the existence of principles?’ as the dividing point between particularists and their critics. Such questions raise important elements in the debate, but they only capture some of the relevant terrain.

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Similar questions can be asked from a related and more epistemological direction and, specifically, responses to them can make use of the resources provided by a broadly phenomenological approach. In Chapters 3 and 4 I have discussed some of the ways in which experience and judgement are placed with regard to the prospects for moral particularism. A common element there was the question of justification, both in terms of Sellars’s diagnosis of the errors of foundationalist empiricism, and of the particularist’s attempt to provide an account of justification as an alternative to the subsumptive model apparently favoured by generalists. Both of these suggest, but leave undeveloped, another level of understanding which can shed light on the structure of moral knowledge by considering aspects of our moral experience, broadly understood. Mandelbaum’s proposal for a phenomenological approach in ethics involves ‘a careful examination of the moral judgements which men make’, and asserts that the nature of ethical inquiry overall should not be dictated by prior commitments to psychological, sociological or metaphysical theories (Mandelbaum, 1969, p.31). We might think that any optimism for moral particularism falls away immediately, since even a cursory glance at the ‘data’ shows that moral principles are not only common, but inherently part of moral thought, reasoning and education. Principles are part of our moral experience and undeniably part of what it is to enjoy moral knowledge. Moral epistemology naturally invites reflection on the nature of justification, but there are other aspects to moral knowledge too. One set of issues is about the vehicles for the transmission of moral knowledge. A disconcerting aspect of some versions of moral particularism, partially captured by casting it in terms of the Myth of the Moral Given, is that it renders the idea of inter-case judgement problematic. This gives rise to a puzzle about how a person retains knowledge between moral cases. Moral realism would suggest that our moral thinking is answerable to the facts and, if this realism is combined with particularism, then our moral thought is answerable to how things are presented by the world case by case. In the present context, however, the puzzle generalizes in some form to a worry about how a culture or practice retains moral knowledge. Sellars writes that The fundamental data of ethics are the concrete moral judgements and evaluations which we and other people make on particular occasions. They include the general maxims and principles which are


formulated in reflective moments and which play a central role in passing our way of life on to the next generation. (Sellars, 1977, p.209) However he warns, in a footnote, that It is always dangerous to take copybook maxims at their face value, for to be a realistic expression of our fundamental moral convictions, they would have to be accompanied by a complicated set of qualifications which specify exceptions, make clear what kind of context is presupposed, and stipulate an order of priority for those situations in which different maxims would call for opposite plans of conduct. (Sellars, 1977, p.209n) So principles and their qualifications are part of what we pass on to our children and they are part of how we encode moral knowledge. Sellars explicitly incorporates both particular judgements and general principles into the set of concrete data with which philosophical inquiry works. Nevertheless, Sellars then raises the question as to what distinguishes a philosophical approach to these data from an ‘anthropological’ one and suggests (but does not endorse) the idea that whereas the philosopher is interested in which moral principles are true, the anthropologist is interested in which moral principles are in fact espoused by particular people or cultures. This distinction suggests that while the objects of philosophical and anthropological investigation are putatively the same in this context (moral principles), the attitude to or way of understanding them is different in each case. The point is important here since a common reaction to moral particularism is that it cannot be right since, as a matter of fact, we teach, use, reject, commend and criticize moral principles all of the time. Given these facts, then, the particularist moral epistemologist must embark on a radical overhaul and revision of our extant practice were it not for the fact that a widely shared methodological commitment is that philosophical activity does not aim to change our practice, but to explain it, account for it, or show it for what it is. It seems that the particularist faces a dilemma of either conceding the incontrovertible role of principles in moral knowledge, or of disregarding that fact and thus proposing a radical revision to our practice, or at least making implausible claims about those facts. In other words, particularism seems to be incompatible with the phenomena. What I want to recommend is that a phenomenological approach in this context is,

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among other things, a way of considering what the phenomena are. My own view is that such an approach is important for helping to bring out the implicit or tacit elements in the structure of moral knowledge that are intimately related to the implicit structures of human experience as such. Too often is ‘the phenomena’ understood simplistically or in ways that are abstractions. The present phenomenological objection to particularism appeals to the fact that moral principles are part of our moral practice and our form of life. Providing a wide-ranging and detailed description of our practice is, as Bernard Williams would have said, a good philosophy. Yet, a phenomenological approach here can enhance this attitude in so far as it can reveal what is implicit in the explicit anthropological ‘facts’ in this sense. The concrete facts of our moral lives do not simply arrive in our lives (or for philosophical analysis) from nowhere. Explaining the nature of our moral experience in this broad sense is not achieved by insulating the experience from the conditions which provide for that experience, and simply describing it ‘as such’. Moral particularism does not stand or fall in light of whether, as a matter of fact, we do use moral principles. Rather, the issue is a matter of appropriately locating this kind of fact given that no sober moral theory can deny that moral principles or rules are at least as small but important part of what it is to have moral knowledge, of what it is to justify one’s thoughts and actions and those of others, and of what it is to pass on our way of life to the next generation. The existence and employment of moral principles, in some form or another, cannot be gainsaid. Yet, we need not interpret this as a reason to think that principles have a privileged status in the structure of moral knowledge. Philosophers of varied inclinations can insist that ‘a detailed analysis of the facts of our practice’ is an important element in philosophical activity. They are right. Nevertheless, this insistence can be understood in a wide variety of ways. Sometimes, a ‘Wittgensteinian’ approach must simply lay out the facts and describe them. Famously, there are passages in Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein recommends that philosophical activity ‘simply puts things before us’, by ‘assembling reminders’, and makes no critical contribution to, or commentary on, the totality which lies ‘open to view’. Wittgenstein suggests that what is ‘hidden’ from view is not of direct philosophical concern (1967, §126). He does, however, soon after also claim that: ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (Wittgenstein,


1967, §129). Philosophical inquiry is, presumably, radically unlike ‘practice’ since it is disinterested, detached and unable to influence on a practical or theoretical level. But it is not clear what kind of stance is distinctively philosophical in this context as opposed to, say, an empirical sociological or anthropological stance or attitude. According to the canon, we might expect that a so-called transcendental approach would help to reveal what is not available through an empirical description of the relevant facts. One might read Wittgenstein, at least some of the time, as providing for a transcendental understanding of these empirical facts; facts such as those which constitute our practice or ‘forms of life’. Jonathan Lear has suggested that Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following is an example of what he calls a ‘transcendental anthropology’ (Lear, 1986). On the one hand, there is in the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations an obvious commitment to the importance of any ‘spatial and temporal phenomenon of language’ (Wittgenstein, 1967, §108) and to a non-abstracted (non-theoretical) account of normativity that proceeds by looking at the use of words (Wittgenstein, 1967, §340). It is natural to read Wittgenstein as somehow opposing ‘metaphysical’ accounts of normativity and recommending an exclusive focus on the actual, the real, the empirical, the natural. Of course, there is such a focus, but it is not one that is thereby incapable of having different dimensions of assessment such that ‘non-empirical’ aspects are not only important for, but essential to, the relevant enterprise of the critique of normativity. There is room, I think, for the (modest) sense of transcendental to incorporate how the kind of facts that are on show when we look at and see our moral practice are already interconnected in various ways. These connections and interrelations are not visible from an empiricist perspective, at least not to a Humean empiricism. The surface phenomena implicate networks of relations which cannot be recognized, let alone accounted for, by a purely empirical approach. If we follow Lear’s suggestion, we can ‘loosen’ the Kantian idea of the transcendental such that it has less to do with the mind’s formal structuring of experience, and more to do with non-empirical investigation (Lear, 1986, p.274). Lear’s interest in drawing out and critically discussing the anthropological and transcendental aspects in Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following and normativity is, partly, to address the wider issues of how a commitment to the substantive aspects of our activities, culturally embedded practices, and so on, are related to questions about what conditions and constrains these practices, and thus what provides our concepts and their use in our lives. The general issue, then, is with the

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relation between actual and possible use. Or, how what is or has been as a matter fact is related to what could be or how things might carry on. For Hume, nothing other than psychological habits relate what is or has been to what might be. Notoriously, there cannot be any justification for relating these distinct items in the ways we do. Hume supposed that we can nevertheless be justified according to the ‘present testimony of our senses’ although that thought, as argued by Sellars, underpins one version of the Myth of the Given. These issues about the differences between anthropological and philosophical stances are not simply relevant to so-called metaphilosophical considerations. Garfield’s defence of moral particularism involves locating the source of the justification of moral thought and practice in ‘our shared backgrounds of concerns and ways of engagement with the world’ (Garfield, 2000, p.204). In emphasizing these kinds of ‘background’, the intention is to provide a corrective to a prejudice in favour of regarding moral knowledge as explicit and principled. According to Garfield, a more compelling way to capture the foundations of moral knowledge is to recognize the role of the ‘complex network of habits, dispositions and ways of seeing, always rooted in the particular, and cultivated by training’ (Garfield, 2000, p.204). I take it that the point here is not that principlism is somehow simplistic or just too rigid since it can be highly complex. Rather, the relevance is that formulating moral knowledge in terms of principles presupposes a more basic level of knowledge, understanding and awareness. Resistance to characterizing inhabitation of this background level as knowledge could come from the tacit assumption that anything worthy of the title of knowledge must be because it can be stated in principled terms. A particularist who wants to emphasize the implicit structure of moral knowledge in so far as it involves the kind of networks of habits that Garfield mentions, need not thereby be hostile to principles as such. That would be, as noted above, to reject or ignore some crucial aspects of moral phenomenology. Rather, it is the status of principles and the related form of knowledge that is most important. A mistake would be to regard the implicit structures of moral knowledge, those embodied in our shared background of habits and ways of seeing, as being capable of a principled articulation. Once the reach of particularism is understood to go beyond a thesis about the nature of reasons, it is possible to begin to appreciate that it is a promising way to bring out the foundations presupposed by principlism. One way to try and do this is, I suggest, to consider the relation between moral particularism and the space of reasons.

6 The Space of Moral Reasons

6.1 Placing in the space of reasons Sellars suggests that a characterization of knowledge that underlies the Myth of the Given, in his sense, can be avoided by ‘placing’ knowledge in the space of reasons. The idea that there can be states of awareness the having of which does not presuppose knowledge, learning, or the possession of concepts which at the same time are able to provide justification is not coherent.1 The image of the space of reasons is introduced by Sellars partly as a way to maintain that knowledge can be adequately understood only in a normative context. The context incorporates the sense in which placing episodes or states within it, involves the knower being justified or being able to justify what they say. It is distinctive and contrasts with other ways in which we make things intelligible, including perhaps other states or episodes. According to McDowell, we sometimes make phenomena intelligible by placing them in a network of intrinsically non-rational relations; the kind of relations that unify phenomena as conforming to laws of nature, for instance. The space of reasons, by contrast, is a domain which involves justificatory relations, and is one of the ways in which we make things (ourselves, for instance) intelligible as being sensitive to, asking for, and providing, reasons. The space of reasons is significant in ways that extend further than considerations relevant to narrow epistemology. Even for Sellars, the space of reasons is needed to make sense of things other than whether or not a particular claim to know is in fact a case of knowledge. In §16 of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars writes that

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[T]o say that a certain experience is a seeing that something is the case, is to do more than describe the experience. It is to characterize it as, so to speak, making an assertion or claim. (Sellars, 1997, p.39) Clearly, asserting and claiming are relevant to knowledge and to epistemology but, it seems to me, there are salient considerations presupposed by narrow epistemology. The space of reasons is the normative context which asserting, claiming, withholding, endorsing, believing, desiring, and so on, require for their intelligibility. Sellars, presumably, wants to make a point that is common between ‘knowing’ and ‘experience’. An experience when it is a seeing that cannot be captured in purely descriptive terms, just like knowing cannot be. The point is not that description here is somehow irrelevant but that it would be, taken by itself, an insufficient or an impoverished way to construe the relevant state or experience. So what it takes to characterize knowledge by placing it in the logical space of reasons, as Sellers recommends, is not just restricted to the consideration of ‘epistemic states’ or of what it is to know. It encompasses an important way in which we can regard mindedness, intentionality and human subjectivity more generally. Given this generality, my view is that our moral thought, reasoning and discourse can be pictured in terms of the space of reasons, perhaps as emblematic of what it is to inhabit the space of reasons. This sort of view takes a quite different starting point to that used by Simon Blackburn. He writes that The natural world is the world revealed by the senses, and described by the natural sciences: physics, chemistry, and notably biology, including evolutionary theory. However we think of it, ethics seems to fit badly into that world ... the problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part. (Blackburn, 1998, pp.48–9).2 Superficially at least, Blackburn shares with Sellars an interest in ‘placing’ an aspect or domain of our lives. In Blackburn’s account, the natural world as it is described by the sciences assumes a privileged status, and the problem of placing emerges in the way it does because, as Blackburn explains in the same place, ‘we nearly all want to be naturalist nowadays’.3 Nevertheless, the way I understand the space of reasons in its epistemological and more general sense refers to a way of

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characterizing thought and action in its normative context and, as I will suggest, that is also a way of characterizing the network of relations that underpin our intersubjective practices and how our thought and action is related to the world. It is clear that the space of reasons is metaphysically unlike what is nowadays meant by the ‘natural world’. An obvious difference is that, contrasted with Blackburn’s picture, the space of reasons is not properly outside of and prior to the domain that we are trying to place in it. Sellars’s space of reasons is invoked as a way to avoid the confusion of trying to analyse what is normative (knowledge) in terms of what is non-normative (nature), and thus is not troubled by the same ‘problem’ that neo-Humeanism might find here. None of this need imply that the space of reasons and what is not the space of reasons need to be always insulated from one another. What I would like to emphasize is the subjective element of how we characterize things in various ways, sometimes as in the space of reasons and sometime as not. McDowell has used the ‘realm of law’ as a contrast to the space of reasons but that phrase does not directly pick out the nature of brute matter itself. It is one way in which we understand things. To that extent, making things intelligible in terms of the space of reasons is like making things intelligible in non-space of reasons terms; at least both are ways to make things intelligible.4 Other candidates for what contrasts with the space of reasons include Rorty’s ‘space of causal relations to objects’ (Rorty, 1980, p.157) although that, as McDowell points out, seems to imply that the rational and the causal inhabit quite distinct realms and that thinking in terms of causes and thinking in terms of reasons are and must be entirely separate activities and concern distinct objects.5 The generalized understanding of the space of reasons, used to incorporate ways in which we depict subjectivity and mindedness more broadly, has metaphysical implications that some find controversial. According to McDowell ‘[t]he conceptual sphere does not exclude the world we experience’ (McDowell, 1996, p.72), yet we need to avoid a lapse into a form of idealism that this might encourage. The point, or challenge, is to maintain the claim that the world we experience is not outside a boundary marking the limit of the conceptual sphere, while not ‘slighting the independence of reality’ (McDowell, 1996, p.34).6 The general point I want to keep in focus is this. In order for our experience to provide reasons for us to think and do things, that experience must involve the exercise of concepts since without that kind of exercise, experience would be bereft of rationality. Our experience of the world, according to this view, is conceptually articulated.

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If this picture is transposable to the moral case, then our experience of the moral world makes use of a relevant conceptual repertoire. In this case, our moral experience shares with a more general account of the nature of experience the requirement that subjects are made aware of reasons – moral reasons to think and act – by the exercise of conceptual capacities. This is relevant to particularism because the reasons that are revealed to subjects will resist codification in principles in the way discussed in Chapter 2, and also that the epistemology implied will be perceptual. I will come back to consider the objection that this sort of conceptualism about experience, and about moral experience, ignores a level of pre-conceptual and pre-reflective awareness and understanding and which therefore prioritizes ‘mindedness’ over embodiment. For the moment, I want to consider a related neo-Humean objection to the idea that our concepts provide us with access to the world.

6.2 Concepts and the moral world In outline, the objection is this. If we need concepts to enjoy experience of the moral world such that the relevant conceptual sphere does not exclude the world we experience, then claims of moral knowledge cast in terms of conceptually articulated experience or perception of moral properties are insulated from criticism. Conceptualism about moral experience of this form regards veridical moral experience as states that directly take in the world. Since this model denies that there is a ‘boundary’ across which ‘external’ non-rational data is exchanged for ‘internal’ meaningful content, it thus does not (cannot) separate input from output. This is a deep failing of the position since, for Blackburn, ‘it is morally vital’ that we split apart these elements: ‘By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism’ (Blackburn, 1998, p.101).7 Blackburn provides the example of an alleged ability to pick up on instances of ‘cuteness’ in the world, specifically in women. Imagine a group of people who use the term ‘cute’ to express how they view some women, and also take themselves to be sensitive to instances of cuteness, ‘to have a new, genuinely cognitive, sensitivity to the cuteness of some women’ (Blackburn, 1998, p.101). Suppose, further, that some other people do not perceive women like that, who do not have that kind of sensitivity: If the last word is that these people perceive cuteness and react to it with the appropriate cuteness reaction, whereas other people do not, we have lost the analytic tools with which to recognize what is


wrong with them. What is wrong with them is along the lines: they react to an infantile, unthreatening appearance or self-presentation in women, or overt indications of willingness to be subservient to men, with admiration or desire (the men) or envy and emulation (the women) … Children and pets are quintessentially cute. Applied to women, this, I say, is a bad thing. (Blackburn, 1998, p.101) By preserving the normative dimension of criticism, opened by the analytic tools that separate the content of what is reacted to from the content of the reaction, we can pass judgement on the reaction; we can say that reacting in that way, is wrong. This ability to assess reactions is not available to the view Blackburn is objecting to because, if it is right and that we can have direct access to the nature of the moral world through the development of perceptual skills, then all we can say is that virtuous folks experience the world in one way and the non-virtuous experience that world in a different way. So a person without the perceptual abilities, facilitated by the operation of conceptual capacities, is simply not able to experience the moral world in the way others do. A result is that while we can say that people have different kinds of experience it is not possible, the tools are absent, to discriminate between such experiences in terms of their justification. The apparent failure of this view to secure an adequate normative space of criticism, is due in part to the way in which the perceptual skills needed to see relevant moral properties are developed. We need to become initiated into a way of life such that we become capable of being sensitive to the moral world. According to the objection under consideration, the inability to critically assess claims to moral knowledge arises because of how the relevant sensitivities are grounded in a form of upbringing. If the sensitivity is a product of upbringing then different upbringings will, presumably (though not necessarily), produce different sensitivities. In that case, it is simply too late for those who do not see the world in the way that the virtuous do. Two issues are important here. One is the idea that we at least sometimes have access to moral reality. The second is that the moral concepts which supposedly put is into contact with moral reality are available, and only available, through a process of upbringing or education, broadly construed. The claim that we achieve conceptually articulated access to the moral world by being educated in the right way naturally becomes, according to this kind of objection, a form of elitism. It is elitist since the relevant education and hence conceptual repertoire is

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a precondition of successful moral knowledge. Failure to gain moral knowledge – access to the world – is a function of employing the wrong concepts or simply being without the relevant concepts due to an impoverished upbringing. Yet there is no rational path available to move a person who does not see aright other than, rather implausibly, to return them to begin their conceptual initiation again. Either one has been initiated correctly or one has not. According to Blackburn, there is something misplaced about the reliance on tradition, pre-established forms of life, or emphasis on ‘whirls of organism’, if such things form a crucial part of a story about the supposed epistemic efficacy of perception of moral reality;8 the principal complaint being that there is a significant tension between the ‘internalist’ character of a form of life or practice, and the ‘externalist’ character of perceptual awareness of the objective world. Very broadly stated, McDowell tries to combine these two elements, and in doing so aims to formulate an alternative conception that simultaneously respects the facts that moral discourse is inalienably connected to sensibilities, practices of shared interests, and patterns of reaction of appropriately sensitive subjects. These are features which Blackburn admires (Blackburn, 1998, p.93) but the unfortunate aspect, according to Blackburn, is that the practice that we are embedded in is also regarded to constitutively enable genuine responsiveness to the moral world. Blackburn’s input/output distinction draws out the problematic reaction to appearances. According to familiar Humean phenomenology, it seems to us as though moral properties are part of the world, although they are not. In the present context, this is important because there is a stable external world which we react to in various morally relevant ways. Notwithstanding the appearances (that is, that we are reacting to moral properties), we are in fact reacting in morally relevant ways to a morally irrelevant external world. But it is misleading to put it like this. Rather, it is better to say that external world is morally relevant in so far as it is a crucial constituent in the space of normative criticism that Blackburn speaks, although it is not itself intrinsically morally relevant.

6.3 Moral experience If it is appropriate to think of experience and competence in the ethical domain by the lights of a certain perceptual model, then traditional forms of empiricist attitude need supplementing or re-thinking by giving a certain competence, or an ability that allows for a transcending of the merely actual and present, a central role. The relevance this has


for revealing the unsuitability of certain aspects of Dancy’s complaint against ‘looking away’ should now be more clear. In short, not only is a practice fundamentally relational in the anti-atomistic sense of giving meaning to ‘instances’ or ‘cases’ beyond any empirically discoverable qualities of instances, the idea of experience of those instances or cases is itself relational too. Without being in the relevant practice, agents would not perceive or experience the relevant instances. Perception of the instances, however, remains a crucial part of what it is to be part of that practice. This should provide hope that a particularistic understanding of experience can combine an emphasis on the importance of the particular, but avoid a collapse into radical atomism by appreciating the essentially relational aspect of competence or ability with regard to moral cases – a competence that not only enables better ways of taking in what is there morally speaking, but a competence or ability that allows for the taking in of ethical states of affairs at all. The dilemma between foundationalism and coherentism that McDowell seeks to undermine in Mind and World is structurally relevant to my argument in the following way. It is familiar that Dancy locates the force of his defence of particularism in reflections about the nature of reasons. For my purposes, Dancy’s critique of ‘looking away’ targets a form of coherentism by exposing as misguided the attempt to secure justification for an action, belief or judgement, merely by bringing it into an appropriate relation with other actions or judgements. I have explained how and why Dancy rejects this picture, and for present purposes this rejection can be understood to mirror McDowell’s claim that coherentism ignores constraint from and answerability to the world. However, an equally misguided foundationalist alternative supposes that rational constraint can be provided by the world through experience, but fails to construe the very idea of experience in a way that enables it to provide reasons. McDowell’s aim is to recommend a model crucial to which is the co-operation between a single experience and the immanent conceptual framework that is essentially related to these sorts of experiences. The thought here is that concepts are not somehow extracted from experience. There is no moment of extraction or cognitive effort needed to derive ideas from experience, and build up a reservoir of concepts each of which has an independent origin. The linkages or relations here are primitive, not derivative. In contrast, fundamental to a Humean framework is a particular kind of scepticism about such relations: when considering an real object in and of itself, no rational or inferential linkages are discernible with respect to any

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other object. This is not a psychological failing on the part of a subject, it is rather an alleged truth about the origin of our ideas or concepts. For McDowell however, in a Kantian frame of mind, rational relations are primitive aspects of what it is to enjoy experience. Without them, impingements or ‘intuitions’ would be blind. Without such rational linkages, conceptually endowed experience would not be able to provide reasons, and the provision of reasons is a desired characteristic of experience, and is certainly desired for the conception of moral experience. For Sellars, appreciating the co-operation of having an experience and it bearing conceptual relations implies that this revised empiricism pictures experience as, in his famous phrase, ‘fraught with ought’. For McDowell, when experience is allowed primitive normative force, it is ‘fraught with implications’ (McDowell, 1996, p.32). The Humean premise that denies the possibility of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ can be granted, but this is precisely why it is not possible to derive a concept from an experience in the extractionist or psychologistic way that Humean empiricism supposes. The relevance of the alternative Sellarsian framework is that the integration of experience and the grasp of a wider framework requires a normative world. Such an environment has two senses for my purposes here. First, it is required for the very idea of thinking, or the possession of concepts to be assessable, in the sense that concepts or beliefs can be related to others in better or worse ways. In other words, an agent can be less proficient with a concept than another agent, or less proficient than she was yesterday.9 This cannot be made sense of in the absence of normativity. Second, the normative environment refers more literally to the manner in which having minds like ours means that we undergo normative experience in our relation with the world. I have suggested that a conception of experience bereft of normative character can make mysterious how experience is supposed to provide reasons. For my concerns, a paradigmatic example of taking in normative aspects of the world is ethical experience. So, minimally, experience as such must be normative if it is to furnish recipients with reasons and so atomism is undermined. This should make us suspicious of any account that presents moral experience as atomistically delivered, because such experience is precisely reasonable, rational or reason giving. McDowell urges us not to suppose that the objects of moral experience ‘belong, mysteriously, in a reality that is wholly independent of our subjectivity and set over against it’ (McDowell, 1998a, p.159). Nevertheless, the world which we inhabit is mind-independent although not, as we might put it, mindedness-independent:


The ethical is a domain of rational requirements, which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them. We are alerted to those demands … [when] … our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons. (McDowell, 1996, p.82) Furthermore, the very idea of being open to the layout of the ways moral features are presented, can only make sense from a domesticated perspective within the space of reasons. Just as a sensory impact, in order to be, or ground, knowledgeable states cannot originate in some radically alien realm outside of the conceptual sphere, the moral domain cannot be detected let alone moves within it justified, in the absence of a suitably normative context or perspective. This implies that ethical features are part of the world only from the perspective of a subject possessing the appropriate sort of conceptual capacities; capacities that cannot be captured atomistically. Moral experience is non-atomistically reasonable, in the current sense. Nonetheless, it appears as though it is just an atomistic conception of ethical experience and knowledge that is implied by radical particularism, despite an insistence that a relevant version is premised on a holism in the theory of moral reasons. Supposing that holism about moral reasons holds, there remains a serious implication for the correlative epistemology with regard to how agents are to treat moral experiences and cases. In light of McDowell’s anti-Humeanism, the serious implication is articulated by the apparent ‘inter-case atomism’ that I have argued is a component of a radical particularism. Hume’s philosophy is relevant here because it represents that sort of atomistic empiricism rejected by Sellars, and by McDowell, and it also lends itself as an appropriate interpretive framework within which to analyse the present form of particularist moral atomism. Despite clear differences between the respective metaethics of Hume and that represented by Dancy, a very general topic that interests both kinds of approach is that of relations; of ‘moving from case to case’ as Dancy puts it (Dancy, 1993, p.63). In Chapter 3, I considered the way Dancy explains how we might, through a commitment to a misguided conception of the nature of moral reasoning and justification, have a tendency to ‘look away’ from the actual case. Dancy urges us to carefully examine the particular case, and this is typically expressed in terms of perception or discernment of moral features; features that speak to our moral sensitivities from a state of appropriately qualified independence. Focusing on non-moral natural features will never, even if we look ‘really closely’,

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deliver anything recognizably moral and will certainly never reveal a reason that favours one’s ϕ-ing now.10 Both Dancy and McDowell insist that it is crucial to genuine moral awareness, and to the possibility of knowledge in the moral realm, to adopt an appropriately evaluative perspective; a perspective that is enabled by the coming into possession of relevant conceptual capacities. The suggestion, at least on the face of it, is that we ought to deny that moral cases ‘other’ than the present one are of genuine normative relevance to moral deliberation and knowledge about a present case. As a general piece of advice, ignoring what may appear to be similar or identical cases may be very helpful, perhaps crucial, to the extent that it might reduce the chances of skewed moral reasoning, and thus reduce the chances that one might get it morally wrong. However, it is important not to let such, albeit plausible, practical advice permeate to our understanding of the very rationality of moral thought and talk. This is especially relevant because it is this latter domain, the very rationality and logic of reasons as such, that Dancy considers his own version of particularism to be fundamentally based on. To be sensitive to a moral state of affairs is an instance of being sensitive to a normative state of affairs. This much seems trivial, and one is entitled to expect that many of the conditions and constraints pertinent to being sensitive to normative states of affairs apply to being sensitive to moral states of affairs. This expectation might be vindicated by Dancy’s insistence that his moral particularism is a consequence of, or at least a parallel to, perfectly anodyne commitments in related areas of philosophy. However, as I suggested in Chapter 3, the conception of what it is to possess knowledge of particulars is a metaethical version of a Sellarsian ‘knowing in presence’. Impacts from the external world, according to one interpretation of what Sellars recommends, must not be conceived of as bereft of normativity. Experience, to be meaningful, must be fraught with ought. Now, a condition of being ‘fraught’ in this sense is that such experiences are already in rational relations. Although the stress upon explicit and thorough inspection of each moral case as it arises is to be welcomed (and can be granted by particularists and non-particularists alike), this epistemological advice on its own does not appreciate that what it is to have an experience of an ethical case presupposes a rationally organized, and organizing, network of relations that enable being relevantly responsive to moral normativity. Radical moral particularism suggests that agents look at moral cases closely to find out what is morally going on, and it urges that looking


away from it could betray a prejudice in favour of certain conceptions of rationality. Yet, it can seem as though the positive thought, that our moral thought and deliberation submit to the authority of the particular case, is over-demanding. For this kind of particularism to be distinctive, it must understand ‘authority’ here to mean something more than referring to how a particular case is simply more important for moral reasoning than the mechanical application of principles; particularists and non-particularists alike could agree on this. As a consequence, the authority of the particular case must refer to a more basic characteristic of the instance where normative force is taken in by a subject by the lights of the particular case somehow on its own. Sellars’s critique of traditional empiricism seeks to undermine the notion that being struck by an instance of empirical awareness can be rationally authoritative but presuppose no acquired abilities; abilities that enable a subject to (possibly) take command of the rational relations between experiences, and to track the rational relations that, for instance, situate experiences in a framework of other relevant experiences. Sellars rejects the epistemological ‘presentism’ of Humean empiricism, and radical particularism implies a presentism of an ethical sort. The idea that one can be impressed by the normative demands of a case by looking really closely at it cannot be sustained in the absence of how that case is or might be related to others. Undoubtedly, there are different kinds of understanding and awareness that are relevant here. For example, that being aware of or responsive to an actual situation requires a different form of awareness to a more implicit or tacit understanding that constitutes grasp of wider contexts. I will now discuss these wider contexts in the next section.

6.4 What is ‘context’? As Mark Lance and Margaret Little point out, ‘[v]irtually every moral theorist working today agrees that context matters, in certain ways, and that principles are not the whole of the moral story’ (Lance and Little, 2008, p.54). Particularists might be understood to put emphasis on context to the exclusion of recognizing any role for principles at all, in effect claiming that it is context all the way down, so to speak. However, Lance and Little have advanced a number of ways to distinguish what they call contextualism from particularism, and they argue that the former is more plausible since it can appreciate how the moral domain is law-governed and how moral thinking and reasoning involves ‘defeasible generalizations’ which are generalizations that are ‘fundamentally explanatory and

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fundamentally porous – shot through with holes’ (Lance and Little, 2008, p.54). What separates particularism from contextualism is the fundamental role of this kind of generalization. Contextualism, so understood, suggests it is a mistake to assume that generalizations need to be exceptionless. If this assumption is rejected, then there is the possibility of retaining the thought the generalizations are fundamental to ethical thought (as it is to other domains). This ‘deep’ contextualism suggests that moral generalizations hold in some contexts but not in others, and that this variability is in virtue and not in spite of the fact that exceptions go all the way to the explanatory ground (Lance and Little, 2008, p.57). Particularists and their opponents of various sorts can agree, then, that context is important, although the idea of context is used in a variety of ways. It is, I think, one of the most startling aspects of particularism, at least in a fairly extreme version, that it seems to defend the view that our moral thinking, in emphasizing the particular, denies a place for generalization. Lance and Little, rightly, suggest that the question is not so much about whether or not generalization has a place in moral thinking at all, but what kind of generalization is at work and, furthermore, their suggestion also provides different ways to conceive of what is meant by context. In Chapter 1, section 1.7, I described a difference between intra- and inter-case holism, a distinction that marks a difference between how far holism reaches and whether, for instance, holism holds within but not between particular cases. While there are important questions about whether (defeasible) generalizations reach down to the explanatory bedrock, but remain context-dependend in some sense, I am suggesting that it is not clear what the boundaries of context are. That is, how far contexts spread out, as it were, (and where they spread into). The context in which I think ‘This is what I ought to do here’ is one kind of context, but another kind is that of thinking about what sort of person I should aspire to be quite generally. The danger, perhaps, is that the idea of context starts to become unhelpfully broad. On the other hand, we need, at least, to be aware of assumptions that govern our understanding of what context amounts to. At the intra-case level, context has an important status by providing the conditions within which moral reasons emerge, at least according to particularism based on holism in the theory of reasons. However, at the inter-case level the status of context is less clear and, I think, potentially problematic for this kind of particularism. This second sense of context is important as it refers to the ‘wider’ conditions in which particular cases are embedded. These conditions do not always require being made explicit,


although failure to appreciate their role can encourage the mistaken view – a form of presentism in the sense suggested in Chapter 3 – that a particular given context can be made intelligible in radical isolation, as if a ‘particular context’ is itself a kind of atom. David Bakhurst has argued for the importance of these wider conditions in the following way. Bakhurst suggests that a plausible form of particularism can hold together an emphasis on the particular, while not thereby dismissing the importance of the wider context within which particular cases are embedded. The proposal is that what it is to be morally impressed by a state of affairs and the processes of moral deliberation take place within a determinate culture of practices. This suggests a different conception of moral experience and reasoning, one that transcends the atomism of radical particularism. Bakhurst construes Dancy’s position to claim that certain ‘practical abilities’ are central to any moral reasoning, where the nature of such reasoning cannot be exhaustively captured by a set of codified rules. The appeal to the notion of practice attempts to augment the radical particularist’s atomistic picture by providing a richer backdrop that includes a wider epistemological field of reference. As Bakhurst suggests, the challenge for particularism is to explain how, although our decisions are made ‘case by case’, they are nonetheless informed by a general moral knowledge of some kind. This would lessen the impression that moral judgement is atomistic in a deleterious sense, and reveal how specific attempts to justify moral belief are made in the light of perspectives that have continuity and integrity. (Bakhurst, 2000, p.168) Although Dancy claims that we cannot know exactly what difference some morally relevant property will make by reasoning from past or imaginary cases, a less radical particularism can, Bakhurst argues, account for how an agent can make use of general knowledge concerning the differing contributions that moral features tend to make.11 Now, Dancy has suggested how ‘default reasons’ are set up ‘in advance’ (Dancy, 2004, p.112):12 [O]ne could say that some considerations arrive switched on, though they may be switched off if the circumstances so conspire, while others arrive switched off but are switched on by appropriate contexts. (Dancy, 2004, pp.112–3)

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Dancy claims that for thick ethical properties, such as justice, we ‘start off thinking’ that if an action is just then that is always a reason in favour of doing it, that is its default nature. If situations turn up in which an action’s being just is not a reason in favour of doing it, then there is something to explain since some other feature, a disabler, has affected the default status (Dancy, 2004, p.113). Yet, default does not mean invariant, and so, at least according to Dancy, default status does not imply that the features or properties in question can be explained or articulated in principled ways. This account of the nature of reasons helps at least to reassure would-be sceptics that there is something ‘outside’ of isolated moral cases. Nevertheless, just what it is that sets up reasons in advance, and what enables how we ‘start off thinking’ are significant, and not just as claim about the metaphysics of reasons. For Bakhurst, aesthetic judgement reveals how a particular judgement concerning, say, how to finish a certain painting, requires a background of aesthetic experience. The point here is that general knowledge of a certain practice is what particular judgements concerning, say, finishing a work are made in the light of. Maybe some features or considerations are set up in advance in ways that reflect the second and wider sense of context. Moral judgement in a particular context makes sense within a context of, say, finding things enduringly significant as Bakhurst puts it (Bakhurst, 2000, p.173). However, this more expansive sense of experience need not simply be unavailable to a strong form of particularism, such as Dancy’s. For instance, he writes, [I]t would be surprising if a long experience in garages were no help to the mechanic; it would be surprising if a long and varied moral experience did not serve to sharpen one’s sensitivity for the future. (Dancy, 1993, p.63) This point can, in turn, be extended. Background features or concerns can, in some cases, make a difference to the wider sense of context, even when they do not come to the ‘active foreground’, as Dancy puts it, and are not the decisive factors in fixing the direction in which a favouring relation points, as it were (Bakhurst, 2000, p.173; Dancy, 1993, p.55). These background concerns are important for the people doing the moral thinking, and not just as metaphysical parameters or constraints on the nature of reasons as such. Bakhurst suggests that moral considerations, of suffering, say, are enduringly significant because, as a moral being, it is the sort of thing


that a person might be concerned about. Translated into Dancy’s terminology, we might say that such things have default status, arrive turned on, and are set up in advance partly because of the sort of person one is. Perhaps integral to our self-conceptions as moral beings is a range of concerns and commitments that have continuity and integrity. A moral person is that sort of being who possesses a sense in which certain moral concepts and considerations endure and remain between ‘particular’ moral cases. For the kind of thought that Bakhurst can be taken as expressing, particularism can be enhanced by recognizing the role of these features of practices and of persons that situate individual judgement in a wider context. Nevertheless, we need not think that this takes us closer to the idea that such things are amenable to a principled articulation, although, this is one place at which calling one self a critic or a proponent of particularism can appear more a matter of terminological preference than of substantive philosophical disagreement. Pekka Väyrynen has recently defended the idea that it is our acceptance of moral principles that shapes our responsiveness to reasons. He writes that acceptance of moral principles shapes conscientious, morally committed agents’ responsiveness to moral reasons in ways which make moral principles suited to contribute to a reliable strategy for acting well. (Väyrynen, 2008, p.80) This puts emphasis on the way in which are awareness of reasons is pretuned by acceptance of and commitment to prior principles. In expressing this view, Väyrynen suggests that the way in which principles shape our responsiveness to reasons does not need not be explained by showing that principles explicitly guide our thoughts and actions, and thus are in the foreground of our deliberations. We might, he suggests, have principles only to some extent available for explicit reasoning, and they may guide responsiveness to reasons even though they are known or understood tacitly (Väyrynen 2008: 81). As he puts it, [O]ur understanding, moral or otherwise, isn’t exhausted by what we can explicitly articulate … Our reasoning also often reasonably relies on background assumptions that we leave implicit or take for granted. (Väyrynen, 2008, p.83)

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What this suggests, then, is that in characterizing our awareness and understanding we might appeal to the background role of principles. Put in these terms, this would be a defence of the role of principles which puts emphasis on the importance of a pre-existing framework that allows for the recognition or awareness of morally relevant features and reasons. The appeal to the nature of moral personhood and what it is for conscientious moral thought and reflection to operate could be interpreted as giving a central place to a moral outlook or point of view, what is presupposed by the perception or awareness of the particular layout of a moral circumstance. Furthermore, this framework involves the way in which it is over time that we come to occupy a point of view. This coheres with the emphasis I placed earlier on the place of practice, understood as what Wittgenstein would have called a ‘spatiotemporal phenomenon’ (Wittgenstein, 1967, §108). Thus, according to Bakhurst, how I describe events in this case has to ring true in light of the stories I have told about previous events. Moreover, my integrity as a moral agent depends on the extent to which all these particular stories make sense. (Bakhurst, 2000, p.174)13 The subjective conditions that pertain to being appropriately sensitive to moral salience over time fit uneasily with radical moral particularism. For an agent to intelligibly constitute having possession of a moral perspective, there needs to be a framework of actual or possible responses to cases beyond any actual one ‘presented’. For present purposes, I have alluded to Bakhurst’s contextualism to demonstrate one approach that is, at least, compatible with the critique of moral presentism. While one version of particularism can give holistic relations an important intra-case status, these might not be adequately extended to the wider relations that constitute being sensitive to normatively articulated experience more generally, or to the ability to grasp and enduring and open-ended moral world view. Having the moral world in view, so to speak, needs particular cases. Nonetheless, these particular cases depend on a network of relations within which to arise. This means that the relation between intra-case holism and inter-case atomism becomes less problematic in the sense that the two are interdependent. For the purposes of this book, this section has provided one way in which the requirements of being a moral agent transcend individual moral cases as they happen to arise.


The constitution of human personality is important for what it is to be presented with a moral case, and what it is to possibly have justified beliefs and knowledge concerning it. Having the moral world in view means taking possession of a certain outlook, perspective, or sensitivity to possible ways of going-on that cannot be reduced to instances of moral experience or of moral judgement. I suggest that this sensitivity is enabled by, and helps to shape, moral cases as they arise occasion by occasion.

6.5 Thinking in the space of moral reasons What I have tried to suggest in the previous sections is that the idea of the space of reasons in what it encompasses (and what it excludes) is more extensive than referring to epistemological states or episodes where such states are understood narrowly. Broadening the space of reasons, as it were, enables us to appreciate the breadth of potential relevance here, since is uncovers the connections between the sort of thing that the Sellarsian space of reasons refers to, and what other philosophers have tried to show. Phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger have inspired opposition to placing or characterizing our knowledge or subjectivity in the space of reasons since that assumes an overly rational and cognitivist framework which excludes those ways of knowing, understanding and modes of awareness that cannot be described in conceptual terms. The complaint is premised on the view that our pre-conceptual and pre-reflective knowledge, including our evaluative knowledge and understanding, is an achievement presupposed by an account of knowledge that articulates it according to an explicit conceptual framework. The objection argues against the view that our fundamental way of knowing or of understanding the world is by the employment of a conceptual repertoire that gives expression to the distinctive kind of rationality enjoyed by human beings. According to this view, what is distinctive and basic about our subjectivity is that we wield conceptually structured thoughts and that human experience is, as in McDowell’s account, conceptual all the way down and all the way out, so to speak. This sort of conceptualism naturally follows from one version of the idea that in order for our experience to provide rational constraint on our thinking and activities it must be conceptual. Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception provides a detailed and wide-ranging critique of empiricism. Under one interpretation it is consistent with the criticism that the Given is some form of bare particular the acquaintance of which results in a kind of ‘knowing in presence’. Merleau-Ponty describes a case of such a ‘pure’ experience as

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an ‘undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact’ which would fail to convey how even elementary perception is ‘already charged with a meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p.3, p.4).14 Nevertheless, MerleauPonty warns against an alternative intellectualist or rationalist picture, according to which our experience of the world is somehow an entirely thoughtful exercise and where the meaning of our experience of the world is constituted, idealistically, by our cognitive operations.15 A worry, as expressed by anti-intellectualists, is that the requirement that our primary awareness of things is conceptual does not provide an accurate account of the phenomenology. That is, that conceptualism cannot be adequate to characterizing the kind of content that is relevant our commonplace perceptions and experience of the world and each other. Our primary way of experiencing involves practical engagements with our situation and cannot be translated into terms which assume a perspective of detached, theoretical cognition. The content of experience is, usually, something that discloses how aspects of the world are enmeshed in practical structures, and ‘show themselves’ as reflecting our concerns and ‘dealings’ in and with the world. As Heidegger puts it, The kind of dealing which is closest to us is … not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’. [E]ntities … which show themselves in our concern with the environment … are not thereby objects for knowing the ‘world’ theoretically; they are simply what gets used, what gets produced, and so forth. (Heidegger, 1962, p.95) A phenomenological characterization of our ordinary experience attempts to reveal the kind of meaning that our experience provides us with access to, and to articulate those structures that are organized by our practical interests. This sort of approach rejects the view that meaning is constitutively tied to conceptual articulation, since the employment of concepts would embody reflecting on the world ‘theoretically’. While this theoretical stance may not itself be somehow illicit as such, Heidegger, and other phenomenologists, are critical of how the philosophical tradition has privileged that perspective over and above characterizations of our experience that are more faithful to the richness and complexity of our practical and engaged lives. Hubert Dreyfus suggests that there is a realm of meaning which is radically different from and which is more basic than that described at


the conceptual level.16 Can it be, he suggests, that philosophers could provide an account of the ‘conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge’ independently of ground floor embodied coping, ‘in effect, declaring that human experience is upper stories all the way down?’ (Dreyfus, 2005, p.47). Dreyfus’s answer is that philosophers are mistaken when they treat as fundamental the existence and employment of conceptual capacities, and who thus characterize our knowledge as operating in a realm quite divorced from that inhabited by non-conceptual, nonrational creatures. The resulting dualism privileges what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘objective thought’ and is a form of intellectualist prejudice. It is, in Dreyfus’s words, to fall in to the ‘Myth of the Mental’ (Dreyfus, 2005, p.52). The Myth of the Mental is supposed to beguile intellectualists or conceptualists, like McDowell, into thinking that since ‘pure’ experience is impossible, experience must be conceptual in order to provide a satisfactory answer to the question (if it was raised at all) of how a bare presence might turn into something experientially meaningful and thus would be able to take its place as an actual or possible reason. The Myth of the Mental allegedly results from recoiling too far in the other direction from the Myth of the Given. Recall that the Given, in its mythical guise, is supposed to be the ‘unmoved mover of knowledge’; it is supposed to provide rational constraint on our thinking yet presupposes no prior knowledge or concepts. One way past this myth is to deny that experience is like that at all, and to insist that experience is constitutively such that it provides rational constraint. For Dreyfus, this tactic falls into a different mythical way of characterizing our experience, one which mentalizes experience and thus renders our primary way of inhabiting the world as a cognitive or as some intellectual affair. Nevertheless, opposition to conceptualism and, in particular, to how it affects our reflections on moral thought and experience need not imply that one adopts a phenomenological approach in the technical sense of a Heideggerian method. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, criticizes conceptualism as it figures in the moral context since it insists, incorrectly, that a person who responds immediately to a moral case is able, hypothetically, to articulate their reasons and justifications. For example, in Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre claims that in particular cases we can exercise a form of non-inferential rational awareness of what we ought to do (MacIntyre, 1999). The sort of understanding MacIntyre has in mind resists being characterized in ‘theoretical’ terms. Furthermore, he suggests that a demand to produce a relevant stock of explicit reasons and justifications in such cases can itself indicate an impoverished moral understanding (MacIntyre, 1999, p.158).

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MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle emphasizes this kind of noninferential and non-deliberative knowledge. Nevertheless, despite criticizing conceptualism, MacIntyre characterizes the relevant kind of virtuous spontaneous coping in intellectualist terms, at least according to Dreyfus and Dreyfus. They cite passages from MacIntyre’s After Virtue in which the ability to explicitly deliberate and reach judgements about situations is the hallmark of practical wisdom. For example, MacIntyre writes that the ‘genuinely virtuous agent … acts on the basis of a true and rational judgment’ (MacIntyre, 1981, p.140). This, Dreyfus and Dreyfus think, signals how an intellectualist prejudice prevents an accurate way of interpreting Aristotle (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991, p.239). More recently Hubert Dreyfus has suggested that that a phenomenological reading of Aristotelian phronesis provides a counterexample to conceptualism and, in particular, McDowell’s version it (Dreyfus, 2005, p.51). Dreyfus quotes Heidegger: [The phronimos] … is determined by his situation in the largest sense … The circumstances, the givens, the times and the people vary. The meaning of the action … varies as well … It is precisely the achievement of phronesis to disclose the [individual] as acting now in the full situation within which he acts. (Heidegger, 1997, p.101) Dreyfus emphasizes how phronesis involves a ‘switch from detached rule-following to a more involved and situation-specific way of coping’ (Dreyfus, 2005, p.52). This is directly relevant for the prospects of moral particularism in the following way. Dreyfus’s anti-conceptualism involves a commitment to the view that thinking in terms of reasons is to think in general terms and so not be appropriately ‘involved’ in the concrete situation. For Dreyfus, the conceptualist prejudice goes right to the heart of how we are to think about our experience and perception. The conceptualist insists that in order for experience to provide justifications then it must be articulated in conceptual terms, since it is only in such terms that it makes sense to appeal to there being, or of our having, reasons. It is this account of reasons, and the tendency of conceptualists to want to think in terms of the space of reasons that Dreyfus rejects. Being able to perceive what to do, as Aristotle suggests under Dreyfus’s interpretation, is to exercise nonconceptual coping abilities that are constitutively and immediately tied to the specific details of particular cases and to the ‘full, concrete situation’. Situation-specific attunement is independent of the employment of conceptual capacities


since, on this understanding, operating in ‘the domain of the conceptual’ is a theoretical and general activity. As Dreyfus puts it: ‘masterful action does not seem to require or even to allow placement in the space of reasons’ (Dreyfus, 2005, p.58). One way to make sense of the problem that Dreyfus identifies is by considering Gareth Evans’s ‘generality constraint’. Evans explains that there must be a sense in which thoughts are structured. He writes: The thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that Harry is happy, and the thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that John is sad … thoughts are structured, not in terms of their being composed of distinct elements, but in terms of there being a complex of the exercise of several distinct conceptual abilities. Thus someone who thinks that John is happy and that Harry is happy exercises on two occasions the conceptual ability which we call ‘possessing the concept of happiness’. And similarly someone who thinks that John is happy and that John is sad exercises on two occasions a single ability, the ability to think of, or think about, John. (Evans, 1982, pp.100–1)17 There is generality inherent in thought, according to Evans. Now, in the present context, this can be interpreted as saying that while one element of someone’s thought about, say, John, is thus situation-specific, the possibility of exercising the relevant conceptual ability involves other contexts and thoughts. In a relevant sense, then, our thought and rationality more generally is context-independent. Dreyfus claims that this situation-independence is why we must resist the idea that ways of expert coping can be articulated in such terms, since masterful dealings with the world and other people involve a kind of ‘pure perception’ through which a situation is understood in its full, concrete specificity. While it might be true that someone learning how to develop skills, the moral virtues for instance, requires decontextualized, general and context-independent rules, at the expert level, the phenomenology shows that concepts, thoughts, and thinking as such are absent. According to Dreyfus, ‘mindedness is the enemy of embodied coping’ and ‘the enemy of expertise is thought’ (Dreyfus, 2007, p.353; p.354). He writes, [I]f we understand concepts as context-free principles or rules that could be used to guide actions or at least make them intelligible,

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a phenomenology of expert coping shows concepts to be absent or even to get in the way of a masterful response to the specific situation … the basis of expert coping may well be the sort of features that the expert could not be aware of and would not be able to think. (Dreyfus, 2005, p.58) So, in the present context, what this amounts to is the claim that the space of reasons is antithetical to situation-specific awareness and thus, if this is right, a space of reasons understanding cannot support the emphasis that particularists want to give to our awareness of the situation. Furthermore, if Dreyfus is right, then Dancy’s proposals that ‘thinking in terms of reasons’ and that it our ‘capacity to judge’ are central to a particularist’s moral epistemology, would also be entirely the wrong way to defend particularism according to which situationspecific awareness and knowledge is vital. Dreyfus asserts that the world is open to us through ‘our unthinking and unthinkable engaged perception and coping’ (Dreyfus, 2005, p.59). Yet this, as McDowell points out, assumes that mindedness and rationality conflicts with or at least stands outside our embodied lives and our abilities to deal with the moral world in irreducibly situation-specific ways. The difficulty is the assumption that to be mindful and exercise rationality in some particular circumstance is thereby to ‘apply to the situation in which one acts some content fully specifiable in detachment from the situation’ (McDowell, 2007a, p.340). But the possibility that the relevant content can be made intelligible in abstraction from particular contexts is questionable. In Chapter 2, section 2.1, I suggested that there is an important role for generality with regard to the sensitivities and abilities that particularists allude to under the name of ‘perception’ or ‘discernment’. In the present context, this generality need not prevent context-specific discernment. McDowell writes, No doubt the very idea of a habit implies a generality of content. But conceiving phronesis as a habit, or a set of habits, is consistent with holding that the only way one can register the generality of phronesis is by a description on these lines: ‘the habit of responding to situations as phronesis requires’. And that leaves what response a particular situation calls for from the phronimos still needing to be determined by situation-specific discernment. (McDowell, 2007a, p.341)


Mindedness and ‘thinking in terms of reasons’ in the sense Dancy suggests does not imply the inability to exercise situation-specific perception. The purity of perception in such contexts, if that is the right way to couch it, does not necessarily mean that concepts, reasons and thought as such are absent. That such and such is what one ought to do, while involving the exercise of rationality and awareness of reasons, might only be intelligible in context-dependent ways. If mindedness is the enemy of embodied coping, then that might assume that what it is to think, have awareness of reasons and to possess and use concepts, are outside of or detached from our practical dealings with the world. Thinking in terms of reasons need not be independent of practice but, rather, instantiated through it. It is, I think, significant that the complaints Dreyfus registers against McDowell, and others such MacIntyre and Mandelbaum, suggest a commitment to a distinction between the intellect and the practical that is deeply embedded in contemporary moral theory. I have previously alluded to Michael Smith’s version of this distinction, or dichotomy, in the context of explicating the ‘problematic’ content of moral thought or experience. We do not need to reject that distinction, but it needs to be carefully drawn. In the present context, the distinction underpins Dreyfus’s thought that absorbed coping in particular cases is mindless, at least in the best case. Yet McDowell, at least as I understand him, suggests that mindedness can be expressed through practice, not merely translated into action, but realized in action: When a rational agent catches a frisbee, she is realizing a concept of a thing to do. In the case of a skilled agent, she does not do that by realizing other concepts of things to do. She does not realize concepts of contributory things to do, in play for her as concepts of what she is to do by virtue of her means-end rationality in a context in which her overarching project is to catch the frisbee. But she does realize a concept of, say, catching this ... The point of saying that the rational agent ... is realizing a concept in doing what she does is that her doing, under a specification that captures the content of the practical concept that she is realizing, comes within the scope of her practical rationality. (McDowell, 2007b, pp.368–9) This captures the idea that activity can be the embodiment of mindedness, in the present sense. This does not need to mean that one’s actions are the physical manifestations of some pre-existing thought or concept originally residing in the mental realm. The point is that what

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it is to be minded is not independent of our bodily activities. In David Bell’s terms, as noted in Chapter 4, section 4.5, spontaneous thought and, presumably, action, need not for all its spontaneity and immediacy be thereby mindless. Furthermore, Dancy suggests that the ability to think in terms of reasons has, what we might call, practical purport: [O]nce we recognize that there being a reason for φ-ing consists in there being something to be said for doing so, it becomes unintelligible to suppose that those who think in terms of reasons should generally suppose nonetheless that such things are irrelevant to the question what to do. To think in terms of reasons at all is therefore to be motivationally disposed in one way rather than another … even if the recognition of reasons is itself a purely cognitive matter, it is not for that reason deprived of what we might call intrinsic practical relevance. (Dancy, 2004, pp.145–6) Moral philosophers would interpret these remarks as being embedded in debates about the relation between cognitivism and motivation, and whether the states of mind that we enjoy in cognition are internally related to motivational states. The point I want to stress, however, is that such remarks are also important for the wider possibilities of thinking about moral mindedness. Thinking in the space of moral reasons is not a purely intellectual or conceptual achievement, somehow cut off from ‘motivation’ or ‘action’. Why would we assume that thinking and acting, particularly in ethics, take place in separate realms or are separate activities? These considerations suggest that the space of reasons need not be restricted to a way of characterizing our thinking and, in particular, the ways in which our thoughts and what we claim can be justified. This accords with my earlier suggestion in section 6.1 that the space of reasons can incorporate more than epistemological questions. I put the point there in terms of our inhabiting the space of moral reasons, and it may be natural to talk of our inhabiting spaces, even in metaphorical terms. But the point is that, by recognizing that the space of reasons need not simply be an alternative epistemological framework for construing justification, we can reconceive what kind of context or ‘space’ is being characterized and its relation to human beings. According to David Wiggins: It is hard to conceive of there being an evaluation of x and y in the absence of a structure of pre-existing concerns that will direct the


imagining of what x amounts to and of what y amounts to and that will focus the evaluator’s attendant perceptions of the circumstances. (Wiggins, 1998, p.244) Such ‘pre-existing concerns’ need not refer to those items that can be explicitly identified in the cognitive-cum-motivational set of a particular person’s psychological profile. Instead, and what minimally unites Dreyfus and McDowell, is that we might interpret these pre-existing concerns in more metaphysical or constitutive terms and so as referring to aspects of the world in which we find ourselves. These concerns form part of the context into which we are initiated as moral beings. Such things, presumably, are part of what we are familiarized with in learning to participate in and in becoming subject to the normative constraints that provide the context for our thoughts, judgements and action, and thus for the possibility that we sometime can succeed or fail in what we say and do. The space of moral reasons is not just a contemplative space occupied by intellects ‘thinking in terms of reasons’, and thinking about whether they can justify what they say and do. The space of moral reasons is not a merely a framework for thinking about how human thought and action relates to the world, particularly in terms of the justification of what one does or says. Rather, being in the space of moral reasons is one way to characterize what it is to have a moral world at all and what it is to be, as McDowell puts it, ‘at home’ there (McDowell, 1996, p.118; p.125). Moral particularism does not defend the view that our moral awareness and knowledge is a matter of simply being struck by particular cases. Discerning moral salience is an ability which presupposes the adoption of a perspective underpinned by inhabiting a practice and by an awareness of the world in which our moral thinking and action take place. I have suggested that one way to try and develop an account of what this means is by bringing out the morally relevant aspects of characterizing knowledge and subjectivity in terms of the space of reasons. The Myth of the Moral Given is a way to describe a mistaken view of experience that would be implied by one version of moral particularism. The value of characterizing our ethical thinking in terms of the space of moral reasons is, partly, in how it can focus attention on the subjective aspects of our moral lives. I have suggested that this can be a counterpart to the emphasis that has been placed on the metaphysics of moral reasons. The sense of subjective here is not meant to refer to the inward or private aspects of our moral lives. Rather, it refers to the

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complex role of subjectivity presupposed by our awareness of moral reasons and of the moral world. Furthermore, an understanding of subjectivity is needed for an understanding of judgement and experience which have, rightly in my view, been given a central place in the debate between particularists and their opponents. Elucidating particularism in terms of the space of moral reasons can help avoid some of the problematic implications of the position. It can also provide ways to develop a more compelling account of our moral knowledge and experience.

Notes Preface and Acknowledgements 1. There is now a good deal of work devoted to discussion and critical exegesis of both philosophers. Some examples are: On McDowell: Thornton (2004); de Gaynesford (2004); Lindgaard (2008); Smith (2002); McDonald and McDonald (2006); Dingli (2005); Gaskin (2006); Willaschek (2000). On Sellars: de Vries (2005); de Vries (2009); de Vries and Triplett (2000); O’Shea (2007); and Rosenberg (2007).

1 Characterizing Moral Particularism 1. A number of others have recently made important contributions to the debate over particularism, especially the book-length critique by Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge (2006) in addition to articles by Mark Lance and Margaret Little (2006a; 2006b; 2008). A special issue of Journal of Moral Philosophy 2007 (4/1) is devoted to the topic as are two edited collections: Moral Particularism (Hooker and Little, 2000) and Challenging Moral Particularism (Lance, Portcˇ and Strahovnik, 2008). Other important sources include the works of David Wiggins (1998), David McNaughton (1988) and Richard Holton (2002). 2. Schroeder is not a pessimist about discussions over particularism although his remarks do capture, I think, a certain attitude to the debate. 3. Brad Hooker has suggested that there are worrying socio-political implications if particularism were adopted in practice. For instance, our ability to predict the behaviour of other people could be undermined in the absence of rules or principles. See Hooker (2000; 2008). 4. Although, if this list is too long, a principle would not be workable in practice. I will come back to discuss ‘practice’ below. 5. See Nussbaum (2000) for an interesting discussion of how ‘theories’ relate to our practices and the perspectival element in moral thought and reasoning. 6. O’Neill discusses this aspect in the context of a wider discussion of ‘judgement’. I will return to this in Chapter 4. 7. I’m not suggesting that McKeever and Ridge so regard it, or that they are necessarily opposed to anything I suggest here. 8. It is worth bearing in mind Dancy’s suggestion about the difference between ‘theory’ and ‘principle’ in this context. He explains, ‘Principles are not like theories, for theories explain what is true in particular cases without determining it, while principles determine what is true in particular cases and explain it’ (Dancy, 1983, p. 533). 9. I adopt this distinction between guidance and discipline from Tim Thornton. See Thornton (2006) for a discussion of how this distinction can be used in the context of particularism and principlism in medical ethics. The distinction is similar to that proposed by Gordon Baker in his explication of the 163

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

Notes ‘objective’ (discipline) and ‘subjective’ (guidance) aspects to rule following. See Baker (1981, pp. 49–50). In McKeever and Ridge’s work, they defend generalism as a regulative ideal, and do not regard principles as constitutive. This dancing image is Gordon Baker’s, where he uses it in his discussion of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. See note 9. It is important to recognize that ‘sensitivity’ here is not meant to be in contrast with ‘active’. This is important for what I want to establish later with regard to the co-operation between sensitivity, and being subject to, and activity, and being responsible for. See Sellars (1948). Emphases in the original. Hume suggests that such relations are projected so naturally and so easily that we mistake them for genuine responses to what is ‘out there’. As Dancy has developed his particularism, the doctrine of holism in the theory of reasons had been finessed. For instance, in Ethics Without Principles he describes some distinctions within holism, and also different forms of atomism. Here, I am concentrating on the main overall themes. ‘Atomism’ about reasons is the natural correlate to ‘holism’. However, later I will be using ‘atomism’ in a different sense; one that does not refer to the nature of reasons themselves, but is used to characterize the apparently singular manner in which experiences and moments of sensitivity to normative demands are delivered to and confronted by agents. It should be clear when ‘atomism’ is used as a contrast to holism in the theory of reasons, and when it is used otherwise. This qualification is important. It is difficult to make sense of the proposition that all reasons must change their valence according to circumstance. This would imply a kind of ‘Kleenex theory reasons’, where they are to be used once, and thrown away (see Milligram, 2002, p. 82 n.16). Prima facie duties include reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, selfimprovement and non-maleficence (see Ross, 1930, p. 21). The point here is that reasons do not retain determinate normativity. It might be true that considerations retain the potential or the capacity to be reasons, although nothing but context can make them into reasons; ‘anything could have, and nothing must have, moral import’, as Little puts it in one place (Little, 2001, p. 36). A related issue here, and one to which I will return, is Dancy’s assertion that it is an unfortunate habit of thought, nurtured by wrong-headed metaphysics, to believe that because a consideration has turned into a reason before, then either it must do so again in the same way, or is more likely to be a reason again for having been one before. Hume is relevant here, and I will develop the character of his contribution to this issue below. Here, I use atomism differently from Dancy’s sense. See note 17. Dancy himself offers a suggestive parallel to the form of my argument here. Although not in a discussion about ethics, Dancy claims that ‘[a] holistic theory of meaning should lead to a holistic epistemology’ (Dancy, 1985b, p. 108). Broadly speaking, I am suggesting that a holistic theory about the nature of reasons should not be orthogonal to a holistic epistemology. Emphasis in the original. Emphasis in the original.

Notes 165

2 Particularism and Subjectivity 1. Ross claims that general principles are known through ‘intuitive induction’ as being implied, as he puts it, in judgements of particular cases (Ross, 1939, p.170). 2. One commentator has suggested that, at least in Mind and World, it is McDowell’s ethical stance and, in particular, the kind of ethical naturalism he develops that shapes the wider approach to epistemology and metaphysics. See Honneth (2002, p.248), although see also McDowell (2002, p.301). McDowell does suggest that we might extrapolate or generalize from the Aristotelian picture of ethical formation, and use that to inform our understanding of the space of reasons in general (McDowell, 1996, pp.66–86). 3. There are, potentially, different kinds of ‘platonism’ available. McDowell, for instance, suggests that ‘naturalized platonism’ can capture the sense in which the normativity of meaning quite generally has a sort of autonomy with regard to what we do or think, but does not exist in ‘splendid isolation from anything merely human’, in contrast to ‘rampant platonism’ (McDowell, 1996, p.92). 4. ‘Sideways on’ is McDowell’s phrase to refer to a perspective that adopts an external vantage point from which the relation between a conceptual framework of understanding and the external world, radically outside of that framework, can be understood. McDowell rejects this perspective, and stresses that the intelligibility of how the world impinges on our thought quite generally requires a perspective from within the framework in question. 5. Emphasis in the original. 6. Lovibond has elsewhere suggested that ways of knowing made available through the kind of induction into the moral world that she has in mind, is not a point simply about ethics, or something that would mark off ethics as being peculiar in this respect. The typical occupation of an aspirant to knowledge, she writes, involves being initiated into a perspective: ‘Since no item of distinctively human knowledge is accessible without such initiation, the enabling role of Bildung in the case of the ethical (and other value-experience) cannot be cited as evidence of any specific defect in the cognitive status of that experience’ (Lovibond, 1996, p.77). 7. Contrast O’Neill (1996, p.88): ‘the moral life is a matter of action, not of connoisseurship’. 8. It is seemingly less troubling since characterizing knowledge in such terms need not invoke any worldly facts or states of affairs that would resist a naturalistic approach. For instance, Gilbert Harman famously argued against a version of moral realism by distinguishing between what needs to be postulated in order to explain observations in various domains. In order to best explain our experience in the moral case, we need not make any assumptions about ‘moral facts’. Rather, to best explain why a person witnessed an action and believed it to be wrong, ‘it would seem that you need only make assumptions about the psychology or moral sensibility of the person making the moral observation’ (Harman, 1977, p.6). 9. See, for example, Blackburn (1998). 10. For a recent collection of essays discussing Williams’s views here, and on related topics, see Thomas (2007).

166

Notes

11. See Sandis (2009) for recent work discussing this and other relevant issues. 12. See, for example, Smith (1994, pp.111–19). 13. Similarly to the work of Bernard Williams, it is difficult to do justice to the influence that Mackie has had on contemporary moral theory. But, see Joyce and Kirchin (2010) for a recent collection of essays focusing on Mackie’s error theory. 14. Emphasis in the original. 15. Emphasis in the original. 16. For a fairly comprehensive and critical engagement see Gaskin (2006). 17. Emphases in the original.

3 Perception and the Myth of the Moral Given 1. I will come back to this relation between the status of principles and articulation in Chapter 6, section 6.5. 2. I do not mean to suggest here that this is what McGrath argues for. Her project, partly, is one of distilling the debate over moral perception into its components, and trying to motivate and argue for a particular conception of moral knowledge by perception. 3. A related issue is how the different ways of perceiving – ‘seeing’, ‘seeing that’, ‘seeing as’ and others – are connected to the question of how literally we understand reports of perceptual experience. In addition, pointing out that a philosophical issue is ambiguous does not amount to much. All I intend to do is register the very minimal fact that matters are not clear cut when it comes to ‘ordinary’ perception, as well when it comes to contrasting ordinary perception with other kinds of perception. 4. I discuss the moral dimension in Chapter 6, section 6.2. 5. The worry about extravagance is directed, typically, at realism – moral perception being, in at least some realist accounts, an important element. 6. I suppose the reverse of this process, as equally peculiar, is captured in Nietzsche’s well-known remark, about ‘truth’: ‘When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding’ (Nietzsche, 2006, p.118). 7. In fact, as I mentioned in note 5, there is a close connection here between the perceptual model and moral realism. Dancy, for instance, considers that a phenomenological argument is the primary way to defend realism. McDowell comes close to endorsing this view too. He construes his version of moral realism to be, among other things, opposed to Mackie’s irrealism yet he and Mackie can agree, precisely, on the phenomenology. 8. Our ability to see chairs, most of the time, goes quite unnoticed. They are deeply familiar aspects of our world. In the stately home we are drawn out of our familiar ways of inhabiting the world, and our attention is explicitly focused on the chair as a chair. Perhaps usually we rarely have our attention focused in this kind of way towards those very familiar elements and objects in our lives. One question is the extent to which the moral case is like this. I suspect that moral perception more often than chair perception is fraught in the sense that very frequently we are ‘reminded’ that what one ‘sees’ is

Notes 167

18.

not what others ‘see’. Nevertheless, also very frequently, what one sees morally is the same as what others see too, as Gilbert Harman’s famous example of the hoodlums and the cat indicates. Emphasis in the original. This is in the context of discussing the case of Chuck Knoblauch, an expert baseball player for the New York Yankees who, because of reflection on what he was doing rather than being in a state of ‘absorbed coping’, became unable to exercise his usual expert skill. The reflective stance ‘disrupted coping’, as Dreyfus puts it. The idea of thinking in terms of reasons is broadened in Chapter 6, section 6.1, and discussed in relation to competing ways to understand the space of reasons. Emphasis in the original. This way of putting things is, like at the end of Chapter 1, section 1.6, is terminologically awkward. In the present context, ‘atomism’ is used to refer to the idea that our experiences are delivered to the mind as fragments or particulars. I think, despite the awkwardness, it is nevertheless this ‘fragmentary’ picture of how we experience moral cases that is important for the present context. Although, as Sellars writes, ‘all awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair’ (Sellars, 1997, p.63). This suggests that even ordinary experience is an achievement, in the present sense, as well. See Chappell (2008) for a discussion of how patterns relates to wider issues about the prospects of a perceptual model of moral knowledge. Emphases in the original. By ‘language-game’, Wittgenstein did not just mean a way of using words and meanings that would be unfamiliar to outsiders. The point is more that our langue-use takes place within a network of practical and non-linguistic activities. In On Certainty, §204, Wittgenstein writes that what ‘lies at the bottom of the language-game’ is ‘not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting’ (Wittgenstein, 1969). (Emphasis in the original). This role of authorship is suggested by Luntley (2002, p.282, n.15).

4

Moral Judgement

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

1. McKeever and Ridge have outlined a number of criticisms of this aspect of Dancy’s epistemology in particular. See, for example, McKeever and Ridge (2008). See also Dancy (2008a). 2. Dancy writes that a narrative conception of salience, put in ontological terms, implies an irreducible cooperation between the world and subjectivity. He writes, ‘Given [a] stress on narrative structures in the world, we might hope to show it impossible to say that there are stories in the world unless we allow that in a good sense the world exists for us.’ (1993, p.162). Emphasis in the original. 3. Emphasis in the original. 4. Dancy’s proposal does, nevertheless, seem to preserve a questionable distinction itself: that between ‘argument’ and ‘persuasion’. This distinction

168

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

Notes assumes that argument, much like the inappropriate conception of justification, implies a subsumptive conception. No such implication need follow but, in any case, not much turns on this issue for present purposes. Emphasis in the original. Emphasis in the original. Or perhaps pre-cognitive, if it is true that creatures or ‘systems’ can behave in accordance with rules if not because of the rules, according to the Kantian idiom. ‘Leading-strings’ is the translation used by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood in their edition of the Critique of Pure Reason for the ‘Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant’ (Kant, 1998). Other translations of the relevant section (B 173–4), such as Norman Kemp Smith’s, have ‘go-cart’ instead of ‘leading-strings’. Emphasis in the original. Emphasis in the original. Emphasis in the original. As Dancy notes, Sellars suggests that foundationalists do not appreciate how experience ‘contains claims’ about what lies beyond them; that is, about reality. In the ethical case, a reason does not make a claim about the rightness, say, of an action, but makes claims on one to do the action. But we can quite happily use these two senses of ‘making claims’ at the same time. See Dancy (2004, pp.149–50). This idea of ethical formation has been prominent in some recent moral philosophy, particularly in the work of Sabina Lovibond (1996; 2002) among others. McDowell explains that the process whereby we become equipped with abilities to be responsive to reasons in ethics and elsewhere is best captured by the German term Bildung. This notion figures centrally too in the work of Lovibond cited in the previous note. Bubner (2000) engages with McDowell’s notion of Bildung and the related form of naturalism that is central to McDowell’s work. It is notable that the kind of naturalism which has informed McDowell’s ethical writing is sometimes not recognized as a naturalism at all. Alexander Miller, for example, describes McDowell’s metaethics as non-naturalist (Miller, 2003). McDowell’s general claim is that we should not let the idea of nature and what is natural be identified with that picture provided by the natural sciences which ‘purges the world of meaning’. McDowell cites Hume as ‘prophet par excellence’ of the picture of the natural world as disenchanted. He writes: ‘Reason, Hume insists, does not find meaning or intelligible order in the world; rather, whatever intelligible order there is in our world-picture is a product of the operations of the mind, and those operation are themselves just what goes on in nature, in itself meaninglessly, as it were’ (McDowell, 1998a, pp.174–5). But this raises a further issue as to how reason and nature are related. Hume is, of course, a naturalist in a relatively familiar sense, but when he writes that: ‘Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever’ what kind of naturalism is that meant to express (Hume, 1975, p.41)? It is, presumably, quite distinctive if it refers to how the discoveries of philosophical and scientific inquiries are related to our lives as

Notes 169 human beings. It is suggestive of a kind of naturalism that understands the operations of nature as constituted, at least partly, by providing a form of constraint to our lives and as limiting the scope of philosophical thought, at least as Hume understood it.

5

Moral Phenomenology

1. Wayne Martin explains that a fixation in contemporary philosophy of mind with ‘qualia’ partly explains this mistake. See Martin (2006, p.6). 2. See, for example, Bagnoli (2002); Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991); Drummond and Embree (2002); Kirchin (2003); Horgan and Timmons (2005; 2007; 2008a; 2008b); Mandelbaum (1969). See also the essays collected in a special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2008, 7. 3. Other realists who adopt this kind of strategy include David Brink (1989) and McNaughton (1988). 4. See, for example, Simon Blackburn’s attempt to account for the realistseeming character of moral thought without commitment to realism in ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value’ in Blackburn (1993). See also Smith (1993). 5. Nevertheless I think that misunderstandings of phenomenology help to encourage an attitude according to which phenomenology is just a set of hopeless and groundless extrapolations on the basis of subjective ‘feels’, and that phenomenology is peculiarly vulnerable to this criticism. 6. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord suggests that ‘the moral problem’ outlined by Smith is better described as ‘the metaethical problem’: ‘a problem that arises only once we stand back from moral thought and practice and theorize about it.’ (Sayre-McCord, 1997, p.55). The implication is, then, that the characterization of moral experience in these terms already presupposes a philosophical stance and that that stance itself will incorporate a range of distinctive and potentially controversial views. 7. Although, versions of the idea that reality and value are antagonistically related are still prevalent. 8. Also listed by Mandelbaum are Aristotle, Butler and Scheler. 9. In addition, Husserl characterized Hume as originating the problem of how ‘inner’ subjectivity is related to ‘external realities’. See Husserl (1969, p.256). 10. This idea of felt demand is, in a way, reminiscent of Dancy’s suggestion of how reasons for action make claims on one. See Chapter 4, n. 12. 11. Here is one example of how ‘cognitive’ is used in a way that differs from how it is used in many cases of metaethical debate. 12. Sellars does not deny that there is some sense to the idea that knowledge rests on a foundation. Sellars is not simply against foundations; the rationality of knowledge is not secured because it has a foundation in the conventional sense of an indubitable ground, but because it is a self-correcting enterprise. See Sellars (1997, p.78). 13. The structure of the relation between ‘seems’ and ‘is’ would also be relevant to the debates about presumptive arguments for moral realism and questions about the ‘neutrality’ of experience.

170

Notes

6 The Space of Moral Reasons 1. The point is not anti-foundationalist as such. See Sellars (1997, p.78), and n12 to Chapter 5. 2. Blackburn goes on to say that what ‘finding room’ refers to here is not necessarily a form of reductivism. Although, he does say that understanding how we think ethically on the model he recommends would not offend against anything ‘in the rest of our world view’ which, presumably, includes the ‘problematic’ idea that we inhabit a disenchanted order. 3. Sellars himself also privileged a scientific outlook in a certain sense. For example: ‘in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not’ (Sellars, 1997, p.83). 4. As McDowell puts it: ‘[D]epictions of nature are linked by relations of justification [but] there are no such linkages in what is depicted’ (McDowell, 1996, p.70n). Elsewhere, McDowell writes that ‘the best way to understand this contrast of logical spaces is in terms of a distinction between two ways of finding things intelligible: on the one hand, placing things in a context of rational considerations for and against them (the sort of thing we do when, for instance, we make sense of behaviour as rational agency) and, on the other hand, finding things intelligible in the ways in which the natural sciences do, for instance by subsuming them under lawlike generalizations’ (McDowell, 2000b, p.6). 5. One of McDowell’s complaints is that this contrast seems to exclude the possibility that reasons might be causes (McDowell, 1996, p.71). 6. See Haddock (2008) for a discussion of this issue. 7. Emphasis in the original. 8. ‘Whirls of organism’ is Cavell’s phrase to refer to Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’. See Cavell (1976, p.52). 9. This point is also generally relevant for understanding how our normative frameworks of meaning and understanding change and develop: ‘Nothing ensures that we keep our concepts’ as McDowell puts it (McDowell, 2007c, p.300). 10. This point is typically put in terms of moral features being ‘shapeless’ at the natural or non-moral level. See Dancy (2004, p.122n). 11. Dancy is critical of the idea that we can know what to do or think by appeal to imaginary cases in ethics. He writes: ‘there is something very odd about the idea that we can learn important truths about the way we should behave from an examination of cases which are the creatures of our own imagination’ (Dancy, 1985a, p.144). 12. See also Dancy (1993, p.26; p.103). 13. Emphasis in the original. 14. Emphasis in the original. 15. Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty writes of a distinction between, on the one hand, how changes have simply ‘happened’ and which have ‘accumulated’ in the past and, on the other, how we might understand those changes and come to regard them as constituents in a network of meaning. In so doing, ‘[w]e have moved from the realm of causes to the realm of reasons’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1974, p.105).

Notes 171 16. One need not have any leanings towards the Phenomenological tradition in order to deny that experience must be conceptual through and through. Dreyfus’s critique is just one. In an ethical context, another version is Alasdair MacIntyre’s view, as articulated in his Dependent Rational Animals (for example, 1999, pp.60–1). 17. Emphasis in the original.

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Index abstraction 5–6, 7–9, 49, 90, 102–3, 121, 134 appearances 129, 142 anthropology 133 transcendental 135 anti-transcendental particularism 10 Aristotle 1, 34, 43, 62, 117, 156 atomism inter-case, 24, 27, 145, 152 about cases 143, 149 about reasons see reasons, atomism about and Hume 19 see also holism a posteriori knowledge 73, 84–5 a priori knowledge 42, 84–5

Crary, A. 49, 103–4, 107, 108, 124 Cullity, G. 83 Dancy, J. and epistemology 25, 26, 64, 67, 70–1, 72 and holism 19–22, 26 and Hume 22 and judgement 72–3, 76–7, 83, 85, 100, 105 and metaphysics of reasons 15, 17 and phenomenology 116 and principles 13, 25, 28, 163n8 deliberation 4, 5, 6–7, 12, 14, 15, 68, 82, 90–1, 92, 98, 99, 124–5, 130, 149, 151, 156 desire 43–5, 94 discernment 8, 65, 72, 76, 77, 80–1, 82, 83, 98, 117, 145, 158 discipline 14, 15, 16, 116, 163n9 Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. 63, 97–8, 99, 121, 124–7, 156 Dreyfus, S. 63–4, 155, 156–9, 161

Bagnoli, C. 169n2 Bakhurst, D. 149, 150, 152 Beauchamp, T. 13 belief 43–5, 47, 94, 113 Bell, D. 101–2, 160 Bentham, J. 15 Bildung 165n6, 168n14 Blackburn, S. 6, 42, 53, 58, 64, 138–142, 170n2 Blum, L. 60–1 Cavell, S. 36–7, 100 Chappell, T. 59 Childress, J. 13 codifiability 12, 31–2, 50–2, 54, 66, 81, 140 concepts 48, 66, 69, 70–1, 73, 74, 78–9, 91, 93, 95, 97, 101, 103–4, 107, 122, 126, 129, 135, 137, 139, 140–2, 143–4, 154, 155, 158, 159 conceptualism 50, 106, 121, 140, 153–6 context 2, 9, 19–24, 68, 81, 90, 98, 120, 122–3, 147–50, 157–9, 161 coping 37, 63, 99, 121–2, 125, 126, 155, 156–8, 159, 167n10

epistemology 2, 8, 9, 21–2, 23–7, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38–9, 42, 56, 60, 62, 68, 70–1, 72, 82, 83–4, 85, 105,126, 132, 137–8, 164n22 and metaphysics 9, 16, 30, 40, 41, 79, 114 emotion 53, 54 Evans, G. 74, 75–6, 157 ethical theory 11, 30, 36, 113, 114, 118 examples, role of 7–8, 20, 78, 89–91, 98 experience 19, 23, 49, 50, 57, 59, 63, 65, 69–70, 73, 74–5, 85, 93, 94–6,97,102, 105, 106, 111–2, 128, 135, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154–5, 156, 162

179

180

Index

experience – continued moral 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 65, 72, 85, 108–10, 112–18, 119–24, 126, 127, 130, 132, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 153, 162 family resemblance 78 forms of life 37, 134, 135, 142 foundationalism 43, 122, 129, 143 Frege, G. 86 Gadamer, H-G. 94, 102, 108 Garfield, J.L. 2, 17–18, 24, 136 Gaskin, R. 95–6 generalism 21, 24, 25, 26, 56, 67, 77, 78, 81, 86, 100, 104, 126, 131, 132 generality 4, 33, 34, 157, 158 generalization 34, 64, 148, 170n4 Gill, M. 127 Gleeson, A. 51–2, 54, 55 guidance 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 24, 163n9 Hare, R.M. 3 Harman, G. 165n8, 166n8 Heidegger, M. 50, 111, 153, 154, 155, 156 holism 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 57, 65, 81, 145, 148 intra-case, 24, 26, 27, 148, 152 see also atomism Holton, R. 163n1 Hooker, B. 29, 163n1, 163n3 Horgan, T. 130, 169n2 Hume, D. 18, 19, 27, 42, 47–8, 53, 54, 58, 65, 89, 92, 136, 145, 164n15, 168n14, 169n9 Humean 19, 44, 45, 47, 49, 53, 58, 74, 79, 88, 120, 135, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147 Husserl, E. 111, 112, 169n9 intellectualism 121, 122 inter-case atomism, see atomism, inter-case intra-case holism, see holism, intra-case

intuitive induction 165n1 Irwin, T.H. 1 Jackson, F. 2, 84 Jacobson, D. 53 Jones, K. 40–1, 42 judgement contrasted with perception 61, 64, 83, 84 theoretical vs. practical 88, 92–3, 118 and experience 85, 93–6, 97, 105–6, 109, 121, 123, 124 and freedom 93, 95–7 and Kant 86–90, 91, 92, 98, 102 and knowledge 72–4, 75–7, 81–2, 84, 85, 97, 100 and narrative 86, 87 and principles 85, 97 and rules 91–2, 97–100, 101, 107 and subjectivity 13–4, 16, 85–6, 101–2, 124 and Wittgenstein 90, 91, 101, 102–3 Kant, I. 8, 14, 85, 86–9, 91, 92, 97, 98, 101, 102, 135 Kirchin, S. 6, 169n2 knowledge, see epistemology Korsgaard, C. 94–5 Lance, M. 2, 11, 12, 147–8, 163n1 Larmore, C. 99–100 law, realm of, see realm of law Lear, J. 135 learning and language 18, 123 and rules 62, 98, 102–3, 157 and understanding 104 Levinas, E. 111 Little, M. 2, 3, 11, 12, 36, 147–8, 163n1, 164n20 Loeb, D. 116 Lovibond, S. 38–9, 165n6, 166n15, 168n13, 168n14 Luntley, M. 78, 79, 167n18 MacIntyre, A. 155–6, 159, 171n16 Mackie, J.L. 44, 45–6, 119, 166n13 Mandelbaum, M. 119–21, 122, 124, 130, 132, 159, 169n2

Index 181 McDowell, J. and conceptual capacities 93, 95, 106, 143, 146, 159–60 and experience 93–5, 139, 143 and judgement 93–5 and moral theory 30–1 and objectivity 49 and particularism 43 and perception 38, 66 and principles 31–32 and rationality 31–3, 94 and realism 50, 139 and reasons 108 and sentiments 53 and subjectivity 49, 144 and therapy 37 and virtue 30–32 McGrath, S. 57, 58, 166n2 McKeever, S. 1, 9–10, 16, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62–3, 64, 84, 126, 130, 163n1, 163n7, 164n10, 167n1 McNaughton, D. 4, 5, 11, 45, 54, 57–8, 66, 84, 163n1, 169n3 Merleau-Ponty, M. 111, 153, 154, 155, 170n15 metaphysics and epistemology, see epistemology and metaphysics and reasons, see reasons and metaphysics Millgram, E. 6 moral perception 48, 56–62, 64, 65, 66, 83, 84, 166n2, 166n5, 166n8 moral realism 50, 53, 112, 116–7, 132, 165n8, 166n7, 169n14 moral sense 53, 55, 57 moral vision 57, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67 motivation 107, 119, 160, 161 Myth of the Given 27, 65, 69, 95, 129, 136, 137, 155 Myth of the Mental 155 Myth of the Moral Given 27, 70, 71–2, 76, 80, 81, 82, 93, 132, 161 narrative and judgement 86, 87 and structures 167n2

naturalism 42, 44, 89, 94, 165n2, 168n14 Nietzsche, F. 166n6 non-cognitivism 42, 122, 125 Norman, R. 49, 56, 123 normativity 14, 78, 88, 122, 123, 135, 144, 146–7, 165n3 Nussbaum, M. 163n5 objectivity 14, 16, 43–4, 48–9, 118 O’Neill, O. 2, 7–8, 13, 14, 52, 68, 88–91, 92–3, 98, 165n7 particularism as anti-philosophical 2–3, 8 varieties of 9–10 and atomism 27 and epistemology 4, 8, 17, 21–2, 23–7, 30, 38–41, 44, 68, 70 and guidance 12, 14 and holism 192, 22, 24, 26–7 and Hume 27 and judgement 72, 87, 108–9 and metaphysics 4, 8, 17, 19, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 40 and moral theory 1, 3, 6–7, 11, 36 and perception 56–66, 68 and phenomenology 130, 132–4, 136 and rationality 4, 6, 22, 30, 43, 97 and rules 16–17, 32–33, 79, 91–2, 99, 107, 149 and similarities 77–9 patterns 59, 77, 78–9 perception, moral, see moral perception Pettit, P. 2, 84 phenomenology different senses of 111 and expertise 30, 62, 125, 157–8 and moral experience 58, 113–18, 119, 122, 124, 127 and principles, see principles and phenomenology phronesis 107, 156, 158 Platts, M. 45

182

Index

practice 18, 27, 33, 34–6, 37, 38, 39–40, 43–44, 46–7, 61, 78–9, 81–2, 89, 100–1, 117, 118, 133, 135, 142–3, 152, 159, 161 and theory 9, 10, 135, 163n5, 169n6 prima facie duty 21, 29, 130, 164n19 Price, A. 1 principles as algorithms 7, 16 as reminders 13, 28 and action guidance 5, 151 and epistemology 4, 11–12, 15, 25, 31–2, 38, 56, 60–1, 62, 64, 66, 77, 80, 87, 132, 134, 136 and intuition 14, 165n1 and metaphysics 4, 15, 25, 28, 51–2, 64, 68, 131 and phenomenology 62–3, 131–2 and moral theory 3, 30, 36 and rationality 2, 6, 31, 33, 40, 56, 66, 68, 90, 97 and reasoning 3–4, 7, 12–3, 15, 21, 28, 52, 61, 65, 131 and rules 5, 14, 52, 55, 61–4, 85, 91–2, 97, 101, 102, 126, 127, 131, 134, 157–8, 163n3 principled particularism 9 projection/projectivism 18, 48, 53, 79, 120, 164n15 psychology 18, 19, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 58, 79, 113, 136, 144, 165n8 rationality and experience 94, 96–7, 106, 139, 153 and moral thought 2, 6, 17, 30–3, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 68, 81, 90, 91, 100, 131, 146, 158 and reasons, see reasons and rationality realism moral, see moral realism realm of law 97, 139 reasons atomism about 20–1, 67, 69, 130

awareness of 66, 83, 151, 152, 159, 162 discerning 55, 72, 77, 83, 85 default 149–150 holism about 19, 22, 23–4, 67 giving 25–6, 28, 82, 87 moral 22, 106 responsiveness to 71, 108, 151, 168n14 silencing of 20, 21 space of, see space of reasons theoretical 22, 69, 106 thinking in terms of 64, 71–2, 80, 81, 84, 108, 156, 158–9, 160, 161 and Hume 19 and mental states 47, 49 and metaphysics 19–20, 21, 52, 79–80, 82, 86 and principles 5, 25 and epistemology 23, 26–7, 29, 53, 65–6, 68, 70, 73, 79–80, 82, 84, 108 and expert performance 63–4, 157 and rationality 6, 22, 99, 159 and valence 20, 21, 51 as worldly 44, 45, 47, 49, 53 Ridge, M. 1, 9–10, 16, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62–3, 64, 84, 126, 130, 163n1, 163n7, 164n10, 167n1 Ross, W.D. 21, 25, 29, 130 rule-following 14, 17, 36, 37, 89, 135, 156 rules and judgement, see judgement and rules and learning, see learning and rules and particularism, see particularism and rules and principles, see principles and rules Sartre, J-P. 111 Schroeder, M. 1, 2, 163n2 scientific image/manifest image 11–12 secondary qualities 74, 75 Sellars, W. 11, 17–18, 65, 69–71, 93, 105, 111, 128–9, 132–3, 136,

Index 183 137–8, 139, 144, 145, 146, 147, 167n14, 168n12, 169n12, 170n3 sensibility 41, 52–3, 54, 55, 72, 142, 165n8 sensitivities 32, 33–4, 53, 66, 104, 108, 140, 141, 146, 150 Sinnott-Armstrong, W. 113–14, 115 skills 99, 122, 125, 159 Smith, M. 2, 43, 44, 84, 118, 159, 169n6 space of reasons 27, 70, 97, 136, 137–9, 145, 153, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165n2 space of moral reasons 65, 110, 160–1, 162 Stroud, B. 23, 24 switching argument 29 subjectivity 14, 16, 30, 38, 40, 45–7, 50, 51, 53–4, 66, 71, 82, 86, 90, 101–2, 103, 104, 113, 117, 119, 123, 124, 130,

131, 138, 139, 145, 153, 162, 167n2 Taylor, C. 47 Thornton, T. 163n9 Timmons, M. 130, 169n2 utilitarianism 1 valence 20–1, 22, 27, 28, 51, 65, 67, 68, 81 Väyrynen, P. 105, 107, 151–2 virtue 15, 30, 31–2 Wallace, R.J. 39 Wiggins, D. 54, 92, 93, 161 Williams, B. 44, 48, 74, 113, 114, 128, 134 Wittgenstein, L. 7, 34, 37, 43, 77–8, 79, 89, 90, 91, 92, 98, 101, 102–3, 134–5, 152 Wright, C. 46

Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons

Moral Particularism

Challenging Moral Particularism

Moral Reasons

Being Apart from Reasons: The Role of Reasons in Public and Private Moral Decision-Making

The Reasons of Love

Reasons and the Good

Rationality and Moral Theory: How Intimacy Generates Reasons (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)

Reasons and Persons

'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons

Reasons and Reductionism

Reasons and Falsification

All the Wrong Reasons

The Reasons For Marriage

Knowledge, Reasons, and Causes

Reasons, Causes, and Knowledge

Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory: Essays in Honour of Philippa Foot

The Reasons For Marriage

Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties

Reasons, Knowledge, and Probability

Reasons and Persons

Reasons and Causes

Moral Attitudes and Moral Judgments

Moral Dilemmas and Moral Theory

69 Reasons

Sterling's Reasons

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