Some Objections To Moral Particularism

Why I don't think that we should be moral particularists

Moral paricularism is the notion that there are not true moral principles—or at least that moral principles are not necessary to do ethics properly. Moral particularism is the view of ethics that I find most objectionable—it seems to rob us of our ability to do good ethics. Thus, in this article I shall explain why I am not a moral particularist.

1 Simplicity.

Moral particularism holds that there are no generalizations about all moral actions—no universal moral rules. Thus, it is infinitely complex, holding to an infinite number of distinct morally supervenient facts. Let’s consider how complex it is by looking at the SEP page based on theories of information, which are used to figure out the complexity of a theory. Note, I’m rather an amateur here, so it’s possible I’ll misunderstand some information theory.

Nyquist’s function: Nyquist (1924) was probably the first to express the amount of “intelligence” that could be transmitted given a certain line speed of a telegraph systems in terms of a log function: W=klogmW=klog⁡m, where W is the speed of transmission, K is a constant, and m are the different voltage levels one can choose from.

Here one would need an infinite amount of information to simulate the verdicts of moral particularism, because there is no simple formula. You would have to directly transmit verdicts about an infinite number of cases. An infinitely complex theory must be rejected if simplicity is to be a virtue at all.

Fisher information: the amount of information that an observable random variable X carries about an unknown parameter θθ upon which the probability of X depends (Fisher 1925).

There’s a high chance I’m confused here, but this also seems to result in infinite complexity, because one needs an infinite number of parameters.

The Hartley function: (Hartley 1928, Rényi 1961, Vigo 2012). The amount of information we get when we select an element from a finite set S under uniform distribution is the logarithm of the cardinality of that set.

This seems the same as the previous one.

Shannon information: the entropy, H, of a discrete random variable X is a measure of the amount of uncertainty associated with the value of X (Shannon 1948; Shannon & Weaver 1949).

A clearer explanation is provided here which would make particularism infinitely complex, holding there there are an infinite number of distinct things that determine moral worth and no simple formula. One would need an infinitely long code to run the program for determining whether things are good or not.

Kolmogorov complexity: the information in a binary string x is the length of the shortest program p that produces x on a reference universal Turing machine U (Turing 1937; Solomonoff 1960, 1964a,b, 1997; Kolmogorov 1965; Chaitin 1969, 1987).

Same applies for Kolmogorov complexity.

Moral particularism is a terrible theory in terms of simplicity. It requires postulating an infinite number of different things with no common uniting factor—that would be infinitely complex by any standard of information. It does worse than positing 100^100^100^100^100 fairies who collectively decide moral judgements, because those would be easier to simulate. Thus, this is not just an argument that undermines it a bit. This is a total headshot to particularism. It is infinitely complex!

When asked why happiness is good, the answer I would tend to give is that it just is, there’s no deeper account. It’s rather like asking why 1+1=2 or why we sound arguments are true. But the particularist has to say that an infinite number of things are true, with no deeper explanation.

2 There are some universally true moral principles

This argument says

Premise 1: If there are true moral principles, moral particularism is false

Premise 2: There are true moral principles

Therefore, moral particularism is false

Premise 1 is true by definition

Premise 2 is hard to deny. Here are several moral principles that seem true

1 If there is a large group of people who are

A) The only existing sentient beings

B) Have a very high quality of life

C) Don’t want to be tortured

D) No benefits to anyone else will accrue from torturing them to death

E) Are infants who have not harmed anyone at any point

F) Will not harm anyone at any future point

You should not torture them to death.

2 If some action would cause an infinite number of people who have not harmed anyone at any previous point and will not harm anyone at any future point to endure infinite suffering, when otherwise they would have lived good lives, you shouldn’t take the action

3 If some action violates rights, decreases desire fulfillment, decrease joy, decreases virtue, causes people’s well-being to be less proportional to their virtue, increases impure pleasures, decreases virtuous pleasures, decreases objective list fulfillment, that action should not be taken.

Moral particularists must deny these moral rules as being universally applicable.

3 Partner’s in crime to scientific particularism.

Premise 1: If moral particularism is true, scientific particularism is true

Premise 2: Scientific particularism is not true

Therefore, moral particularism is not true

Premise 2 is widely accepted—there are virtually zero scientific particularists. Everyone thinks there are true either laws or law like generalizations about physics.

Premise 1 is also plausible. The reasons people give for accepting moral particularism seem to also apply to scientific particularism. Dancy says, for example,

The first reason is that absolute principles cannot conflict, and that if they cannot conflict a vital aspect of our moral lives (that is, conflict) has been left out of account altogether by any theory that supposes that morality is entirely governed by absolute principles.

If two supposed absolute principles conflict in a single case, one of them must be abandoned. Suppose, for instance that one principle says that all actions of type A are wrong and another says that all actions of type B are right. Suppose also that no action can be both overall wrong and overall right, and that it is possible for an action to be of both types, A and B. Things are all right so far, but if there were an action of both types, one or other of the principles would have to have abandoned. But this means that we have no room for conflict. What is meant by moral conflict here is not conflict between two individuals, but conflict between reasons for and against in a given case. There cannot be that sort of conflict, if all reasons are specified in absolute principles, because if the reasons conflicted the principles specifying them would conflict, and this would just show that one of the principles was a fraud. Conflict would, then, never be more than a product of our own misconceptions. There would be no real conflict.

What this criticism amounts to is the complaint that we need to be able to make sense of cases in which there are moral reasons on both sides, for and against. But we cannot do this effectively if all moral reasons are specified in absolute principles. Morality cannot, therefore, be just a system of absolute principles. The only way in which we could continue to think of morality as governed by absolute principles is to suppose that there is only one such principle, so that there is no possibility of conflict between principles, or to arrange things in some other way so that the principles are incapable of conflict. (Even then, of course, there would be the worry that conflict is real, and that to arrange things so that conflict is merely apparent is to erase something important.) We know of one position that offers only one principle: classical utilitarianism. The argument against this ‘monistic’ position is rather different. The argument is the direct claim that monism is false; there is more than one sort of relevant property, or more than one way in which features can get to be morally relevant. So a position with only one absolute principle is false, and one with more than one such principle cannot make proper sense of conflict.

But the same is true of scientific particularism. If scientific particularism is false, there are universal laws of physics that never conflict. Additionally, given the many different contributory facts to scientific features, it seems that one could make a similar reply, namely, that a single absolute principle can’t account for the diversity of scientific factors that go into any individual case.

(Additionally, I would argue that the utilitarian account is plausible across all cases, as I have previously in my series).

The second prong of the particularist attack is to ask why we should suppose that a feature that counts in favour in one case must count the same way wherever it appears. To this question, I think, no real answer has been produced. Generalists tend to point out that if one claims that a feature counts in favour here and against there, one has something to explain. But the particularist is happy to admit this. It is true that if a feature counts in favour in one case and against in another broadly similar case, there must be an explanation of how this can be. That explanation will presumably be given by pointing to other differences between the cases. In the second case, perhaps, something that is required for the feature to count in favour is in fact absent, though it was present in the first case. Such explanations must be available, and they can be found. None of this does anything to restore a generalist conception of how reasons function.

One could make a similar reply in the scientific case. Why think that laws applying one way in one case mean that they must apply another way in a similar case.

The third prong of attack on contributory generalism involves asking for an appropriate epistemology. How are we to tell, from what we can discern case by case, that this feature will function in the same way wherever else it appears? Ross, our paradigm generalist, holds that we start with the recognition that this feature counts in favour here, but that we can immediately tell (by a process which he calls ‘intuitive induction’) that it must count in favour everywhere. The question is how this is supposed to work. What is it that is discernible in one case and tells us that what we have here must repeat in all other cases? (Ross rightly does not suppose that we learn our moral principles by ordinary induction.) The standard, and probably the only, answer to this question is wrong. This answer amounts to an account of what it is to make a difference in a particular case—what it is to be relevant here. That account understands a feature as relevant here if and only if, in any case where it is the only relevant feature, it would decide the issue. Now if this account of particular relevance were defensible, we would indeed have some reason to suppose that what is relevant here would be relevant in any other situation. For on each further situation it will still be true that if it were the only relevant feature, it would decide the issue. So relevance is indeed general relevance, on this showing. And this gives the generalist the epistemology he needs, for it is now easy to see how, in discerning that this feature matters here, we immediately see that it would make the same difference on every occurrence. For it is true of it on each occurrence that if it were the only relevant feature, it would decide the issue.

Sadly, the account of relevance that this all depends on is not defensible. It is, after all, true of any feature whatever that if it were the only relevant feature, it would decide the issue. The word ‘relevant’ appears within this formulation, and it cannot be removed. For if we said merely that if this feature were the only feature, it would decide the issue, we would have said something that is probably both false and, worse, incoherent. It would be incoherent because the idea that a feature could be present alone, without any other features whatever, is surely nonsense. The idea that an action could be merely kind, say, without having any other features at all, makes no sense at all. Further, there may be some features that can only be relevant if some other feature is also relevant—features that (in terms of reasons) only give us reasons if some other feature is giving us reasons as well. For instance, in the Prisoner’s Dilemma one prisoner only has reasons if the other one does. If this can occur, any ‘isolation test’ for reasons must miss some reasons out. Finally, trying to isolate the contribution of a feature by asking how things would have been if no other feature had made any contribution is, when one comes to think of it, a rather peculiar enterprise. It is uncomfortably like trying to determine the contribution made by one football player to his team’s success today by asking how things would have been if there had been no other players on the field. So the notion of relevance that is required as a basis for generalist epistemology is unacceptable.

One could make a similar reply in the case of scientific realism. How would we know that laws of physics apply universally?

Additionally, in the moral case it seems like by reflecting on features we can deduce that they count for or against some state of affairs. Reflecting on the nature of suffering, for example, allows us to realize that the fact that some action would cause suffering counts against doing that act.

Particularists often will argue that whether some fact counts for or against doing some act is context dependent, however, one could say the same about the scientific case. Whether some celestial body will pull in another one requires knowledge of the full context. However, this doesn’t mean scientific particularism is true.

4 Poor track record of moral intuitions

Our moral intuitions are very often wrong, most people throughout history have thought lots of terrible things like that slavery was permissible, women should be second class citizens, and child abuse is permissible. This undermines the arguments for particularism. If general principles govern an infinite number of cases, it’s unsurprising that they would seem wrong to us. This is because our moral intuitions sometimes produce bad results, so we’d expect our intuitions to, in some cases, diverge from the true moral principles.

This also undermines particularist epistemology. If our case specific judgements are often dreadfully wrong, a moral system that relies on them to make decisions is unreliable. The particularist can always appeal to specific facts of the case which make it impossible to adequately apply principles to.

To quote this lovely book “moral particularism as a decision procedure provides far too much scope for special pleading and rationalization of self-serving action.”

5 Moral particularism Undermines Moral Knowledge

A) It undermines thought experiments. If I’m trying to argue for the moral obligation to care about the future, care about the interests of animals, or abolish slavery, I would likely appeal to similar cases. For example, if I ask someone what the justification is for enslaving people of a particular skin color, the generalist might say something like “Well, people of that skin color aren’t morally relevant.” However, the particularist can just appeal to particular facts about the case, such that thought experiments can’t be employed. This undermines our ability to employ moral reasoning, because the thought experiment will never be identical to the case at hand, so the particularist can always dig in their heels and say that the specific case at hand has unique features.

B Moral particularism must hold that moral knowledge is a posteriori, however, that would make it impossible to make a priori judgements about other cases when combined with the commitments of particularism towards there being no general principles, as this book argues. According to moral particularism, moral facts can’t be deduced a priori, because they depend on the specific features of a case. Thus, we need to experience a case in order to know facts about it. However, this would mean we can’t make judgements about merely imagined cases that it seems like we can know a priori, like that an alien holocaust that inflicts massive suffering and benefits no one would be bad.

C Moral particularism undermines moral knowledge based on experience because we can’t extract general principles. Small children, for example, seem to learn that it’s bad to hurt others by being hurt by others and seeing the reactions of others from being hurt. However, if particularism is true, then they can’t extrapolate the general principle that it’s wrong to hurt people. However, if this is true, then it’s unclear how we can have moral knowledge that we can apply to other cases. What are we learning in moral cases if we’re not gaining knowledge of moral principles?

Dancy replies

The third question asks us what relevance other cases do have to a new case, if not the sort of relevance that the generalist supposes. The answer to this is that experience of similar cases can tell us what sort of thing to look out for, and the sort of relevance that a certain feature can have; in this way our judgement in a new case can be informed, though it is not forced or constrained, by our experience of similar cases in the past. There is no need to suppose that the way in which this works is by the extraction of principles from the earlier cases, which we then impose on the new case.

This raises several problems.

1 It leaves us unable to determine when we should assume that like cases implications to spill over to other like cases. If there aren’t true moral principles, what reason do we have to think that harming someone is morally wrong in general, rather than the notion merely that harming someone is wrong in a few specific circumstances.

2 How does it inform us of anything if there are no principles that can be extracted? If, for example, scientific particularism were true, we couldn’t extrapolate trends from other cases, because there would be no static rules that govern all cases. Particularism holds the same is true.

3 If there are no true moral principles, what reason do we have to even think that like cases should be similar in their moral judgements. If, for example Z is a function of X^Y^A^B^C+BCA-LR^N, where each of them are variables, we couldn’t extrapolate trends based on the values for the values of any of the variables. All of them depend on the others. In the particularist case, it’s even more dire, for there are an infinite number of variables. Thus, how can we extract any general lessons about other cases if the permissibility of some action depends on an infinite number of specific features of the case?

D Leads to skepticism because we can’t reach reflective equilibrium. This has been argued persuasively by Torbjörn Tännsjö. The arguments is as follows. In order to have knowledge, our beliefs can’t be analyzed in a vacuum, they must be able to form a coherent web. However, on particularism, there is no coherent web to be formed, just a series of disjunctive moral judgements. Thus, on particularism we can’t have any moral knowledge. Given that our views can’t be wrapped into a coherent web, we can’t be confident in any of them, as coherentism is the only appropriate method for ethics.

Note, this claim about coherentism being the only appropriate method for ethics is consistent with the view that foundationalism is true broadly. This is not about our fundamental axioms, just about higher order ethical principles. When asked why I accept, for example, the claim about 10!!! dust specks being worse than torture , I can appeal to a series of other judgements that are more plausible. However, the particularist rejects any such judgements, so they can provide no deeper account of how they have moral knowledge.

If asked how they know whether we should flip the switch in the trolley problem, the moral particularist can’t appeal to principles or to other scenarios, because those other scenarios lack identical features, so they require distinct moral judgements. Only the generalist, thus, can have moral knowledge. For the particularist, any moral judgement they make has no deeper explanation. The reason I shouldn’t torture Jim has no deeper account relating to the badness of torture.

This means particularism makes ethical reasoning impossible—we can neither appeal to thought experiment nor general principles. This makes us fully unable to correct bad moral judgements. This is because moral particularism can’t account for the cluster structure of moral reasoning, where similar cases tend to have similar results.