Steelmanning Particularism

Making my best case for moral particularism

INTRODUCTION

“Moral Particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral principles, that moral thought does not consist in the application of moral principles to cases, and that the morally perfect person should not be conceived as the person of principle.”

I find moral particularism to be a particularly implausible theory, with many defensible, principled reasons to reject it. However, in this article, which will also be littered with wordplay, I will try to make my strongest case for particularism. I have not read much from leading particularists, so I may be only Dancing around the relevant concepts.

1 THE TOTAL FAILURE OF PRINCIPLES

One law-like generalization of investigating any domain, be it chess strategy, sailing, or literature, is that it makes good sense to try to figure out the laws that govern that domain — if indeed there are any. When it comes to some areas like physics, it is quite obvious that there is a set of well-ordered laws that reign supreme. After all, we’re able to make enormous numbers of correct predictions using our knowledge of physics. Given how grand our theories are at predicting the results of experiments in physics, at providing a deeply unified picture of all the facts about physics, we should go with our gut, informing us that there’s a grand unified model of physics.

Or take the example of mathematics. Every mathematical fact contained somewhere in the great expanse of true things to be known about mathematics can be inferred from a small number of axioms. Being deducible from a minute number of simple axioms is both necessary and sufficient to be a mathematical fact.

Or consider the domain of health — while health may be complex, there are at least in principle very complex rules that govern how healthy one is.

The same, however, is not true of many domains. Take the domain of aesthetics and you’ll see that there’s pretty much no good way of creating general aesthetic laws. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be pretty — and it certainly makes no sense to reference necessary and sufficient conditions for prettiness when star-gazing. When one gazes at their wife, they oughtn’t have a checklist to decide prettiness; rather, they ought merely to consider the things about their wife that they find pretty. Maybe there is some list that could be written out — but it would comprise a labyrinthine document of epic proportions, rivaling the US legal code in terms of complexity, bizarreness, and unreadability.

Ethics, like aesthetics, but unlike physics, is poorly described by general principles. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for an act to be right. Acts certainly have features that contribute to their general rightness — an act that increases utility will tend to be right, though certainly not always. We shall in a moment return to the failure of the notion that utility is always to be maximized. But while the fact that an act produces utility does tend to count in favor of an act, there are certainly other considerations that countenance the aforementioned act; other decision procedures one ought to utilize before deciding whether or not to have the good pleasure of taking the action.

Consider a case in which a bunch of nazis derive pleasure from torturing a Jewish person. In this case, as is evident to all but a deranged band of rabid utilitarians, whose good sense seems to have been sullied by debauchery and hedonism, the fact that the act pleases a bunch of nazis makes the act less palatable than it would otherwise be. One’s gripe about the icebox killers shouldn’t be that they didn’t adequately enjoy their spree of torture and murder.

Ethics is not like these things — it works well in practice, but poorly in theory. That’s because there are no true, universal ethical theories. All attempts to systematize ethics, including most notably that of the utilitarians, have produced downright monstrous results.

The utilitarians offer a relatively clear-cut case — though they’re certainly not unique in this regard. The utilitarians have done us the good fortune of giving us a simple solution to all of ethics, revealing just how inadequate these one-sentence ethical theories are. The simplistic utilitarian determinant of whether an act is right is whether it increases utility — yet utilitarians rarely grapple with the troubling implications of their view. By attempting to reduce all of morality to a black and white set of rules, utilitarians would sanction reinstituting slavery, or apartheid in South Africa — as long as one being derived enough pleasure from it to outweigh the harms of it. They’d also have to grant that, given the unpredictability of history, atrocities like slavery, the holocaust, and Jim Crowe may have been right, as a result of positively shaping the future. Similarly, they’d have to grant that many murders, rapes, and even tortures have been good for the world overall, given their unpredictable ripple effects. Indeed, a utilitarian would have to sanction raping a woman if she’d give birth to a child who would cure cancer.

Utilitarians tend to be relatively nice people — yet their approach to ethics is downright sociopathic. Of course, because utilitarians live their lives as particularists, they tend to shy away from the more repugnant conclusions of their theory; no utilitarian I know, for example, actually endorses a significant number of rapes throughout human history — or thinks that whether mass shootings are right will depend on whether their harms were in some way outweighed by some combination of legal change or pleasurable public catharsis. Utilitarianism in theory is almost breathtakingly repugnant — holding that raping children would be a good thing if enough aliens experienced sexual pleasure from watching the rape of children, yet in practice, the utilitarians never act on their depraved principles — and for good reason! Utilitarians in the real world are, for good reason, more likely to feed their grandchildren, with money that could have gone to save several far-away lives, than they are to endorse feeding their grandchildren to the utility monster.

Similarly, even if it turned out that the suffering from consuming factory-farmed meat outweighed the pleasure the average person gets in the course of their life, the holocaust would still have been clearly wrong! It would similarly still be wrong to go on mass murder sprees.

Even the most steadfast utilitarians don’t rob banks — even if they knew they probably wouldn’t get caught and could get a lot of money. Similarly, no utilitarian I know would actually shoot a person to steal 10,000 dollars — which they could then sell to save several lives.

This isn’t a failure on the utilitarians part — rather, it’s a success on the utilitarians part and a failure on utilitarianism’s fault. Were the theory untempered by human decency — that would be deeply frightening!

Or take the — arguably even crazier — natural law theorists. These wackos have a nice, simple theory, which tells them that being gay is immoral; lying is immoral, even to prevent the holocaust; anal and oral sex are immoral, and so on. However, the natural law theorists are a much more pernicious force of lawlessness and destruction than the utilitarians — for they actually follow through on their deranged theory. In the clutches of their theory, they sign off on laws that make the lives of people much worse. Isn’t it strange how the horrificness of a theory tends to be proportional to how much it’s used to dismiss other concerns, how much the theory is seen a simple, elegant, parsimonious solution to all of ethics.

The natural law theory is also doomed from the start. Were it true that the proper function of a human was to go around experiencing infinite suffering — even were that the reason a creator made us — we would nonetheless not deserve such a fate.

Kant’s attempt to systematize ethics was a particularly amusing failure — he came up with a bunch of different principles, totally inconsistent with each other, claimed falsely that they were all the same without explaining how, and yet despite that herculean effort to generate a generalist moral law, he was totally unable to avoid the very clear failure mode of holding that it’s wrong to lie to a nazi when a Jew is at your house. And if he Kant do it, despite throwing out parsimony entirely, then the parsimony loving sycophants certainly can’t adequately explain our moral intuitions.

Even someone as brilliant as Parfit ran into devastating counterexamples to his preferred theory. Every theory has decisive counterexamples — except particularism of course. Isn’t that strange — the generalist’s diet is filled with bullets, while the particularists get off scot-free?

The closer to particularism theories get, the more plausible they are. Hedonistic utilitarianism is less plausible than objective list theory utilitarianism, which is less plausible than Huemer’s pluralism — and so on.

2 THIS ISN’T HOW WE SHOULD THINK OF ETHICS

Having a justified true belief in the following, we know that conceptual analysis is either always or almost always a failure. Attempts to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, being a chair, being beautiful, being a nice person, and so on have been a long project of failure.

It turns out that our concepts — even one’s representing real things like chairs — are relatively imprecise; despite not knowing exactly when a series of sand particles become a heap, I know a heap when I see it. Ethics is the same — we can be far more confident that it’s wrong to torture small children than we can be in any account of why it is wrong. Much like a good act, I know a good song when I hear it — but I have no idea what the precise necessary and sufficient conditions are for me finding a song to be good. There no doubt are some, but they’re totally useless to theorizing about which pieces of music are nice — this is true of mostart; when I gaze at the moonlight, there’s sonota precise criteria for deciding whether or not I’ll enjoy it that is practically useful.

Thus, we have several good reasons to think that even if there are true moral principles, they’re not how we should think about ethics.

3 THE OBJECTIONS SUCK

As the title may suggest — I’m relatively unpersuaded by the objections to particularism. I’ll just respond to a few here.

One first objection claims that particularism is not parsimonious. However, strangely, those levying this objection never seem to have any reasons to think that parsimony is a good thing. Given that aesthetics and chairs have no clear necessary and sufficient conditions for obtaining, they’re just as lacking in parsimony. Yet no one makes this objection to believers in chairs, art, or music — to raise such a silly objection would be cartoonish theatrics. It turns out that, much like Zeus, we have no good reason to accept that parsimony favors a theory.

Any claim that parsimony is a virtue will rest on some sort of seemings. Seemingly however, our seemings that run contrary to all the various moral generalist theories — you know, the ones claiming that torture and genocide would be wrong even when proscribed by a theory — are much stronger, and thus hold far more weight, than any parsimony related seemings.

A second objection claims that particularism undermines moral knowledge and the relevance of thought experiments. This objection claims that, if there are no principles that make two cases alike morally, then we can’t draw parallels between two cases. However, then all of our judgements will rest on bare appeal to intuition — resulting in fairly radical skepticism.

It would do well for these people to compare the domain of aesthetics to ethics; when this is done the confusion becomes apparent. I am currently listening to the song Cleopatra by the Lumineers. I am enjoying that song. While there are no general aesthetic laws, this fact gives me good reason to think I’ll enjoy other similar songs. Cases that are alike are still alike and render similar verdicts, even where there are no universal, overarching principles. This also undermines the claim of skepticism — our moral beliefs can still nicely reflectively equilibrate; undermining the original position of the objector.

CONCLUSION

There is no one, overarching moral law written on our hearts. Morality is far too complex to be encapsulated in singular, simple principles. One’s ethical failure is directly proportional to how much they try to summarize and act on a moral view that distills ethics down to a miniscule number of moral principles. Ethics, like aesthetics, cannot, even in principle, be generalized in this sloppy, haphazard way.