Sometimes people recommend Moral Particularism as being similar to my ideas on Popperian morality.
This is a condensed summary of my notes on Particularism, based on this entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Particularism in its full/pure state (what Dancy called “trenchant”) — that there are no moral principles — fails when applied to itself: it is itself a principle.
Reductio ad canem:
Particularism says that being morally right in any particular case doesn’t have anything in common with the other cases.
Applied to dogs, Particularism would say: There is such a thing as dogs. Poor misguided people think there’s a common factor that makes something a dog. But dogs are dogs for individual reasons — not some common factor they share. Dogs have nothing in common. And yet you can recognise a dog (theoretically all dogs) by being doggedly sensitive.
Particularism has various misconceptions about what a ‘principle’ is.
Whether a feature is relevant or not in a new case, and if so what exact role it is playing there … will be sensitive to other features of the case. … what is a reason in one case may be no reason at all in another
This, as an argument against principles, is silly. Most moral systems agree with this idea of situation-dependence.
Laws of physics might say a ballast is a functioning feature for a ship but not a plane — but it’s still the same underlying principles.
Particularism never answers “in what way does it depend on the situation?“. (Because any answer would then be a principle…)
Dancy doesn’t recognise the concept of ‘red’ is a general theory (i.e. a principle).
Particularism may partly be due to a misunderstanding that’s common among non-programmers. Namely: ‘if there’s a principle, it should give the same answers in all cases’.
But the whole point of principles is that they give you different answers for different situations.
If you want to write a program that does different things in different situations, the only way to do that is to have a function (i.e. a principle) which takes the description of the situation as the input. You cannot write a different function for every situation, because then you’d need a function to determine what function to use (which would then be used in every situation).
“Particularists take their holism to be a reason to reject any invariance of reasons, of either sort—whether at the overall or at the contributory level.”
…Except Particularism itself, that’s totes invariant.
“holism” = There are so many factors affecting the morality of situations that no two situations are ever alike, and therefore no generalisations about them are ever true. Except that one.
Particularism claims it’s how to think about objective morality. But general theories (‘principles’) are a prerequisite of objective morality that’s knowable (including fallibly knowable).
If ‘dog’ refers to some objective property, there must be some general meaning/attribute that’s shared among all dogs and not things that aren’t dogs.