Particularism and Responsibility

Hello all,

I'm curious about the possible ramifications for theorizing about responsibility if one accepts a particularist conception of morality-that is, one that rejects the centrality if not the relevance, of moral principles (e.g., as defended by Jonathan Dancy).    Thus far, I haven't uncovered much of any discussion of this.  Are any of you aware of something I may have overlooked?

Thanks!

Comments

[Dwight Furrow]

Andrew,

I haven't come across any extensive treatment of this issue although some of the essays in "Moral Particularism", edited by Hooker and Little are relevent in that they deal with what it means to give a reason for a claim, including reasons for holding people responsible.

In my recent book "Ethics: Key Concepts in Philosophy" I defend moral particularism and in the last chapter provide an account of moral responsibility. It is an introductory text so I don't give it a comprehensive treatment. Roughly, my view is that P.F. Strawson was on the right track in looking at the social practice of holding people responsible, which will be highly contextual and thus compatible with particularism. However, we have to make room for social practices to be criticized. Thus, other factors come into play in our judgments about moral responsibility, especially Fischer and Ravissa's notion of guidance contol. However, none of these considerations for the particularist can be universal generalizations.

[Michael Cholbi]

One thought that occurs to me is that moral particularism would likely narrow the scope of actions for which individuals are rightly held morally responsible: Suppose we adopt a Fischer/Ravizza picture of respsonsibility. Furthermore, suppose that moral deliberation (or more broadly, practical reasoning) is a mechanism that is "owned" in the appropriate way by agents and that we are rationally responsive to moral deliberation. It would seem to follow that we are responsible for those acts resulting from moral deliberation. But the particularist view of morality greatly complicates moral deliberation because (at least in Dancy's version) it denies that a factor that is morally relevant and decisive in one context is decisive or even relevant in another context. This seems to make moral deliberation so context-sensitive as to narrow the number of actions that can rightly be said to be reponsibly performed. In Strawsonian terms, if particularism is true, our sympathy for the intricacies of moral deliberation should lead us to see less of people's behavior as responsible and to be more lenient in excusing morally odious behavior that results from an understandable inability to navigate a moral situation by appeal to whatever moral considerations are relevant in that situation.

[Dwight Furrow]

Michael,

You pose an interesting question.

It seems to me that the particularist is arguing that practical reason just is such that the relevance and valence of factors is context sensitive. But this kind of reasoning is performed competently by most human beings with normally functioning reasoning mechanism, at least under ordinary circumstances. So there is no problem with setting high standards for what we can reasonably hold people responsible for.

One the other hand, the particularist argues that when assessing the practical reasoning of others we must pay attention to contextual factors that determine outcomes. And we may not know enough about how others are situated to make accurate judgments about their intentions, thus making us uncertain about when to assign responsibility. Perhaps a strict deontologist with stringent principles and few exceptions might have an easier time with this.

But the particularist view strikes me as capturing our situation as moral agents--often uncertain about the intentions of others. The virtue of Strawson's approach to moral responsibility is that he makes clear that our assignments of moral responsibility are often based on judgments about what makes our social interactions function well. Sometimes, it is beneficial to give others the benefit of the doubt, sometimes not. Since morally odious behavior usually disrupts relationships and is an obstacle to social life, I'm not sure why a particularist would find it generally excusable.