Moral particularism

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Moral particularism is the view that there are no moral principles and moral judgement can be found only as one decides particular cases, either real or imagined.

According to particularism, most notably defended by Jonathan Dancy (2004), moral knowledge should be understood as knowledge of moral rules of thumb, which are not principles, and of particular solutions, which can be used by analogy in new cases.

A largely coincident view about law was defended by Castanheira Neves in his 1967 major work.

[edit] References and links

• Dancy, Jonathan (2004). Ethics without principles, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dancy, Jonathan (2001). "Moral particularism", in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.