Particularism and Practical reason

shmik

My main influences have been from continental philosophy, various authors have changed the way I view morality but it’s been somewhat difficult to communicate my outlook. Here I’ll try to elaborate on it using 2 specific theses. They don’t completely accurately describe my outlook and there may be some issues holding them together but it’s a work in progress.

Moral Particularism

Many common positions on morality are based on the application of moral principle to situations. So when analysing a question one will pick out the relevant moral principles to the case and use them to decide on a moral course of action. One extreme example of applying a moral principle is Kant’s axe murderer. A man knocks on the door and asks for the whereabouts of a person he intends to kill. The Kantian is then faced with a difficulty, she cannot breach the principle that we ought not to lie but she also does not want to inform the murderer of the person’s whereabouts.

This example is good for highlighting two common ways of thinking about principles. The absolutist says that it is always wrong to breach a principle while a contributory conception is weaker and states that breaching a principle always contributes to reasons against performing an action. On the contributory theory we can balance out the principle against lying with other principles that apply to the situation, but the lying itself always counts as a negative point.

Particularism rejects both of the absolute and contributory views. Instead of applying moral principles the morally attuned person applies moral reasons to situations. The main difference here is that the actual specifics of a situation are primary. Sometimes the fact that one is lying is a reason not to perform an action whilst in others it could be neutral or even a good thing to do. Perhaps it’s morally correct to lie to the axe murder and the lying itself is good.

One of the downsides is that we lose the universality that is so desired in moral discourse. People want to say ‘In this situation you claim something is immoral because of X, therefore this other similar situation should be immoral because of X’. A common argument that is the first that comes to my head is from an ad campaign.

You wouldn’t steal a car
You wouldn’t steal a handbag
You wouldn’t steal a television
You wouldn’t steal a movie

Downloading pirated films is stealing.

Here its telling us that all these examples fall under the principle of stealing, therefore for consistency we should not pirate films. This is something I think we need to give up, we need to overcome the fetishism for systemisation and the desire to be able to prove our positions by deriving them. Moral principles are at best a crutch and may only be useful for people that are out of touch and for teaching children.

Morality as part of practical reason.

Basically morality doesn’t have trumps. The moral reasons to do an action are just part of a larger practical reason for doing it. We generally think of moral reasons as radically different from other reasons and that the moral conclusions represent the complete practical reason. The thought is that we should isolate the moral considerations in a situation. If these imply that I should take action which will result in losing my job, then I should nonetheless take those actions. Instead of this I’m proposing that moral reasons factor as just another reason for doing an action. ‘Moral reasons’ are the way we describe a subset of practical reasons. This works well with particularism, in a specific situation we weigh up all the reasons for and against doing a particular action. Some of these are moral and some not. We then form a practical reason which is what we should do.

I'll also add that I don't think that morality is congnitivist and that many of the influences of our moral deliberations won't explicitly present to us as reasons. Furthermore in many situations there won't be any kind of deliberation at all, intuition plays a large role.

Streetlight

I'm more or less in agreement that the idea of moral principles (understood in terms of 'rules') are exactly the wrong way to go about thinking morality, and are more or less a religious hangover from a time when ethics became conflated with 'commandments' and the like. To follow a rule is not to act morally but to be something like a bureaucrat or a moral pencil-pusher, as it were, merely 'applying' universals that do not implicate me in the situation when morality is called for. This is the minimal trace of truth in Kant's idea that one shouldn't simply act in conformity to duty (a situation which conflates ethics with legality) but also because of duty. I ought to be in some sense responsible for my acts, invested in the situation in which I am called upon to act morally, rather than being a mere spectator who, from the safety of the stands, as it were, can simply hide behind rules instead of recognising the part I play in being a moral agent.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that what you might call moral particularism is in a much better position to address these issues. Just as morality cannot be an abdication of responsibility to the universality of law - without ceasing to be morality - I am equally suspect of any attempt which might subsume morality to the rubric of 'practicality'; as if the moral thing to do is dictated by the most practical thing to do - a position which once again leaves me 'outside' of the ambit of the moral responsibility, allowing me once again to 'hide behind' practicality so as to claim my morality. One must be careful, I think, in any attempt to 'shut down' the space of morality by aligning it once and for all with a set of 'moral criteria' be this the universality of law or the dictates of practicality - morality, my intuition tells me, must be something that remains 'open', that cannot be 'closed' and parsed neatly without struggle. One must inhabit morality, live it in a way that puts oneself in question even as we strive to do the 'right thing'.

shmik

Hey

↪StreetlightX

I actually agree with everything you wrote. In the OP the particularism section got a little long so I rushed the talk about practical reason. I didn't intend the meaning 'being practical' when I used the term 'practical reason'. I meant it in this way:

In classical philosophical terms, it is very important to distinguish three domains of human activity: theoretical reason, which investigates the truth of contingent events as well as necessary truths; practical reason, which determines whether a prospective course of action is worth pursuing; and productive or technical reason, which attempts to find the best means for a given end. — From Wiki

Really it's just another shot at traditional moral views. The point is the negative one, that we cannot isolate the moral aspects of a situation to assess which course of action we should take. Instead deciding what should be done (or worth pursuing) requires also taking into account other reasons and motivations which don't fall under the umbrella of morality. By the way these veiws don't necessarily go together and I'm sure many particularists disagree with the practical reason aspect.

Baden

There is a sense in which the search for moral certainty through theory is as much an abdication of moral responsibility as an attempt to to fulfil it. So, I share the particularist's discomfort with attempts at universalizing moral principles. In fact, there's good evidence to show that this kind of universalizing is what the least moral among us fall back on to fill the vacuum of their moral character. I've just been listening to an interview with a researcher who questioned prisoners diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder on their moral beliefs, and their answers tended to be very much in line with rule-based systems of morality, i.e. you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't swear, you shouldn't kill etc., but with a striking lack of gradation as if the interviewees were reeling off a shopping list of moral requirements without really engaging with them because their sense of morality was based much more on their understanding of the dictats of authority than any personal sense of sympathy with the victims of the stated transgressions.

And I think sympathy must be at the core of morality, sympathy tempered by reason. You can't rely on reasons for action alone because then you are not really inhabiting morality as @StreetlightX suggested above. On the other hand of course, sympathy alone will not cut it because it may strip you of the moral courage to do the distasteful for greater ends (say in the case of a mother who has to strike her choking baby hard in order to dislodge a piece of food but can't bring herself to do it, or in more extreme cases where you might have to harm or even kill someone to save others).

So yes, I'm generally on board with the idea that morality is empty without recourse to particular contexts, but it's also empty unless grounded in a genuine engagement with the other at an emotional level.

shmik

In fact, there's good evidence to show that this kind of universalizing is what the least moral among us fall back on to fill the vacuum of their moral character. I've just been listening to an interview with a researcher who questioned prisoners diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder on their moral beliefs, and their answers tended to be very much in line with rule-based systems of morality, i.e. you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't swear, you shouldn't kill etc., but with a striking lack of gradation as if the interviewees were reeling off a shopping list of moral requirements without really engaging with them because their sense of morality was based much more on their understanding of the dictats of authority than any personal sense of sympathy with the victims of the stated transgressions. — Baden

This is really interesting. I have been thinking about moral rules in analogue with the way people teach chess. At first the beginner learns rules, 'develop knights before bishops; castle quickly...' later they learn more complicated rules 'place your rook on the seventh rank...', while the best players don't evaluate positions in terms of these rules at all. Rather they use their intuition from experience playing in many situations. Splitting the game up into rules is an oversimplification and while they may often be relevant they will also lead you a stray. So from that perspective it would make sense that the most morally out-of-touch would be the ones that are most reliant on the rules.

And I think sympathy must be at the core of morality, sympathy tempered by reason. You can't rely on reasons for action alone because then you are not really inhabiting morality as StreetlightX suggested above. — Baden

I'm not sure about this, I think that reasons for action include moral feelings i.e that we cannot separate the reason's to do something from the emotions attached to it. That's part of what is wrong with using rules they try to separate rationality from sentiments.

There's an interesting article called against empathy in which the author argues that in many ways empathy hinders our moral actions, with a bunch of philosophers writing responses to it.

I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences. — Paul Bloom

Baden

@shmik I agree there is some tension in the notion of empathy as a ground for morality as empathy tends to dissipate in proportion to the distance of the other from the self, whether that be in physical, social, or cultural terms; and it would seem that any morality based on such arbitrary notions of proximity must fail. So, in that sense empathy or sympathy (the term I usually prefer to use because it more strongly connotes the will to help those in need) could get in the way of morality as much as further it. But I think the picture is more complicated than that. I don't agree, for example, with Bloom that being absent of empathy necessarily puts us in a better position to act morally. As long as we are aware of the distortive effects of empathy, we can override them, but that effort itself must be driven by a will to help, and that will to help tends still to be grounded in empathy or sympathy for others. Remove that and there is nothing but rational calculation, and that leaves morality at the mercy of the normative theory du jour. To mangle Kant (entschuldigung!), moral reasoning without sympathy is empty, sympathy without moral reasoning is blind.

shmik

↪Baden

Things can probably turn on the way that we are using sympathy or empathy. If it means a general concern with other, then I would agree. But when used in a strict sense, to my mind there is no single foundation for our moral motivations. Elements like, empathy, a sense of justice, a feeling of responsibility or may be a desire for social order - are in play. For instance if I see someone shoplifting from the supermarket I feel a desire to stop them or curse them or at least belittle them in my thoughts. I can't see how that would be related to empathy.
This mixes into the other thread in which I believe we can feel responsibility to stop a tragedy without being able to feeling empathy towards the people it effects.

That is to say if empathy goes we are not left with the a bunch of cold rational equations.

Cavacava

Several interesting views, and I agree with much that has been said. Kant (and others) ask what it means to be a moral agent, for him this must involve the concept of freedom of the will. We, as a species, seek to order what we experience, and language facilitates this process. Unless there are rules/language then it is difficult for me to see what could be meant by freedom. The presence of rules suggests certain way(s) to act, which we can follow or not.

Kant is doing meta-ethics, he is not so much concerned with applied ethics. I think pressuring his statements too much about their application may lead us off his course. The way we can recognize that a chair is a chair, regardless of its maker or style may also applicable to what we think is moral or not. We learn what is right and what is wrong, from our family, our community, all the societal forces around us.

Normative values become habitual in individuals and these values provide us with our initial moral viewpoint, which we accept without much question, at least until a dilemma arises that tests our values. I don't think we should tell an ax murderer where our friend is, but context also may play an important role. Does immanent danger to one's self out weigh our duty to a friend? We recognize the moral course of action, but our freedom as a moral agent has been compromised. We can lie and this may be the best moral course of action given the particularity of the circumstance.

I think empathy, compassion, fairness/justice are instinctual drives that become the emotive content of our thought and I don't think the way we think about what we desire or how we act can be reduced solely to either emotions or reason. These two seem inexorably intertwined in our will and our imagination. I don't think Kant was correct in separating them, even though I understand his desire to achieve the form of an action that might serve as a universal law.

BC

We need every trick in the book to get through life without acting in utterly appalling and thoroughly reprehensible ways. We have reason but we are also animals with a combination of base and more refined drives. We live in close proximity and are constantly rubbing up against each other's personal interests, often rubbing them the wrong way.

(IF) We behave well, it is because we have first learned at least some rules and know that breaking the rules will result in our feeling varying degrees of guilt and shame. The antisocial, psychopathic person is not able to feel sufficient guilt (or any at all) and can break rules without personal discomfort.

Guilt is, indeed, a gift. This sharp edged emotion is our best advisor. It may not always be right, but it's message will be clear.

One of the more advanced rules we may (or may not) learn is that persons are central to moral questions: our person and other persons. Whatever the rule, whatever the custom, whatever the peculiarity of the situation, persons are central and more important than material considerations. In the context of Kant's axe murderer, lying is a no-brainer. Of course you must lie. (Isn't the axe murderer a person? Don't Lizzie Borden's wishes count? Yes, they count--against Ms. Borden who wished to sink her axe into her parents' brains.)

What makes the golden rule effective is the identification of the subject person's needs with the needs of the object persons. What satisfies you is my starting point for meeting your person's needs.

We may find ourselves wanting to screw all other interests to serve our own wishes, just as long as we get what we want. Most of us won't go too far, but most of us will, on an occasion, decide to set aside the needs of the one and the many to get something we desire a lot. We may not commit arson, rape, and bloody murder to get the job promotion we want, but we could very well be willing to screw (both meanings of the word) several other people to get the advancement.

Anger, love, guilt, lust, fear, etc.; a focus on persons; will; rationality; habit; learning "commandments" and the meta-rules about how flexibly we can ignore, interpret and obey them--it's all needed to achieve the well-being and good behavior of the one and the many.

Free agents can decide to ignore their moral gyroscope and live with the guilt, of course. An opportunity to embezzle money undetected may be too much temptation, and the person may walk away richer without detection but carry a heavy load of guilt. An opportunity to have the much desired but illicit sex may become available and one will take the pleasure and the guilt together.

Soylent

Instead of applying moral principles the morally attuned person applies moral reasons to situations. — shmik

How does one become "morally attuned" and have "moral reasons" if not by applying moral principles?

The main difference here is that the actual specifics of a situation are primary.

Surely you mean the morally significant specifics of a situation are primary. The position of Jupiter probably doesn't matter when you're acting, unless the position has become morally significant (e.g., Astronauts travelling to Jupiter). How do we discern morally significant specifics from morally insignificant specifics under particularism?

shmik

How does one become "morally attuned" and have "moral reasons" if not by applying moral principles?
Surely you mean the morally significant specifics of a situation are primary. The position of Jupiter probably doesn't matter when you're acting, unless the position has become morally significant (e.g., Astronauts travelling to Jupiter). How do we discern morally significant specifics from morally insignificant specifics under particularism? — Soylent

I'm not sure about the origins, it doesn't really bother me much, we get socialized.

I actually disagree that we can know before a situation what will be morally significant and what won't be. I could easily throw your example back at you. How did you decide that the position of Jupiter is morally significant if astronauts are traveling there. I'm guessing that you're not relying on a rule you learned about traveling to Jupiter or any other planet.

Soylent

I actually disagree that we can know before a situation what will be morally significant and what won't be. — shmik

In your opinion, is particularism a moral theory capable of providing only post hoc judgements or is it that moral judgements are simply carried out while falling short of knowledge? Perhaps, you hold that we cannot eliminate any detail as morally insignificant and so must consider everything, no matter how seemingly trivial. If I am the person hiding a friend in my house, how do I use particularism to tell me what I should do when the murderer comes to my door? Do I need to examine the contents of the murderers pockets? Perhaps I should at least ask to test the weapon first.

Perhaps it’s morally correct to lie to the axe murder and the lying itself is good. — shmik

Specifically, is "perhaps" the best particularism can do? After the fact, what do we use to judge whether the action was right?

How did you decide that the position of Jupiter is morally significant if astronauts are traveling there. I'm guessing that you're not relying on a rule you learned about traveling to Jupiter or any other planet. — shmik

Moral theories that rest upon principles make discernment of morally significant details a feature of moral education with hopes that agents will learn to make sound moral judgement. We judge, to the best of our abilities, what aspects of action are morally significant, and through practice and the aim of a moral principle, become skilled and accurate at focusing our attention. I don't need to go to Jupiter or another planet to extrapolate from experience of the application of a moral principle that the position of Jupiter can become morally significant to astronauts travelling there while it is not significant when I am trying to decide if I should lie to a murderer at my door. My worry is that without a principle, we are aimless in our discerning the particulars as morally significant or morally insignificant.

shmik

@Soylent There is some difficulty for me when answering your questions. We have very different conceptions of morality being that many of the things you are concerned about don't come up on my radar at all. Not because I miss them but because they don't form part of and are not relevant to my view.
I think morality is something we experience and live through, not something we have knowledge of. We learn how to converse with others not through applications of rules, it's the same with morality.

In your opinion, is particularism a moral theory capable of providing only post hoc judgements or is it that moral judgements are simply carried out while falling short of knowledge? Perhaps, you hold that we cannot eliminate any detail as morally insignificant and so must consider everything, no matter how seemingly trivial. If I am the person hiding a friend in my house, how do I use particularism to tell me what I should do when the murderer comes to my door? Do I need to examine the contents of the murderers pockets? Perhaps I should at least ask to test the weapon first. — Soylent

When I say 'before' I don't really mean it as temporally before I mean it as before you know the details of a situation. If someone knows the details that they are working with they can then be in a position to assess that particular situation.

When we are speaking about hypothetical I can make an assessments but these don't then map
to real world situations. The world is complicated there are thousands of different little things which could change what you think of a situation. What is going to count as a moral reason for doing an action will not come down to minutely detailed list.

The perhaps is going to depend on details. But you have missed the whole point of the sentence which is that under certain circumstances the fact that you are lying my not even be a point against doing an action.

My worry is that without a principle, we are aimless in our discerning the particulars as morally significant or morally insignificant. — Soylent

I don't have this issue. Also I am not calling for an abandonment of all moral reasoning all together. We still hear about it from other people. "It was OK to lie then because if you didn't Barry would probably have told his wife about it. Since she works with Mitch and it could be a pain for him if she found out that..." Whatever it is, I'm just say that the principles take these reasons and try to apply them like a hammer, flattening out all differences.

Moral judgements shift from being about knowledge to being part of the skills we use in dealing with the world.

Particularism and Practical reason

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