Some Defects of Moral Particularism

Moral particularism may be described as the position that our moral thinking should be guided by the morally relevant features of particular cases or situations, rather than by general principles of conduct. The particularist can always find exceptions to moral principles or can find cases in which those principles may be inapplicable, misleading, or insufficient. The particularist therefore contends that our moral judgments are always context-dependent, and that the rightness or wrongness of our moral judgments depends on the relevant features of each particular case or situation, rather than the application of moral principles to that particular case or situation.  

      Pekka Vӓyrynen (2011) describes three kinds of particularism: (1) the position that there are no true or valid moral principles, (2) the position that there's no good evidence for their existence, and (3) the position that our moral thinking in no way depends on their existence.¹ He explains that a prominent argument for particularism is the argument from "holism," that a moral reason to perform an action in a particular context may not be a reason to perform that action in another context, while the argument from "atomism" may say to the contrary that a moral reason to perform an action in a particular context may also be a reason to perform that action in another context.²

      Jonathan Dancy (2004) distinguishes between holism and atomism by saying that holism is the claim that a moral reason in one case may be no reason at all (or even a contrary reason) in another case, while "full atomism" is the claim that a moral reason in one case must remain a reason, and must retain the same reason-giving polarity, in every other case. He distinguishes between "full atomism" and "cluster atomism" (the claim that features occur in clusters, and that if all the features in one case are relevantly similar to the features in another case, then any feature that is a reason in one will be a reason in the other.) However, he notes that an argument against cluster atomism is that the polarity of features in a cluster could be affected by changes in the polarity of features in a relevantly similar cluster. A weaker form of atomism would merely claim that if two cases are relevantly similar, then whatever features are reasons in one case will also be reasons in the other.³

      Dancy also distinguishes between theoretical reasons and practical reasons, and between reasons for belief and reasons for action. He explains that the kind of holism he advocates is intended to hold for both sides of each distinction.⁴  

      Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever (2016) explain that the particularist argument from holism has been rejected by generalists who question the sustainability of the distinction between the particular features of a situation that count as reasons and the contextual factors (defeaters, enablers, etc.) that impact whether they do indeed count as reasons. The context-sensitivity of reasons depends on this distinction in order to explain why some particular feature of a situation that counts as a reason in one context may not count as a reason in another context.⁵

      Ridge and McKeever also explain that generalists have rejected the argument from holism on the grounds that it may not be able to explain how reasons, enablers, defeaters, intensifiers/attenuators, etc. actually combine or interact with one another.⁶

      Even if we grant that moral principles may not always be generalizable, there are other arguments to be made against particularism, however.

      In Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet, Polonius gives his son Laertes the following advice, as Laertes prepares to leave for France:

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

      While we might question the generalizability of any or all of these principles, the possibility that they might convey some moral wisdom would seem to be denied by particularism. Indeed, particularism doesn't seem to allow for moral instruction from any general principles of fairness, honesty, loyalty, prudence, humility, and so on. However, further examination of the extent to which such principles actually promote virtuous conduct might provide some evidence for their validity.

      On the other hand, a particularist virtue ethics (virtue ethical particularism) may seek to understand the way in which moral virtues may be expressed by judgments that depend on the relevant features of each particular case or situation. In such an ethics, the rightness or wrongness of actions may depend on the degree to which those actions express moral virtues rather than the degree to which they conform to general principles of conduct.

      Another defect of particularism, however, is that it doesn't seem to allow for the fact that some principles may accommodate contextual variability and may not necessarily be rigid and inflexible. Some principles may appropriately yield or defer to other principles of wider application or higher priority.

      Another defect of particularism is that it doesn't seem to allow for the possibility of moral learning and experience, and for the generalizability of what has been learned from previous relevant cases. Vӓyrynen (2011) explains that particularists may reply that discovering the morally relevant features of a particular case may enable us to learn what kinds of features may be relevant in subsequent cases. However, it's still difficult to see how this can happen without grasping some generally applicable principles.⁷

      

FOOTNOTES

¹Pekka Vӓyrynen, "Moral Particularism," in The Continuum Companion to Ethics, edited by Christian Miller (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 251.

²Ibid., p. 253.

³Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 94.

⁴Ibid., p. 74.

⁵Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever, "Moral Particularism and Moral Generalism," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016), online at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism-generalism/.

⁶Ibid.

⁷Vӓyrynen, p. 258.

Pascal's Penseés

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher who was born in 1623 in Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand) and died in 1662 in Paris (at the age of 39, probably of tuberculosis and stomach cancer). His father Étienne (1588-1651) was a government official, and his mother Antoinette (1596-1626) was the daughter of a merchant in Clermont. She died when Blaise was three years old. He had two sisters, Gilberte (1620-1687) and Jacqueline (1625-1661). He was educated by his father, and at a young age he distinguished himself as a mathematician. In 1651, his father Étienne died, and his sister Jacqueline entered the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal. Jansenism was a theological movement named after the Dutch Catholic Bishop of Ypres in Flanders, Cornelis Jansen (in Latin, Cornelius Jansenius, 1585-1638), whose writings emphasized the importance of original sin, the necessity of divine grace, and the predestination of some, but not everyone, to be chosen for salvation. It was declared a heresy by Pope Innocent X in 1653. In 1654, Blaise had an intense religious experience that caused him to convert to Jansenism, and he joined his sister Jacqueline at Port-Royal. His subsequent writings included the Lettres Provinciales (Provincial Letters, 1656-57), which attacked the teachings of the Jesuits and defended Jansenism, and the Penseés (Thoughts, 1670), which were fragments of a projected defense of Christianity.

      The Penseés are a series of aphorisms or reflections, varying in length from a single sentence to more than twenty paragraphs, and numbering 923 in all. They are divided into thirteen sections, on such topics as "The Misery of Man without God," "Morality and Doctrine," and "The Fundamentals of the Christian Religion," with an appended fourteenth section of "Polemical Fragments," addressing the controversy between the Jesuits and the Jansenists.

      Pascal attacks those philosophers who teach the goodness of human nature, and who see the highest good as the good to be found within ourselves, thereby placing us on an equal level with God. He argues that human nature has been corrupted by original sin. We're all born into sin, and we're obligated to resist or overcome it. He therefore condemns self-love (amour-propre), insofar as it reflects self-will rather than divine will, and insofar as it reflects love of self rather than love of God. He says that we can be blinded by self-love and by the instinct to place ourselves on an equal level with God (492). Indeed, we're so full of faults and imperfections that it's difficult to understand how we can feel such love for ourselves, given that we often don't feel the same kind of love for others (100).

      Since we're often blinded by self-love and self-will, the nature of God is largely hidden from us. Just as God may be infinitely knowing, God may be infinitely incomprehensible to us. The fact that there are many other religions besides Christianity is also a sign that God's nature may be hidden from us. If God's nature were apparent and manifest, then there might be only one religion that humanity would feel called to follow (585).

      However, Pascal also says that God is within us. The kingdom of God is within us, just as the universal good (le bien universel) is within us (485). But the universal good is to be found within us only insofar as God is to be found within us. Thus, "Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us" (465).¹ Jesus Christ the Redeemer can be found within us, and can be found within all persons (785).

      Pascal affirms the centrality of Christ to our knowledge of God. "Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ...Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves" (547).² "It is not only impossible but useless to know God without Jesus Christ" ("Il n'est seulement impossible, mais inutile de connaître Dieu sans Jesus-Christ," 548).³

      Reason (la raison) and feeling (le sentiment) may be seen as competing impulses in human nature. Reason may act methodically and deliberately, while feeling may act quickly and spontaneously (252). Faith is to be found in feeling, since reason ultimately can't prove the truths of faith and religion. "If we must not act except on certainty," says Pascal, then "we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But...there is more certainty in religion than there is as to whether we may see tomorrow" (234).⁴ We should therefore avoid both the extreme of depending on reason alone and the extreme of depending on intuition or feeling alone (253). 

      Faith is a gift from God, rather than a gift from reasoning (279). However, faith isn't contrary to reason, and it doesn't call us to disobey reason. Indeed, "Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master, for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, but in disobeying the other we are fools," (345).⁵ Having faith doesn't mean being blind to reason or to the evidence of sensory experience. Faith tells us what we can't confirm by sensory experience, but it doesn't contradict what we can confirm by sensory experience (265).

      Reason tells us when we should submit to feeling. Indeed, reason tells us that there are an infinity of things that surpass our understanding, and that there are matters that can only be resolved by faith or feeling. "Reason would never submit if it did not judge that there are occasions on which it ought to submit. It is then right for it to submit when it judges that it ought to submit" (270).⁶ Thus, "There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason" (272),⁷ and "All our reasoning [therefore] reduces itself to yielding to feeling" (274).⁸

      Pascal also argues that it is the heart and not the faculty of reasoning (raisonnement) that experiences God. "This, then, is faith, God felt by the heart, not by reason" (278).⁹ The heart has its own reasons for feeling, which can't be known solely by the intellect (277, 283). Thus, we can know truth not only by reason, but also by the heart (282). The heart can provide access to truth, just as reason can provide access to truth.

      Pascal argues that even if we can't prove that God exists, we can still choose whether to believe or disbelieve in God's existence by weighing the potential gains or losses to be obtained from making either of these two choices. This is known as Pascal's wager: the decision to affirm or deny the existence of God (233). Practically speaking, we can't merely sit on the fence and be skeptical or agnostic. We have to make a choice, and Pascal's argument for affirming the existence of God is that we have much more to gain by believing than by disbelieving in God's existence.

FOOTNOTES

¹Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Penseés, translated by W.F. Trotter (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), p. 111.

²Ibid., p. 126.

³Ibid., p. 126.

⁴Ibid., p. 59.

⁵Ibid., p. 82.

⁶Ibid., p. 67.

⁷Ibid., p. 67.

⁸Ibid., p. 67.

⁹Ibid., p. 68.

A Meditation on Life and Death

The following is a reflection I shared at the "Faith at Eight" service at our church on Sunday, November 6, 2022.

I'm troubled by the last paragraph of today's reading from the gospel (Luke 20:27-38), in which Jesus says that 

"Those who...are considered worthy of a place...in the resurrection of the dead...cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

      It's almost as if Jesus is saying that death isn't real, and that it doesn't exist. But I believe that death is real, and that it does exist. 

      Death is certain. Each one of us will die one day. Every living thing and every living being will die one day. There's no one who has ever permanently avoided death. Each day of our lives, we're drawing closer to death. And death is always on the horizon, drawing nearer to us, although we don't know precisely when it will arrive. The horizon of death may indeed be a background for whatever gives life its meaning.¹ Death is an inescapable reality. 

      So I'm wondering why we as Christians are so attached to the concept of the eternity of life, while other religious and philosophical traditions, such as Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, and the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, teach the importance of non-attachment to the things of this life and to things that are temporary. I think Christianity shares with those traditions the teaching that we shouldn't be attached to temporary things like money, property and possessions, but I think that we as Christians are particularly attached to the concept that life is eternal.

      In Tibetan Buddhism, attachment is seen as a source of suffering, and the cessation of suffering cannot occur unless there's also a cessation of four kinds of attachment. The four attachments are attachment to the temporary, attachment to the cycle of life and death, attachment to solitary liberation, and attachment to misconceptions about reality. According to the bodhisattva Manjushri, "If you have attachment to this life, then you're not a Dharma practitioner. If you have attachment to the realm of samsara, then you don't have renunciation. If you have attachment to your own benefit, then you don't have the thought of enlightenment. And if clinging arises, then you don't possess the view."²

      Buddhism teaches that everything is impermanent. All things are temporary, and if we're attached to temporary things, then suffering arises when we lose them. The path to the cessation of suffering is the eightfold path of righteousness: right views, right intentions, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Although we may be attached to all sorts of things, such as wealth, property, belongings, social status, prestige, power, and so on, attachment to such things will cause us to feel frustrated and disappointed when we lose them.

      I think that in Hinduism the concept of moksha is analogous to the concept of nirvana in Buddhism. Moksha is release from samsara, from the endless cycle of life and death. Moksha is freedom from ignorance, and from misconceptions about reality. Moksha is freedom from illusion, and from mistaking the temporary for the eternal. Moksha is liberation from bondage to the cycle of life and death, a kind of release rather than a kind of attachment.

      The ancient philosophy of Stoicism, as taught by philosophers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, also teaches the importance of non-attachment to things that are temporary. Epictetus teaches us that if we're attached to things that are beyond our power to control, then we won't be able to retain our equanimity. He says that wisdom involves knowing what is within our power to control and knowing what is not within our power to control. Wisdom also involves knowing what is within our power to change and knowing what is not within our power to change. Wisdom thus enables us to accept those things that are not within our power to control or to change, and it also enables us not to be attached to such things.

      Against this, I would argue that there are good kinds of attachment. I think that attachment to loved ones and to friends and family is good. I think that attachment to social ideals like peace and justice in society is good. Not all kinds of attachment are bad. But clearly there is a place for non-attachment or detachment as well.

      So I'm wondering why we as Christians are so attached to the concept that death has no power over us and that we can live in an eternal dominion or kingdom ruled by God. I'm not sure we fully acknowledge the reality of death or that we really acknowledge death as such--death as death. 

      Whenever someone dies or passes away, we say they're not really dead, and that they're still living in our hearts, and that they'll remain with us for all eternity. We see death as a transitional stage leading to another kind of life. 

      Last week, in a death notice for the Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, instead of saying that Pastor Butts died or passed away on the morning of October 28th, the notice said that Pastor Butts "peacefully transitioned" on the morning of October 28th.³

      In Christianity, there's this whole theological framework around the concept of the eternity of life. John 3:16 says, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life." Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus." John 11:25-26 says that before Jesus raised Martha's brother Lazarus from the dead, he told her, "I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, though they die, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." And Romans 6:8-10 tells us that if we've died with Christ, then we'll also live with him. Death will have no power over us, if we're dead to sin but alive to God.

      But I wonder whether we can ever be truly mindful and fully aware of the present moment if we believe that life simply goes on forever! How can we truly appreciate the preciousness of life, and how can we truly realize that life is a gift, unless we realize that life is temporary? And how can we find peace in death, unless we're ready to accept death when it arrives?

      Life and death are inseparable. They're everywhere and all around us.

      But maybe this isn't at all what Jesus is talking about. Maybe he's talking about something totally different, because he's not talking about an earthly life, he's talking about a resurrection life! And maybe a resurrection life is totally different from life as we know it! And maybe it's even beyond our knowing or understanding! What then is a resurrection life?

FOOTNOTES

¹Lama Jampa Thaye, "The Stages of the Path: Parting from the Four Attachments - Part 1," online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80xvCcq0pMI.

²Lama Jampa Thaye, "Parting from the Four Attachments: Attachment to the Temporary," Tricycle, March 2014, online at https://tricycle.org/dharmatalks/parting-four-attachments-0/attachment-to-the-temporary/.

³Adelle Banks, "Calvin Butts, Leader of Harlem's Historic Abyssinian Baptist Church, Dies at 73," The Roys Report, October 31, 2022, online at https://julieroys.com/calvin-butts-leader-harlem-historic-abyssinian-baptist-church-has-died/.