Abstract

According to the particularist account of moral value offered by John McDowell, David Wiggins, and Jonathan Dancy, moral judgments are truth-susceptible but are uncodifiable and are reached perceptually. Their truth-susceptibility is supported by their uncodifiability, since their uncodifiability implies that they cannot be analyzed in terms of some other form of discourse. Moral values are in this respect analogous to secondary qualities. Particularists infer from this account of value that moral deliberation does not involve inference; rather, it is case-by-case perception of what judgment in the circumstances conforms with practice. However, a purely perceptual account does not permit a satisfactory explanation of various features of our moral practices. Primarily, it does not permit a convincing explanation of how moral uncertainty can be resolved in a progressive, directed way--of how moral judgments can be made in unfamiliar circumstances, of how dilemmatic cases can be resolved, or of how moral reform is possible. This problem suggests several others: a perceptual account does not allow for a satisfying explanation of how we blame or credit agents for their deliberation, of how debate across moral communities can plausibly lead to resolution, or of how we reason about justice. These problems are illustrated with cases in bioethics, which differ significantly from the examples that particularists draw upon. Particularists can meet these objections, and offer an overall more attractive account, by accommodating a defeasible requirement for coherence among judgments. This style of inferential reasoning, illustrated in the contemporary casuistry advanced by Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen, is consistent with many of the attractive features of particularism, including the centrality of perception and the uncodifiability and truth-susceptibility of moral judgments, but it ensures that deliberation is not strictly perceptual. It shows how it is possible to argue about judgments, by comparing them to other cases and, perhaps, by developing and employing open-textured theoretic generalizations. The revised, casuistical particularism is illustrated in the decision to stop life-sustaining treatment