In this paper I consider what might be my best response to various difficulties and challenges that emerged at a conference held at the University of Kent in December 2004, the contributions to which are given in the same volume. I comment on Crisp's distinction between ultimate and non-ultimate reasons, and reply to McKeever and Ridge on default reasons, and to Norman on the idea of a reason for action. I don't here consider what other particularists might want to say; (...) I certainly don't think that my way of doing these things is the only possible one, but not surprisingly I am interested in seeing what resources it might have to defend itself. (shrink)

Peter Winch seems to have described the following kind of paradox. Two agents in a morally dilemmatic situation can agree on the values in that situation and their bearing on decision but come to different all things considered verdicts about what to do. Yet this kind of blameless disagreement is not a Protagorean relativism in which "right" reduces to "right for A" and "right for B". This paper tries to preserve the appearances while avoiding relativism, abandoning cognitivism about value or (...) abandoning the "impartiality" of reasons. It is argued that Sen's notion of evaluator relativity in which outcomes differ in value according to whether one is the proposed author or viewer of the proposed action can be adapted to solve the problem. The sense in which values are perspectival is compatible with their objectivity as they systematically transform across viewpoints; Sen has correctly identified that the "author/viewer" parameter is perspectival in a different sense in which this kind of transformation test does not hold. However, a minimal realism about value suggests that Sen's insight is into the importance of an agency stance towards proposed outcomes. Practical reasons are perspectival in a more radical way than judgements of value, but still objective. Adapting his insight by explaining it as a claim about reasons not values solves the paradox while remaining cognitivist about values and impartialist about reasons. (shrink)

Particularism takes an extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons and thereby threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example, pain, and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, some particularists draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. The present paper argues that all but the most deflationary ways of drawing this (...) distinction are either implausible or else insufficient to help the particularist avoid flattening the moral landscape. The difficulty can be avoided, however, if we reject particularism's extremely ecumenical view of reasons. (shrink)

This chapter sets out to distinguish the sorts of claims have been advanced under the rubric of “moral particularism,” and to sort through the insights and costs of each. In particular, it distinguishes those who are animated by suspicion of theory itself from those who aim to reconfigure — sometimes radically — the nature of theory. It defends as key the particularist insight that exceptions to substantive moral explanations are ubiquitous. It argues that the lesson of this insight is not (...) to abandon moral generalizations, but to change the picture of what they must look like to do their work. (shrink)