Volume 2, Number 3
November 2008
ARTICLE

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Volume 2, Number 3, November 2008, Pages 1–23
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v2i3.27
PDFPDF

Abstract

What are moral principles? The assumption underlying much of the generalism–particularism debate in ethics is that they are (or would be) moral laws: generalizations or some special class thereof, such as explanatory or counterfactual-supporting generalizations. I argue that this law conception of moral principles is mistaken. For moral principles do at least three things that moral laws cannot do, at least not in their own right: explain certain phenomena, provide particular kinds of support for counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. Moreover, neither a best-systems theory of moral principles nor any of the competing theories of moral principles proposed by Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, Pekka Väyrynen, and Mark Lance and Margaret Little could vindicate the law conception of moral principles. I conclude with some brief remarks about what moral principles might be if they are not moral laws.
Copyright © 2008 Luke Robinson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Two Accounts of the Normativity of Rationality

Jonathan Way

Dancy on Acting for the Right Reason

Errol Lord

Kant and the Balance of Moral Forces

Santiago Sanchez Borboa

Moral Intuitions, Reliability and Disagreement

David Killoren

Beyond Ought-Implies-Can: Impersonal Obligatoriness Implies Historical Contingency

Peter B. M. Vranas

Do We Have Reasons to Obey the Law?

Edmund Tweedy Flanigan

Unreliable Love

André Grahle

The Significance of a Duty’s Direction: Claiming Priority Rather than Prioritizing Claims

Marcus Hedahl

Saving Lives and Respecting Persons

Greg Bognar and Samuel J. Kerstein

The “Prospective View” of Obligation

Holly M. Smith

People Do Not Have a Duty to Avoid Voting Badly: Reply to Brennan

Marcus Arvan

Should Desert Replace Equality? Replies to Kagan

Michael Weber

Portico