CaseEthics
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Frameworks

Advanced / hybrid

Moral Particularism

Reasons don't behave like rules.

Guiding principle

A feature that counts in favor of an act in one case may count against it in another; moral competence is skilled perception, not rule-following.

Key thinkers

Jonathan Dancy

Strengths

  • Fits the phenomenology of hard cases better than principled theories.
  • Explains why exceptionless rules always attract counterexamples.

Common objections

  • Threatens the possibility of moral learning and teaching.
  • Hard to distinguish from rationalized intuition.

Mini-example

That an act would break a promise usually counts against it — but promising to meet a friend for coffee counts differently once you learn the friend meant to lure you into fraud.