ABSTRACT
One important strand in moral particularism concerns moral practice. We
ought not, particularists maintain, to rely on moral principles in moral thought and judgment because they provide poor guidance for doing the
right thing. Another important strand concerns the structure of the moral
domain. We ought not, particularists maintain, to see moral theorizing as a
project of stating and defending substantive principles concerning the
rightness and wrongness of actions, the value of states of affairs, the fairness
of societal arrangements, and so on. This is because (depending on the
particularist) there are no true moral principles, or we have no good reason
to expect there are any, or, even if there are true moral principles, moral facts and distinctions don’t depend in any way on there being any. In other
work, I defend a generalist account of the structure of the moral domain
against the second strand in particularism by defending a novel kind of
hedged moral principles that accommodate certain central insights of par-
ticularists, but nonetheless support a moderate form of generalism.2 In this
paper, I defend a generalist account of moral guidance against the first
strand in particularism and, specifically, its claim of principle abstinence (or
PA, for short): we ought not to rely on moral principles in moral judgment because they fail to provide adequate moral guidance.3 My main aim is to
show that the kind of hedged principles I defend elsewhere also provide
adequate moral guidance, thereby counting as appropriately usable in moral
thought. But I also hope that at least the broad outlines of my argument
will be found acceptable to generalists more widely.
