ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a thought experiment in which we are invited to design an overall structure for ethics. Structure without content, and with a background colonialist assumption that whatever is eventually slotted into the structure should be exported everywhere else. What we would then agree upon would resemble some universal and compact set of principles and background values. This is a view of ethics which is uncomfortably close to familiar and widespread assumptions about ethics, including both liberalism and social democracy. What is offered here, instead, is a “modest particularism” in which principles still play a role, but only as hints, clues, and reminders. People matter, animals matter, and ecosystems matter. Principles are only a convenience. The background understanding of particularism draws from Jonathan Dancy and Laurence Blum.
