Particularity and Principle: The Structure of Moral Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract This remark is surely as true of our moral lives as it is of the more narrowly cognitive domain of language use and ratiocination in the context of which most recent discussion of rule-following has been conducted. Moral universalists might take comfort in such an insight, inferring that since the moral domain is rule governed, our moral knowledge consists in the knowledge of universal generalizations. But (as Sellars would have been the first to note), they would be wrong. For everything hangs on whether what it is to follow a rule and what it is to know a rule are understood as the grasp of a universal generalization from which knowledge of particular instances is derived, or as the knowledge of how to respond to paradigm instances, with an appropriate but perhaps inarticulate ability to generalize.

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