(Disclaimer: Yet another old post from 2017. This isn’t meant to dispute particularism per se. Just some brief thoughts)
This post is meant to begin laying down some of my basic thoughts as I take a deeper dive into ethics and trying to lay out some of my own meta-ethical thought. It will be rather short.
Frequently, we hear criticisms of those whose moral compasses are “too black and white”. That these people aren’t capable of grasping the “nuance” and/or “complexity” of the real world. This is a real criticism, but sometimes people don’t seem to grasp what the problem of black/white thinking is.
The problem of black/white moral thinking has nothing to do with having a set of unchangeable moral principles. Nor is it at all problematic to hold on to those principles. I am going to butcher this quote (and I don’t remember the source), but the quote goes something like: “You are more likely to be betrayed out of weakness than out of malice.” I tend to agree with this. To adhere to, and never break, your moral principles is a sign of remarkable strength and willpower.
The problem of black/white moral thinking really has to do with specificity (if you ever see the term “granularity” in philosophy discussions, it means specificity. “Fine-grained” is more specific and “coarse-grained” is less specific). Take this for example: We have an event. Bob killed Jim. Do we have enough information to make a moral judgment? Some will say “killing is always wrong, therefore we have enough information.” Others will dispute this, claiming that we need information on the intentions of Bob and Jim, the context of the action, the means by which Bob killed Jim, etc.
The question ultimately ends up as: what is morally meaningful? Which elements of an event are morally meaningful? Do they all matter? Intent, means, foresight, actual consequences, context, etc. Or do only some of them matter? And even more basically, what is the full list of these elements? These are answers I aim to focus on in the coming weeks.
