Particularism and moral education

Abstract

Some opponents of ethical particularism complain that particularists cannot give a plausible account of moral education. After considering and rejecting a number of arguments to this conclusion, I focus on the following objection: Particularism, at least in Jonathan Dancy's version, has nothing to say about moral education because it lacks a substantial account of moral competence. By Dancy's own admission, particularists can tell us little more than that a competent agent ‘gets things right case by case’. I respond by reflecting on how we want our children to turn out, morally speaking. I argue that we can present a compelling story about our aspirations for our children's moral development that is consistent with particularism and that provides the beginnings of a plausible account of the competence we look to moral education to instil.

Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was presented at a philosophy colloquium at the Institute of Education, London, and at a conference on particularism in Bled, Solvenia. I am indebted to the audience on those occasions for helpful questions and criticisms. I am also grateful to Jennifer Welchman for her perceptive comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. Dancy first introduced particularism in two papers published in the early 1980s (1981, 1983), inspired to a large degree by the moral philosophy of John McDowell. He has subsequently developed the position in numerous writings (e.g. 1993, 2000) culminating in the recent book-length treatment Ethics Without Principles (2004). His ideas have prompted a growing literature, among which Hooker and Little (2000) is a valuable collection of critical essays. Although there are now a number of versions of particularism on the scene, in this paper I have in mind Dancy's position, or a sympathetic descendent thereof.

2. Dancy has more to say about competence in Ethics Without Principles (2004, 190–93) but it is scarcely more informative. For example, we are told that ‘to grasp the practical purport of a [thick moral] concept … is to grasp how its applicability in a given case can affect what one ought to do’ (2004, 191–192) and that ‘[to] parse a situation … is to work out its practical profile and thereby come to see what response it calls for’ (2004, 193). It does not illuminate the notion of moral competence to say simply that a competent judge knows what sorts of difference the presence of certain features make in different situations. The question is what sort of competence that comprises.

3. This is a delicate matter because Dancy rightly recognizes that not all reasons generate obligations (or ‘oughts’, as he puts it). That it would be fun to go to the hockey game gives me a reason to buy a ticket (what Dancy calls an ‘enticing reason’), but does not generate an obligation to do so. Dancy does, however, portray moral reasons as ‘peremptory’ reasons that do have an essential relation to oughts (see Dancy 2004, 21).

4. I develop a similar objection in Bakhurst (2000, 167–68), though there I deploy MacIntyre's ideas rather than Williams's. Dancy refers to my paper (2004, 186), but does not comment on the objection in question. So I think it worth raising again.

5. I have two children, a daughter, born in 1992, and a son, born in 1995.

6. Indeed, I believe that someone now widely thought to be morally blameless could in fact be in a situation of massive moral error, such that members of subsequent generations might condemn him or her for having lived a morally contemptible life. For example, subsequent generations may come to see the plight of those in the third world, or the treatment of the environment, as a moral catastrophe that ought to have been averted, and rightly complain that people like us did little or nothing of significance to prevent the perpetration of these wrongs while professing moral views that ought to have led them to act. In this respect, we might be seen as occupying a situation analogous to that of ‘ordinary’ German citizens under Nazism.

7. Talk of ‘essentially contestable concepts’ sometimes provokes the objection—especially relevant in the present context—that such concepts would not be learnable. The idea of essential contestability, as introduced by W. B. Gallie (1955/56) and developed more recently by David Wiggins (1991), is designed to undermine the presumption that enduring controversy about the nature of a concept indicates that judgements in which the concept enters are not objective. On the contrary, Wiggins argues, in the case of an essentially contestable concept such as justice, whether some action is just can be a matter of fact, and claims about justice can be assessed as true or false, even though there is enduring reasonable dispute in central cases about what it takes for an action or situation to be just. This circumstance, however, is consistent with there being some claims about justice that all parties find unproblematic—not all cases are hard cases—and these provide a foothold for the novice. (Admittedly, another mark of essential contestability is that there is no foundational point from which to refute those—e.g. sceptics, amoralists—who take a perverse view of the concepts at issue, but this is irrelevant to the question of learnability.) Thus, we can tell the following story about how such concepts are learnt. We pick up the term ‘justice’ with reference to certain paradigm situations and as one of a family of cognate moral notions. So we learn that it is just or ‘only fair’ to divide a pie equally among all those at the meal. But of course inevitable protests emerge: Do those with greater appetites warrant more? Do some people deserve more? Should those who especially like the pie have larger portions? If there are to be portions of different sizes, should everyone agree who gets more? As we accommodate such considerations, so the space of contestability opens up. (Should we say that justice demands that we do not treat people equally or that really to treat people equally involves giving them differently sized portions?) As we try to refine and theorize these notions (What more is there to justice than fairness? What is the relation of justice and desert?), so the space widens. Our theoretical reflections may even lead us to refine or reject the initial paradigm, which becomes a ladder we kick away, to appropriate Wittgenstein's famous metaphor. Thus it is possible for novices to learn concepts the mature find essentially contestable.

8. Bernard Williams places the emotions at the centre of moral education, writing that if moral education ‘does not revolve round such issues as what to fear, what to be angry about, what—if anything—to despise, where to draw the line between kindness and stupid sentimentality—I do not know what it is’ (1973, 225).

9. The idea that schools have a special role to play in moral education is more often sounded in the USA than in Britain or Canada. Thomas Lickona, for example, writes: ‘Escalating moral problems in society—ranging from greed and dishonesty to violent crime to self-destructive behaviours such as drug abuse and suicide—are bringing about a new consensus. Now from all across the country, from private citizens and public organizations, from liberals and conservatives alike, comes a summons to the schools: Take up the role of moral teachers of our children’ (1991, 3–4). Many who make this summons look to the schools to socialize children into a stable framework of ‘conventional’ values to equip them against the evils and temptations of an ailing society. More liberal thinkers, such as Michael Pritchard (1996), portray reasonableness as the key virtue, and see moral education as developing skills of critical thinking and moral argument rather than as inculcating specific views.

10. The reader may wonder why I make no use of the idea of ‘default’ values or reasons. In Ethics Without Principles, Dancy invokes the notion of a default value in order to rebut the objection that particularism leaves nothing constant in the realm of value. The idea is that a default reason ‘is a consideration which is reason-giving unless something prevents it from being so’ (2004, 112); likewise, a consideration is said to have a default value if it brings a certain value with it to situations even though that value may be obliterated or reversed by the influence of other considerations. Dancy thinks the notion of a default helps meet a challenge I raise in Bakhurst (2000), where I argue that the particularist needs to explain how holism is consistent with enduring moral commitments (e.g. against torture, for charity). In my view, however, the notion of a default is presently so undertheorized as to be useless. Dancy appeals to an explanatory asymmetry. Where a default reason or value makes its normal contribution, no explanation is needed; but where that contribution is overridden, then explanation is necessary (e.g. in cases where torture is wrong, the wrongness requires no explanation; explanation is necessary only in cases where torture is permissible). What we need to know, however, is what, in the case of default reasons/values, grounds these explanatory asymmetries. Dancy maintains that some considerations are ‘set up’ to make a certain contribution; they ‘arrive’ in situations already ‘switched on’ or ‘switched off’. But how are we to understand these metaphors? Dancy writes as if it is simply a brute metaphysical fact that some considerations have this default status, but it is unclear that the making of such brazen metaphysical claims is consistent with the philosophical methodology that informs particularism (it is hard to imagine McDowell, let alone Wittgenstein, taking such claims seriously). I suspect that if the notion of a default were properly theorized, it would pull particularism in the direction of the something like the Rossian prima facie, a notion that Dancy has previously done his best to undermine. It is also uncertain that the notion helps meet the challenge I raised: to understand commitment we require an account of our attitude to kinds of action, but the metaphor of a default is rather a blunt instrument for that purpose. In any case, as things stand, I have insufficient confidence in the notion to put it to work in this paper.