NDLI: Rules and Principles in Moral Decision Making: An Empirical Objection to Moral Particularism

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Zamzow, Jennifer L.
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	It is commonly thought that moral rules and principles, such as ‘Keep your promises,’ ‘Respect autonomy,’ and ‘Distribute goods according to need (merit, etc.),’ should play an essential role in our moral deliberation. Particularists have challenged this view by arguing that principled guidance leads us to engage in worse decision making because principled guidance is too rigid and it leads individuals to neglect or distort relevant details. However, when we examine empirical literature on the use of rules and principles in other domains, we find that people can learn to use rules discriminately and that rule-based models tend to outperform even expert judgment. I argue that this evidence poses a problem for the moral particularist. If the particularist claims that we should not rely on decision-making rules when making practical decisions and it turns out that these rules help us make better decisions, then the particularists’ prescriptive account is deficient. However, if the particularist claims that we should rely on practical decision-making rules but not on moral rules, she needs to explain how practical rules are different from moral rules and why we should rely on the former but not the latter.
Starting Page	123
Ending Page	134
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISSN	13862820
Journal	Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
Volume Number	18
Issue Number	1
e-ISSN	15728447
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2014-04-23
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Moral judgments Particularism Moral rules Moral principles Experts Empirical Ethics Political Philosophy Theory of Medicine/Bioethics Philosophy of Medicine Ontology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Social Sciences

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