Jonathan Dancy s Particularism: A Critical Assessment

Jonathan Dancy advocates a radical particularist theory of ethics. Arguing against a variety of generalist doctrines, he maintains that there are no moral principles and that our ethical decisions are highly context-dependent: they are made case by case, without the support of such principles. In this paper, drawing on a number of theoretical concepts used in science as well as the philosophy of science I shall try to develop a moderate generalist-pluralist model. This model, I shall argue, is less vulnerable to Dancy s criticisms and better equipped, in comparison to Dancy s own model, to deal with moral cases.