Dancy Moral Particularism

In Ethics without Principles, Jonathan Dancy mainly demonstrates that every ethical issue is particular, and needs to be considered separately, while the principle can bring about faults, so principle is unnecessary. The inspiration of Dancy came from his critique of W.D.Ross, whose theory talked about the difference between prima facie duty and duty proper. The main ideas of Dan’s moral particularism include the distinction between favorer and enabler, and between moral particularism and holism, and the former (his main idea) plays a fundamental role in his whole theory, and he extended it into the non-moral field. In discussing the difference between holism and atomism, Dancy found that some kinds of moral principle can coexist with holism,thus this kind of holism was not completely in conformity with the requirement of moral particularism. Dancy puts forward some criticism on holism, and discusses the theory of non-inference about moral consideration. Based on the criticism of Moore’s values, Dancy puts forwards his holistic value theory, which demonstrates the intuitionist characteristics. Moral particularism insists that moral problem can be solved without the help of principle, which led to a lot of denouncement. In my opinion, we cannot desert principle completely, meanwhile particularism seems not convincing enough in the aspect of semantics.