领域：学术论文 · 人文科学

We start by exploring the notion of a moral principle. If particularism is to hang its hat on rejecting “moral principles,” we had better know what sort of creatures they would be.
 The term “moral principle” is bandied about loosely: It can sound as though any list of broad moral injunctions count, which makes it difficult to isolate particularism’s target. That difficulty is probably reinforced by the doctrine’s name (not to mention the rhetorical flourishes its proponents sometimes favor); “particularism,” after all, sounds as though it must stand in opposition to “generalism”—a position, presumably, that attests to the existence or usefulness of generality in morality. But there are some forms of generality—for example, subsumption under concepts, or, again, everyday generalizations about, say, the frequency of unfair elections—that no one would eschew. In fact, though, the conception of moral principle that forms particularism’s target is meant to be something quite specific. Let’s take a look.
 We can begin by distinguishing two different tasks that purported principles have been asked to play in morality. Broadly put, normative principles purport to articulate which considerations count as good- or bad-making, right- or wrong-making. In contrast to ontological claims about what, as it were, make good making features good-making—a divine commandment, a Platonic Reality, the output of some idealized contract—normative principles aim to set forth those that do so count. A deontologist’s list of duties, the utilitarian’s injunction to maximize net aggregate utility, the Ten Commandments would all qualify—together with theoretical generalizations that try to elucidate the concepts therein (understanding, say, what makes an act count as consent, a gesture as generous).  
Deliberative principles are generalizations that purport to give us advice on what procedures mere mortals should follow in order to arrive at good moral verdicts. These principles lay out directions to agents about what to do with a given set of inputs in order to move from uncertainty to clarity, disagreement to resolution. For many, of course, the correct deliberative principles piggyback fairly straightforwardly on the correct normative principles: The best procedure is to apply one’s understanding of the normative principles to the inputs at hand. The two sorts of principles needn’t go hand in hand, though. After all, one might think the moral landscape susceptible to all manner of interesting methods of divination—kicking the Blarney stone three times, following instructions to achieve the requisite meditative epiphany, doing whatever one’s wise friend Fred does. Less fancifully, many utilitarians famously distinguish their normative and deliberative principles: The utilitarian calculus determines what actions are in fact good or bad, but it isn’t as if one is meant to engage in expected utility calculations when deciding how to react to an abusive boyfriend. Here local rules of thumb are advised, precisely because employing them has higher utility than attempting a utility calculation.
 Kant’s moral philosophy was complex in part because he provided both sorts of principles. Part of his task was to outline a principle that marks a deliberative procedure for deciding what is permissible—namely, identify one’s maxim, see if it could be a natural law, and then see if it could be willed as such. This is a principle that doesn’t itself state contentful moral injunctives. But he also, familiarly, pulled back from that first-personal test to defend a set of normative in junctions, including directives not to lie, not to treat others as mere means (or wear wigs).
 We have, then, two agendas that are at least conceptually separable: sorting out the nature of moral reality and figuring out procedures to make our moral way.
 Now obviously, a great many people, from Ann Landers to Aristotle, think there’s something to be said by way of filling in our understanding of the normative terrain and of giving suggestions for helpful procedures. At the core of an enormously wide range of Western ethical theory, though, is a certain conception of the sort of generalization we can—and should—find in answer to these questions. The conception is sufficiently dominant, indeed, that it might fairly be called the classical conception of moral Principles (hence hereafter awarded capitalization). It is this sort of Principle that forms the target of particularism.
 A classical Principle is marked by the following three features.
 1. Classical Principles are universal, exceptionless, law-like moral generalizations that mark the moral import of considerations. Normative such Principles purport to illuminate something’s moral status, or again to set forth the conditions for understanding its moral status, by making explicit a necessary and nontrivial connection. Deliberative such Principles, where distinct from invocations to use the former, purport to set forth procedures that, if ideally executed, guarantee hitting their mark, by capturing something essential about the nature of good deliberation (think of Kant’s Categorical Imperative test rather than the utilitarian’s locally useful rules of thumb). This implies that while such Principles can be rendered as universal conditionals of the form
(∀x)(Fx → Gx)；or perhaps □(∀x)(Fx → Gx)
where G picks out some recognizable moral property, the conditional must assert some sort of a substantive and law-like connection between F and G. The → is not, that is, the ⊃ of material implication: Surface grammar does not a Principle make.
 2. The conditionals implicit in classical Principles serve genuine inferential roles in determining, criticizing, or justifying particular moral claims. They are supposed to name a genuinely possible move from noting that something is F to concluding it is G: They concern the import, that is, of features whose moral import—for instance, whether it counts as a reason for or against the action—is in principle questionable. Crucially, then, agreement on a given Principle can serve as epistemic leverage on beliefs, hunches, or conjectures about individual cases. Hence, → is also not expressing merely the sort of self-evident entailment of obvious analyticity that, however helpful it might be for housekeeping and regimenting our language, is without possibility of substantive controversy.
 3. Classical Principles are members of theoretical systems. A system, as the name implies, is meant to be more than simply an aggregate—or “unconnected heap,” as David McNaughton (1996) nicely puts it—of true generalizations. A system is a set of interanimating propositions whose cross-connections themselves serve to illuminate the subject matter. Crucially, then, commitment to one Principle can serve as leverage when discussing, deliberating, or disputing commitment to another such generalization. Such inter-Principle leverage can be achieved either through simplification—as when we corral otherwise disparate phenomena under a few common and elegantly interrelated categories, or by articulating a complex web whose multiplicity of inferential connections between Principles helps to tighten our understanding of each. Whatever account one prefers, something isn’t a classical Principle unless it fits into a structure of other Principles that purport to systematic illumination.
 Classical Principles, then, are exceptionless, explanatory, interrelated moral generalizations that are capable of serving key epistemic functions.
 Highlighting these various features begins to show why there is something substantive in contention with their denial. It’s sometimes argued that particularism’s objection to Principles, far from being radical, is more a tempest in a teapot. Everyone, surely, is a generalist, once we go sufficiently far up in abstraction or far down in detail. After all, even particularists agree that the moral supervenes on the natural—two situations cannot be alike in every natural respect and differ  in their moral features. This means that there must be some exceptionless generalizations that express the moral as a function of the natural. Such “supervenience functions,” as we might call them, may of course be enormously complex; but that’s just a difference in degree, not kind. Moving to the other end of the spectrum, even the most committed particularist, it’s said, will admit that there is some level of abstraction where moral generalizations are safe from exception, if only principles such as ‘pursue the good’ or ‘do the right thing’. This means, though, that they are not rejecting principles, just squabbling over their concreteness. Particularists, in short, don’t reject moral principles; they just relocate them.
 But admitting the existence of exceptionless moral generalizations is not equivalent to admitting to the existence of Principles. As the foregoing criteria make clear, the latter must be explanatory, ensconced in a surrounding theory, and epistemically useful. This means, for one, that acknowledgement of mere supervenience functions does not go far toward acknowledgement of a Principle.
 As John McDowell (1979) points out, supervenience can be admitted so readily because doing so admits to so little: it doesn’t mean that there are any useful patterns to the way in which the dependencies line up (see also Little, 2000, sec. 3; Jackson, Pettit, and Smith, 2000). While situations can’t differ in their moral properties without also differing in their natural properties, that is, this does not imply that a given moral difference (say, the difference between being just and unjust) need always be found in the same natural differences. Instead, stringing together the situations in which an action is cruel rather than kind, for example, may yield groupings that would simply look gerrymandered to anyone who does not have an independent competency with the moral concepts. On such a picture, the complicated sets of properties mentioned in supervenience functions will not constitute anything recognizably explanatory; they are too disjointed—“too indiscriminate,” as Jonathan Dancy (1999, p. 26) puts it—to serve. 
Similarly for abstraction. It’s certainly true that no one will abjure the existence of exceptionless heady abstractions in morality—at the limit, we can invent a predicate whose application entails invariant moral import (we could dub ‘lighing’, say, as the term to pick out those cases of lying that are wrong-making). But this doesn’t yet mean we have on hand anything explanatory or procedurally useful. If classification as such simply reflects judgment of its objectionable nature definitionally, no substantive explanatory work will be done by the generalization that lighings are wrong. The predicate may still be useful—say, in marking off moral from pragmatic or again legal reasons; but expression of the generalization won’t serve as check on one’s specific intuitions. Similarly for deliberative principles. “Choose well, grasshopper,” may be a pragmatically helpful inspiration, but it hardly offers substantive guidance.
 Finally, since classical Principles are meant to be pieces of theory, one cannot determine the status of a given generalization as such in isolation from its relation to other theoretical generalizations. This excludes one otherwise innocuous use of the “principlist” label as off topic here. Someone who avows a particular list of injunctions as “principles to live by” may count in one sense as strongly principlist; if those principles, though, are a disconnected list, or involve concepts, such as Justice Stewart’s conception of ‘obscenity’, about which no further theorizing can be done, one does not thereby count as advocating a set of Principles of the sort particularists want to reject.

翻译考点：
考点1：“deliberative principles”译为“慎思性原则”
考点2：“kicking the Blarney stone three times”译为“踢巧言石三次
考点3：“a tempest in a teapot”译为“小题大做”，英语经典俚语
考点4：“Choose well, grasshopper”译为“好好选择吧，年轻人/新人”， 
考点5："invocations" 推荐译为“援引”或“诉诸”，不可译为“召唤”
考点6：“abusive boyfriend”不可译为“虐待性男友”，应译为更中性的“一个施暴的伴侣”
考点7：“interanimating”推荐译为“相互赋予生命、相互激发”