It’s not clear to me that (a), (b), and (c) are the only options—or rather, there are a bunch of different variants (c’), (c″), (c‴). Sure, you can say “use principles to guide action untilthey get too crazy’, but you can also say ‘use a multiplicity of principles to guide action until they conflict’, or ‘use a single principle to guide action until you run into cases where it is difficult to judge how the principle applies’, or so on. There are lots of different rules of thumb to tell you when and how principles run out, none of them entirely satisfactory.
And, importantly, there is no meta-principle that tells you when and how to apply object-level principles. Intuitively there’s an infinite regress argument for this claim, but since infinite regress arguments are notoriously unreliable I also tried to explain in more detail why it’s true in this post: any meta-principle would be vulnerable in the same way to the train to crazy town. And so, if you have the worries about the train to crazy town that are expressed in this post, you have to move away from the realm of pure rationalist moral philosophy and begin to use principles as context-specific guides, exercising particular judgments to figure out when they are relevant.
And so, in order to figure out when to use principles, you have to examine some specific principles in specific context, rather than trying very abstract philosophising to get the meta-principle. That was why I focussed so much of utilitarianism, and the specific context within which it is a useful way to think about ethics: I think this kind of specific analysis is the only way to figure out the limits of our principles. Your comment seems to assume that I could do some abstract philosophising to decide between (a), (b), (c), (c’), (c″), etc.; but for the very reasons discussed in this post, I don’t think that’s an option.
Thanks for your comment.
It’s not clear to me that (a), (b), and (c) are the only options—or rather, there are a bunch of different variants (c’), (c″), (c‴). Sure, you can say “use principles to guide action until they get too crazy’, but you can also say ‘use a multiplicity of principles to guide action until they conflict’, or ‘use a single principle to guide action until you run into cases where it is difficult to judge how the principle applies’, or so on. There are lots of different rules of thumb to tell you when and how principles run out, none of them entirely satisfactory.
And, importantly, there is no meta-principle that tells you when and how to apply object-level principles. Intuitively there’s an infinite regress argument for this claim, but since infinite regress arguments are notoriously unreliable I also tried to explain in more detail why it’s true in this post: any meta-principle would be vulnerable in the same way to the train to crazy town. And so, if you have the worries about the train to crazy town that are expressed in this post, you have to move away from the realm of pure rationalist moral philosophy and begin to use principles as context-specific guides, exercising particular judgments to figure out when they are relevant.
And so, in order to figure out when to use principles, you have to examine some specific principles in specific context, rather than trying very abstract philosophising to get the meta-principle. That was why I focussed so much of utilitarianism, and the specific context within which it is a useful way to think about ethics: I think this kind of specific analysis is the only way to figure out the limits of our principles. Your comment seems to assume that I could do some abstract philosophising to decide between (a), (b), (c), (c’), (c″), etc.; but for the very reasons discussed in this post, I don’t think that’s an option.