Moral particularism

Abstract

Moral reasoning is individual or collective practical reasoning about what, morally, one ought to do. Philosophical examination of moral reasoning faces both distinctive puzzles — about how we recognize moral considerations and cope with conflicts among them and about how they move us to act — and distinctive opportunities for gleaning insight about what we ought to do from how we reason about what we ought to do. Part I of this article characterizes moral reasoning more fully, situates it in relation both to first-order accounts of what morality requires of us and to philosophical accounts of the metaphysics of morality, and explains the interest of the topic. Part II then takes up a series of philosophical questions about moral reasoning, so understood and so situated.