Virtue Ethics and Particularism

Abstract

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles. However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions and their features. Such action-centred particularism, I argue, is compatible with generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘be X’ but rejects any implication that the relevant x-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.