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The limits of ethical particularism

Epistemologists have a distinction between what they call methodism and what they call particularism. Particularism in epistemology is the idea that we start out with certain propositions that we just take as a given that we know--typically a fairly wide array of them--and then we figure out from there what knowledge is. These propositions will typically include not only, "I exist" but also things like "There is a book in front of me" and the like. Methodism, on the other hand, takes the more austere approach and begins with an analysis of the concepts of knowledge and justification. This analysis leaves open possibilities such as the existence of a Cartesian deceiver. If there were such a deceiver, he would cause us to be widely mistaken and hence not to know many common sense propositions. For example, there might not really be a book in front of me, in which case, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I don't actually know that there is a book in front of me.

In epistemology, I have always been a methodist and have defended that approach on the scholarly level. I think that for philosophers it takes more to answer the Cartesian skeptic (or for that matter the Berkeleyan idealist) than kicking a stone.

However, ethics is a whole different ballgame. I see no reason whatsoever why the natural light should not operate in such a way as to give us a priori knowledge of ethical particulars. In fact, that's how it seems to work. One can use extreme or odd examples to illustrate such self-evident particular ethical truths, such as, "It is always wrong to burn babies in gasoline for fun," but I think that, "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" will do as well or even better, without either the gasoline or the frivolous motives.

From there, we can try to figure out what it is about babies that makes this true, which helps us to develop our more general principles. (Hint: They are innocent human beings who are not actively harming anyone.)

The practical difficulty with either a principles-first approach or a specifics-first approach in ethics is that if you get either one drastically wrong to begin with, you end up somewhere drastically wrong. We see what happens when you start out with absolutely the wrong particulars in this story, highlighted by Wesley J. Smith.

Erik Parens, a senior researcher with the Hastings Center, is bothered about the fact that technically late-stage Alzheimer's patients can't be killed under Holland's euthanasia law. As it happens, late-stage Alzheimer's patients are killed in Holland with little or no consequence for the doctors. Parens admits this himself:

This situation may be changing, as suggested by the 2011 Dutch case of a woman in the late stage of Alzheimer's whose request for aid in dying was respected.

But he's still exercised by the fact that Dutch law has no clear provision for killing the mentally incompetent. You see, Holland's official euthanasia law was written up on what he calls a "cancer model." On a cancer model, the patient requesting suicide must be both mentally competent when making the request and also suffering unbearably.

Well, as Parens sees it, this poses a couple of problems for killing off late-stage Alzheimer's patients. One problem arises if the patient doesn't (darn it) happen to ask to be killed while still compos mentis. Perhaps the patient just doesn't get around to it, or perhaps early in the disease, he doesn't really feel that his suffering is unbearable. Then, later on, even if those around him think that his situation is terrible and his life not worth living, he's no longer mentally capable of asking to die. Another possibility would be that a mentally competent person would not feel that his suffering was at that time unbearable but would believe that later on, after he lacked mental capacity, his suffering would be unbearable. But, doggone it, the official law doesn't provide for such a person's saying, "Kill me later" while he is presently mentally competent. Hence, the only Alzheimer's patients who can be (fully legally) bumped off under Holland's current suicide law are those who are still mentally competent, early in the disease, and who at that time consider their existential suffering unbearable and request death.

And that just isn't enough for Parens. He is even concerned about cases where the person isn't suffering later on, when no longer mentally competent, but wanted earlier to set up a "death order" for that later stage:

The predisease person may have thought she would have wanted assistance in dying if she were to develop the disease, but that person may be replaced by a person who actually has Alzheimer's but is perfectly happy to live in a new, different way.

It bothers Parens that under these circumstances you can't be killed. Evidently the postdisease person is just too degraded to realize how degraded he is, which is why he's happy.

If one holds what we might call “the disease view” of the person, however, the current situation in the Netherlands can seem odd. On this conception (which in a nuanced form is associated with Ronald Dworkin), there is one person, who, when she is healthy, conceives of her whole life and makes a decision we should respect: that she wants help in dying when she is so far into the disease that she can no longer engage in meaningful communication with those she loves. On this “disease view,” the current Dutch practice is odd insofar as it fails to respect the healthy person's capacitated wish, and in so doing, subjects that person to what she said was, by her lights, unbearable suffering.

Parens wraps up his "field notes" with a candor that may be shocking to some members of hoi polloi, but probably won't shock his fellow bioethicists:

My guess is that it won't work terribly well to use the cancer criteria in the context of Alzheimer's disease. My further guess is that, to make headway, we will have to draw on both the “difference” and the “disease” views. How to do that is hardly clear, but that we need to try is.

Got that? We need to try. Because it must be possible to kill late-stage Alzheimer's patients, we, by which he means "we bioethicists," need to find a way that "we bioethicists" find philosophically satisfactory to justify such killings. In other words, Parens' ethical particulars, which are driving his search for ethical principles, include, "It must be possible to kill late-stage Alzheimer's patients legally."

Now, it isn't actually wrong across the board to allow ethical particulars to drive the search for ethical principles. The man on the street may have a far clearer understanding that it is wrong to kill babies than he has of more abstract principles under which that particular ethical truth falls.

But when one starts out with insane ethical particulars, one's principles will simply be warped because one's particulars were warped.

What ought to strike the ear about Parens' stunningly candid admission that he's going to find some way to justify bumping off late-stage Alzheimer's patients is its sheer, brutal recklessness. His conscience is so seared that he never says to himself, "Wait a minute. What did I just say?"

Very much to the contrary. Parens heaps fulsome praise and gratitude on his Dutch bioethics colleagues who are wrestling with this tough problem of finding a "model" under which to kill Alzheimer's patients:

I recently visited terrific colleagues in the Netherlands, primarily to explore the nexus of the bioethical debates about disability and enhancement. But since I've been contemplating the question concerning assisted suicide in the context of Alzheimer's disease, the visit was also a chance to learn a bit about how the Dutch are broaching that fearsome and bewildering question.

As in the United States, the Dutch conversation about assisted suicide emerged primarily in the context of cancer. At least in that context, before acceding to a request for assistance in dying, caregivers must be sure that the person has made a voluntary and carefully considered request, and that her suffering is unbearable and without prospect of improvement. The Dutch have recently been trying to use those criteria in the context of Alzheimer's disease. Given the wave of Alzheimer's cases poised to crash onto wealthy countries, along with emerging technology to detect the disease process before symptoms appear, we should be grateful to the Dutch for that attempt.

I have to admit that I'm much inclined to throw up my hands in despair over any philosopher, even a young philosopher, or any student messed-up enough not to be able to see what is wrong with what Parens is doing.

But let me try instead to find some cautionary further principle which might apply to all of us. It would doubtless not work to put the brakes on Parens, but it might help some other people. Let's call this the Monster-Avoidance Principle, or MAP, something roughly like this:

MAP: To avoid becoming a moral monster, any time I find myself trying to find a way to justify my or others' deliberate intention to kill specific fellow human beings, I should stop and think very hard and proceed cautiously. This should apply with special force if those human beings are helpless.

Now, notice: I did not include in the MAP any words like "guilty" or "innocent." That is because I didn't want to trivialize it and/or make it merely sarcastic. If I had said "my innocent fellow human beings," then, on my view, the MAP would just be a way of saying, "If I'm considering making ethical space for atrocities, I should stop and think first."

But the MAP as stated can also apply to advocates of the death penalty, like me. It requires an advocate of the death penalty to attempt not to be draconian, not to (for example) justify the death penalty for trivial offenses or even less-than-heinous offenses, merely in order to keep public order. It also raises questions about carrying out the death penalty upon people whose past actions have warranted it but who have since then been (say) severely injured so that they are presently dying or physically helpless.

Naturally, though, one especially hopes that the MAP would act as something of a brake on those whose consciences are somewhat messed up but not yet wholly messed up and who are considering what should be such evidently heinous particular ethical proposals as killing late-stage Alzheimer's patients. Killing a "wave" of them, no less, lest that "wave" crash into the wealthy nations and o'erwhelm them.

This is probably all hopeless, though maybe I'm just feeling a bit down today. Those who need something like the MAP are probably those who won't use it, or won't change their minds because of it. And those who have good instincts about defending themselves and their loved ones against psychopathic aggressors will probably try to follow the MAP and hence develop pacifist scrupulosity about self-defense. There really is no substitute for having your head screwed on straight about these kinds of things, and once your head gets partially unscrewed, I don't know if it can be fixed. But one occasionally likes to try something other than just saying, "What??"

Hence, I suggest that we all try to avoid becoming moral monsters. It might help; you never know.

Comments (22)

To paraphrase a long Stephen King quote: “I aim with my eye. I shoot with my mind. I kill with my heart.”

KJB Jeremiah 17:9 "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

It might help; you never know.

Weeelllll, I suppppooooose it might. Maybe. Just possibly. One cannot categorically rule out that it might help, anyhow. :-) Thwok! (sound of taking tongue out of cheek)

OK. Since (due to MAP) I don't want to discuss the death penalty for bioethicists, can we talk about banishing all bioethicists to their own small impoverished island, to let them practice bio-"ethics" on each other with no innocent bystanders? Hmmm? Let them carry out their "thought experiments" not in thought but in practice, and get first-hand knowledge of the results. Maybe they'll even figure out a reason or two that traditional morals were held for so many centuries without major modification. Who knows, stranger things have happened.

Isn't being a Cartesian skeptic (or for that matter the Berkeleyan idealist) a rationalist trap that Chesterton warned against when he wrote of The Thought that Ends all Thought?.
The skeptic can not be refuted in strict logic ("the madman (begging your pardon) has lost everything except his reason") but he lives in a narrow world, that is the only possible answer.

Actually, I think there _is_ an answer, rationally and in quite some philosophical detail, to the challenge of the Cartesian skeptic. But it takes some time to spell it out. It's one of the most fascinating problems in all of traditional (pre-naturalized) theory of knowledge, and I would love to get a book published on what is known as the problem of the external world. Unfortunately, most contemporary (naturalized) epistemologists either think the question uninteresting or prefer to discuss highly boring versions of it (brains in a vat answered by dull word magic a la Hilary Putnam). So any such book project is probably doomed to remain unpublished. I'd rather talk to a Berkeleyan any day, but most publishers aren't Berkeleyans. My guess is that Bishop Berkeley and Chesterton would have found one another basically sane, though each would have thought the other a little odd. However, that was just the lead-in to the post. I put it in there just in case anyone finds one of my epistemology articles directed against particularism in _that_ area and tries to accuse me of inconsistency.

One can use extreme or odd examples to illustrate such self-evident particular ethical truths, such as, "It is always wrong to burn babies in gasoline for fun," but I think that, "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" will do as well or even better, without either the gasoline or the frivolous motives.

From there, we can try to figure out what it is about babies that makes this true, which helps us to develop our more general principles. (Hint: They are innocent human beings who are not actively harming anyone.)

I think this is missing the point of thought experiments in moral philosophy expressed in extremes. Usually as some form of the expression "torturing babies for fun". It make it more extreme for employing torture instead of killing, and to assert it would be for fun (or sexual pleasure). It increases the shock value, and it is supposed to. It is hard to see how anyone could better for shock value and absurdity (and triviality of pretext to heighten the effect) of "torturing babies for fun". I don't think anyone could. That was the point of the expression. Shock and awe. There can be no excess of triviality or absurdity, and the more the better for the purpose it has traditionally been used. Namely, to show that you can know that something is wrong without being able to identify the precise reason, and the existence of self-evident moral truths. To show existence I only need to show one occurrence. That was the point of the extreme example, and because of this there is no reason not to use the most extreme example imaginable. But in any case one can't simply pare away the extremes of an intentionally extreme statement made to show the existence of self-evident truths to arrive at a different statement that is then asserted to be self-evident without explanation. Neither can we transfer the shock value of "extreme or odd" examples onto different examples that are less extreme.

Mark, you're right that it depends on the purpose of the example. If the purpose is just to refute some form of ethical relativism--that there are not objective or absolute ethical truths--then the extreme nature of the example has a useful purpose.

If, on the other hand, one is attempting to use the concrete example as a starting-place for finding solid and crucial ethical principles, then the extreme additions can be confusing. For example, it's also wrong to torture animals for fun, but that doesn't direct us to the principle behind the wrong of baby-killing, which is specific to the fact that babies are human. Peter Singer would no doubt advocate _humane_ infanticide, but that doesn't make it right.

What do you think about the death penalty in some special case where the criminal's memory has been erased so that he has no knowledge of his past crimes?

I don't know. But he isn't helpless, so MAP as worded wouldn't apply. It could be just to execute him. I don't hold to a theory of personal identity according to which he is a different person from the one who committed the crime, so if the evidence was beyond reasonable doubt that he did in fact commit a truly heinous crime, then _he_ did commit it, which is relevant.

I haven't yet figured out exactly how mercy can be just, when it comes to the DP. On the one hand, it seems like mercy is the kind of thing that can't be required; it must be undeserved. On the other hand, if the state is to carry out its rightful duties, it seems like it should not be giving out undeserved favors, or else it is neglecting justice. God, we know, dealt with this problem by sending Jesus Christ to die for our sins. The state has no such option. So the paradoxical question is, can there be such a thing as mandatory mercy, mercy which it would be wrong not to extend? I haven't figured that one out yet.

If, on the other hand, one is attempting to use the concrete example as a starting-place for finding solid and crucial ethical principles, then the extreme additions can be confusing.

But no example that uses "for fun" could ever conceivably be used as a starting place for finding practical ethical examples. You can't just trim off stuff put in to begin with for one purpose and use the remainder for another. You said:

One can use extreme or odd examples to illustrate such self-evident particular ethical truths.

But that isn't the purpose of the extreme or odd example you used. Extremes are used to clarify something in particular. If you could come up with an example that used extremes to clarify "particular ethical truths" rather than the particularity of the existence of any, I suspect you'd have equivalent examples and not have even an apparent persuasive power to advance a principle from the statement as you're trying to do.

If it were really possible to go from "It is always wrong to burn babies in gasoline for fun" to "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" then it isn't clear to me why we'd need particularism at all. But I see no way to explain how to get from one to the other except for the hint about some "active harming" principle. I think this is problematic. For example, the first ethical principle is "do no harm", but this isn't a moral absolute. "Thou shalt not murder" is a moral absolute because it renders the moral judgement within it. Levels of depravity and moral absolutes work in combination at the extremes, and that is why "torturing babies for fun" as an expression works. But it is very difficult to see how we can get from such an extreme combination to moral absolutes by trimming off the extremes. It seems to me like the philosophical equivalent of a hate-crime.

I wasn't trying to "go from" the example involving "for fun" to the example without it. I was just saying that for purposes of starting from particulars, analyzing them, and thence coming up with an overarching and highly salient moral principle, the particular, "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" is more useful than the more extreme particular (which is also, of course, true). The relatively less extreme particular (though actually, infanticide _is_ rather extreme in one sense) is also instinctively and intuitively seen to be true by a great many people, and it leads us fruitfully to the importance of human-ness and innocence, regardless of whether the means used for killing are humane or not.

So the paradoxical question is, can there be such a thing as mandatory mercy, mercy which it would be wrong not to extend? I haven't figured that one out yet.

I hope I am not going too far afield: Lydia, the mercy can never be mandatory in the sense of the criminal have a claim on it - he never can, that's the nature of mercy. It's always more than he deserves, which by definition is all he can have a claim on. It is, however, POSSIBLE for the state to grant mercy (say, by lessening a punishment justly deserved) because the state has more goods in its care than justice alone, and sometimes achieving strict justice cannot be done without losing some other good even more worthwhile. If a father of a large family in an unusual and uncharacteristic fit of pique does something that merits him a 3 month prison sentence, but mandating that sentence will wreck his sole proprietorship business, cause him vast commercial penalties on failed contracts, and leave his family destitute for decades, then it is not really for society's best interest to impose that prison sentence, all things considered. Yes, justice gets shorted a little. Overall, that's worth it.

Mercy can be mandatory in a sense on the part of the state, but ONLY in a sense, because the state cannot uphold justice as a common good if it always gives full mercy and never metes out just punishments. For the state to be everywhere and at all times giving less penalty than is deserved (or no penalty) would be for the state to intentionally contribute to defect in justice - in the good - continuously. (If for no other reason, then because if penalties are never given then laws will never be obeyed.) And then if there must be cases where the state metes out simple justice without mercy, there can be no mandate that it be THIS situation rather than THAT one. So the choice of particular situations in which to grant it must always be a matter of discretion, cannot be across the board, and must be done primarily in the interests of the whole common good rather than the good of the specific individual offender.

However, within that context, whenever a judge or magistrate or ruler runs into a situation where clearly granting mercy does more good to the state taking all matters into account than imposing justice does, and the merciful act lies within his authority, the ruler cannot ignore the claim of mercy on his consideration out of a whimsical autonomous choice to simply follow justice. His obligation is to seek the common good, of which justice is but one part. If he sees that achieving justice will be less good in toto than granting mercy, in that case mercy is a kind of mandate for him for that situation. Discretion isn't made for whim or sheer willfulness, it is made to apply to particular cases judgment that cannot be written in perfect detail in the universal terms of law. In the few cases where it is clear to the adjudicator that mercy serves the common good better, in those cases mercy is sort of mandatory for him. It is a sort of internal prudential imperative rather than an external or legal one.

I wasn't trying to "go from" the example involving "for fun" to the example without it. I was just saying that for purposes of starting from particulars, analyzing them, and thence coming up with an overarching and highly salient moral principle, the particular, "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" is more useful than the more extreme particular (which is also, of course, true).

Well it is either a moral absolute or it isn't, and it is either useful for getting to general moral principles or it isn't. The statement "It is always wrong to torture babies for fun" is a moral absolute. That is the point. If we tried to show that the lesser statement is also a moral absolute we'd end up with a rerun of the moral absolutist objections to PDE and lesser of two evils concepts in thought experiments that we've all been through on W4 before by the usual suspects. The statements "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" , "It is always wrong to harm babies", and "It is always wrong deliberately to harm humans" all suffer from the same problem if we wanted to argue it out.

I also don't see why the more general of the example statements above wouldn't be the more useful for identifying overarching moral principles.

I'll have to think about that, Tony. It's hard. Looking at it from the perspective of a third person, it would seem that the observer could say to the judge, "You _must_ grant mercy in this case." I still have trouble wrapping my mind around how that is mercy, therefore.

Well, Mark, I already answered why the more general of the example statements is more useful *in some ways*--namely, that it focuses attention on humans rather than on torment. That is, the more specific example still leaves as an open question whether it's also wrong to kill the baby by a painless lethal injection. It also leaves open whether human babies are on a par with puppies, whom it is also wrong to torture for fun. To my mind the more sweeping (and nowadays, more needed) principle is not "It is wrong to torment sentient beings of all species" but "Human beings are special and deliberately killing innocent ones is wrong."

Tony,
Justice that is the separating of good and evil, is a particular thing. To know what a person merits, we must know him. But the state has difficulty knowing in this sense. A person can only be truly known by those who love him. So the justice as meted out by Courts is imperfect.
So what is called 'mercy' is to some extent a suitable correction in the administrated justice.

I recommend Anthony Esolen's remarks on justice in state that are included as notes to his translation of Inferno.

the more specific example still leaves as an open question whether it's also wrong to kill the baby by a painless lethal injection. It also leaves open whether human babies are on a par with puppies, whom it is also wrong to torture for fun.

Since killing must be considered harm I don't see why both the very general statements I offered wouldn't cover killing for any reason. And doing a great many decent things become wrong if done for fun. I've already said, closing off possibilities was never the purpose of the usefulness of the combination of extremes in the expression "torturing babies for fun", and this applies to whether puppies are on a par with humans. That they are not is self-evident and no example is necessary, nor could be sufficient to show this. Trying to make the equivalence itself is a problem, except for things we properly share by our shared animal nature.

To my mind the more sweeping (and nowadays, more needed) principle is not "It is wrong to torment sentient beings of all species" but "Human beings are special and deliberately killing innocent ones is wrong."

Murder uniquely applies to humans, and I don't see how "deliberately killing innocent" improves upon "Thou shall not murder". I am highly skeptical that a longer and more explicit set of rules than mankind has seen fit to use over the last number of centuries represents an advance. I think it harms the cause in the same way that hate crimes harm the cause of justice.

would do anything but make the situation worse.

Well, sigh, Mark: I think that a particular (which, again, most people share) ethical proposition that it's wrong to kill babies leads us to "Thou shalt do no murder" in a special way that "it's wrong to torment babies to death" doesn't. I'm sorry you don't see that, but there it is. Repeating myself just gets dull for both of us and for the other readers.

Well we've arrived at the fact that you think "it's wrong to kill babies" leads us to "Thou shalt not murder" in a special way, whereas I don't (not sure it really gets there at all) and think "Thou shalt not murder" leads us to "it's wrong to kill babies" in the correct direction of moral reasoning on this, and the most common one. You keep repeating that "most people share" something, but it isn't clear to me that what they share is your view rather than mine.

It seems to me your's is a novel view in moral philosophy. I'm not sure if those believing in moral sense theory ever advanced anything like this. But I really don't care about that and it isn't about any theoretical concerns for me. I'm more concerned with practical things.

It certainly draws on popular appeals to children's interests that are now widely used, and therefore widely mocked, and I don't think it is cynical to do so because it merely acknowledges that it happens to be a highly politicized and manipulative rhetorical technique. I have a Christian friend, a father of two, that says "Do it for the children!" in the most trivial situations for great comic effect. I think it is dangerous from a philosophical standpoint, but that is no doubt boring.

It isn't my intent to be mean about it and I'm sorry I've belabored it. It's just that aside from the philosophical issues, even my own personal experience shows me this is dangerous. I'll put it this way, I don't believe sentimental arguments are a friend of children. I have learned the hard way to tune them out with extreme prejudice at this point in life just by my own life experience having to do with children. It is anything but humane. The sentiments of the powerful trump those of the weak with frightening regularity. Children are never powerful. So I hate this view. Sorry, I just do. It's nothing personal. I'll let it rest finally so you can have the last work if you like.

Just to clarify something, when I said "I think it is dangerous from a philosophical standpoint" I wasn't referring to my friend who mocks the appeal to children's interest. I think that is simply a healthy skepticism of such appeals from experience, and that is pretty widespread as far as I can tell. I think Chicago mayer Rahm Emmanuel's recent comments chastising gang members to "stay away from the kids" was not well-received. Something seems wrong about that.

I'd also like to point out that if it were true that thinking or feeling or seeing it wrong to kill babies teaches us not to murder in "a special way", then how do we keep from saying that murder of children is a special type of murder? Is it? It is always true that some ways of committing crimes or sins are more heinous or revolting than others, but murder isn't like theft where the crime is ranked by the value of the item stolen. Since we're all of equal moral value the destruction of a life can't be ranked that way, but only by motive (premeditation).

By "a special way," Mark, I meant as compared with a particular statement that refers to _tormenting_ someone one kills, including a child. That is to say, it's wrong to kill a child even if one does it humanely, and it is also wrong simply to torment sentient creatures who are not human. Hence, the reference to not killing babies without the tormenting focuses on their human-ness in a special way and also on the fact that killing them humanely would not be acceptable.

Sentiment can, of course, be abused. But we live in an age of bioethicists whose entire job is to turn out "men without chests" who can contemplate infanticide with calmness and ask, "What's wrong with the rest of you?" when people are horrified. Reawakening that horror is not a bad thing but a good thing--the recreation of men with properly trained and properly ordered natural sentiments, including the instinct that infants should be protected rather than murdered. In many ways that is a major goal and strategy of the pro-life movement, and it is an important and noble one.

I'll have to think about that, Tony. It's hard. Looking at it from the perspective of a third person, it would seem that the observer could say to the judge, "You _must_ grant mercy in this case." I still have trouble wrapping my mind around how that is mercy, therefore.

Maybe because, when the third-person observer says "must" he isn't saying it in the sense "because he deserves it". We presume all along that the criminal doesn't deserve it. The motivation comes from elsewhere than just deserts. So, I guess the distinction is that something can be necessary or "the only right way to proceed" without being "the only right way to proceed because he deserves leniency." When we give a gift to a teacher to show appreciation, we aren't saying that we "must do this because she deserves it" but rather "we CAN do this and we want to, even though it is over and above what justice demands." Not all kinds of obligations are obligations in justice.

Lydia, statements such as "It is always wrong deliberately to kill babies" do not "reawaken horror". Reawakening horror of acts performed I assume can best be done by confronting people with the horror actually done, which I fully support. I doubt that the goal and strategy of the pro-life movement is advanced by a view that suddenly says the traditional formal argument:

"The killing of innocent human beings is morally wrong; human infants are innocent human beings; ergo, killing human infants is morally wrong"

should be replaced by:

"Particularly heinous acts of killing the innocent, or at least such of those acts that seem to contain a higher level of evil, are more illuminative of why it is morally wrong to kill the innocent than acts that are less so."

I'm all about reawakening horror, but you don't awaken horror by argument, much less a fallacious argument. What do I learn about the wrongness of killing from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or some real-life horrific act? Exactly nothing. If I didn't know murder was wrong would I learn that by learning of our witnessing gross instances of murder? I don't see how.

The first and classic argument is powerful because the first and foremost instinct of humans is preservation of life. This begins with self-preservation, and extends to all humanity through realization of our like nature. We were all once a baby, and we will all one day be old. It is the reason that scripture admonishes to "Love our neighbor as ourself", and not "Love our neighbor as a baby" or "as an octogenarian". And the Golden Rule presumes we have insight into our neighbors at different ages based on our shared humanity. If we don't have this self-evident insight shared from our common humanity and life experiences as such, it is unlikely this can be educated into us.

Particularists don't think we'll present the horror of acts by arguments. The horror of acts is best presented by the truth of results of these acts, and arguments for anything stand or fall on their correctness. My entire point is that it is dangerous to blend sentiment and formal argumentation as you have. Frankly, it's what got us into this mess. Good and noble intentions are never in short supply.

Ok, I'm done now. Like I said, nothing personal. It is an important topic.

Mark, I don't believe I've presented or advocated _any_ fallacious argument. Goodness gracious. The argument would go something like this, "Okay, I know that it's always wrong to kill babies. Why is that? It can't just be because they are cute, because it would also be wrong to kill funny-looking babies. It can't just be because they are young, because it would also be wrong to kill old ladies. It seems to be because they are human beings, and being babies, questions about the death penalty or their attacking someone or having committed a crime worthy of death don't arise..." In other words, we start with particulars and then we try to tease out of them the principle that lies behind them. I think that can be a fruitful way to proceed.

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