The Tyranny of Principles

Oversimplification is a temptation to which moral philosophers are not immune, despite all their admirable intellectual care and seriousness; and the abstract generalizations of theoretical are, I shall argue, no substitute for a sound tradition in practical ethics. These days, public debates about ethical issues oscillate between, on the one hand, a narrow dogmatism that confines itself to unqualified general assertions dressed up as matters of principle and, on the other, a shallow relativism that evades all firm stands by suggesting that we choose our value systems as freely as we choose our clothes. Both approaches suffer from the same excess of generality. The rise of anthropology and the other human sciences in the early twentieth century encouraged a healthy sense of social and cultural differences; but this was uncritically taken as implying an end to all objectivity in practical ethics. The subsequent reassertion of ethical objectivity has led, in turn, to an insistence on the absoluteness of moral principles that is not balanced by a feeling for the complex problems of discrimination that arise when such principles are applied to particular real-life cases. So, the relativists have tended to overinterpret the need for discrimination in ethics, discretion in public administration, and equity in law, as a license for general personal subjectivity. The absolutists have responded by denying all real scope for personal judgment in ethics, insisting instead on strict construction in the law, on unfeeling consistency in public administration, and-above all-on the inerrancy of moral principles. I propose to concentrate my attention on this last phenomenon-the revival of a tyrannical absolutism in recent discussions about social and personal ethics. I find it reflected in attitudes toward politics, public affairs, and the administration of justice, as much as toward questions of ethics