Sulla possibilità di un'etica senza principi

Most of the agents believe that acting morally entails the possibility of tracing their behavior back to norms, rules, principles. Ethical particularism in Dancy’s version represents a radical challenge to this idea. For the particularist, those who act morally do not need to appeal to prin-ciples either to motivate their action ex ante or to explain it ex post. Incidentally, Dancy seems to consider particularism also a criticism of our moral tradition that incorporates Christian ethics. In this article I make some criticisms of Dancy’s position and I argue that particularism does not provide any explanation of phenomena that are important both for morality and for social cooperation, such as trust, predictability, reliability usually attributed to moral agents.