In the absence of a determinate decision procedure the most common method for making decisions in cases where moral principles conflict is the much maligned method of casuistry, developed so exhaustively by both the Jewish and the Roman Catholic religions, also adopted by Kant, and also (in a way) by the British legal system. Essentially the method, whose objective is the application of accepte...

Gillon outlines the principles of the deontological, or duty-based, group of moral theories in one of a series of British Medical Journal articles on the philosophical foundations of medical ethics. He differentiates between monistic theories, such as Immanuel Kant's, which rely on a single moral principle, and pluralistic theories, such as that of W.D. Ross, which rely on several principles t...

Political philosophy seeks to justify principles of social justice. How should it go about that task? One answer, what may be called the practice-based method of justification, is that we are to justify principles, by moral reasoning, both for and from a social practice, which we identify by way of social interpretation. The approach contrasts, on the one hand, with what might be called pure so...

I vindicate the thrust of the particularist position in moral deliberation. to this purpose, I focus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducib...

The "four principles plus scope" approach provides a simple, accessible, and culturally neutral approach to thinking about ethical issues in health care. The approach, developed in the United States, is based on four common, basic prima facie moral commitments--respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice--plus concern for their scope of application. It offers a common, basic ...

Some approaches to the assessment of moral intuitions are discussed. The controlled ethical trial isolates a moral issue from confounding factors and thereby clarifies what a person’s intuition actually is. Casuistic reasoning from situations, where intuitions are clear, suggests or modifies principles, which can then help to make decisions in situations where intuitions are unclear. When intui...

We tend to sympathize with addicts who behave illegally or immorally in service of their addictive cravings more readily than we do with those who act in exactly the same ways but who are not addicted. The addict who kills for money to buy crack seems less a moral monster than the unaddicted person who coldly plots the same murder for the same purpose. This distinction in our moral sentiments s...