Sentence examples for default principles from inspiring English sources
Cass R. Sunstein, "Cost-Benefit Default Principles" (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 104, 2000).
These cost-benefit default principles are both legitimate and salutary, because they give rationality and sense the benefit of the doubt.
So we can safely invoke default principles to articulate the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction and thereby capture Nagel's basic idea without making the distinction useless to radical moral particularists like Dancy.
(Recall that we are understanding "reasoning" quite broadly, as responsibly conducted thinking: nothing in this understanding of reasoning suggests any uniquely privileged place for deductive inference: cf. Harman 1986. For more on defeasible or "default" principles, see section 2.5).
With this machinery in hand we are in a position to see how default principles might be helpful in crafting a version of the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction that everyone (or just about everyone) can live with.
Abandoning Nagel's assumption of universality in favor of our more modest default principles seems to allow us to make good sense of his distinction without excluding even fairly radical forms of particularism.
And it is not many years since a French diplomat confessed in my hearing that, when in doubt, the view at the Quai d'Orsay was that French diplomacy should always be guided by the default principle of doing down the British.
Moreover, the objection continues, the reason LY is true carries over to any default principle.
Or consider a default principle according to which the fact that an action would satisfy the agent's biological needs is sometimes a reason.
Suppose, for example, that we accept a default principle according to which the fact that an agent's culture demands something is sometimes a reason to do it.
Hence clause (b) in any default principle will always be false, which is enough to make the antecedent false and so enough to make the conditional trivially true.
