Walker, Margaret Urban, "Moral Particularity", Metaphilosophy, 18, 171-185, July-October 1987 Warren, Karen J., and Cheney, Jim, "Ecological Feminism and Ecosystem Ecology", in Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Warren, Karen J. (ed)., Bloomington Indianaa University Press, 1996.
Thus they fail to appreciate the moral import of particularity and cultural substance: particular relationships between unique individuals, on the one hand, and membership in particular cultural communities or traditions, on the other (for feminist critiques, see Benhabib 1992; Meehan 1995; for a communitarian argument, see Taylor 1989).
First, we can all agree with Dancy that sound moral judgment depends upon the particularities of moral situations in all their individuality and complexity.
But the film's moral, which goes well beyond the particularities of its setting, is both clear and hard to shake: it is not so much that the love of wealth weakens the love of God, but rather that the pursuit of money, which in our modern societies is a condition not just of comfort but of survival, undermines the capacity for friendship and fellow feeling.
Cohen's systematic philosophy and his philosophy of religion thus stand as complements to each other: whereas one conceives the human as an ideal agent constituted by universal ethical laws, the other treats the human as a concrete individual, constituted by the particularities of his own moral failings and attempts to atone for them.
Love is between two particular people in their particularity.
Thus Cohen maintains that there is a distinctive role in philosophy for a religion of reason: its distinctive concern is precisely with the particularities of individual humans' lived moral experience, and their attempts to overcome their various and different moral failings as they strive to realize ideal ethical laws.
So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil.
It is futile to argue that the moral individual is located in a realm outside history, outside the particularities of space and time.
However, new behavioral particularities observed in urban pigeons could have induced the erosion of their former moral function.
Whereas theorists tend to emphasize the capacity of our ordinary moral experience to be neatly ordered and systematized, the anti-theorists emphasize the cultural embeddedness, particularities, and ineradicable untidiness of our moral lives (Elliott 1999).
