Impartial principle and moral context: securing a place for the particular in ethical theory

Abstract

This essay critically assesses two strategies of accommodation used by defenders of impartialism in ethics to argue that the care orientation represents no genuine challenge to impartialist theoretical paradigms. One strategy focuses on impartiality as a constraint on moral deliberation, the other as a constraint on moral justification. While highlighting respects in which the commitment to impartiality is more consonant with the care orientation than many advocates of care have acknowledged, this essay attempts to clarify crucial ways in which each accommodationist strategy fails, thus locating some of the more important contributions and challenges the care orientation offers to moral theory.