One of our most fundamental notions of morality is that in so far as
objects have moral properties, they have non-moral properties that make
them have moral properties. Similarly, objects have moral properties in
virtue of or because of having non-moral properties, and moral properties
depend on non-moral properties. In ethics it has generally been assumed
that this relation can be accounted for by the supervenience of moral
properties on non-moral properties. However, this assumption is put into
doubt by an influential view in contemporary ethics: particularism. Thus,
one of particularism’s most important implications is thought to be that
supervenience is incapable of accounting for the notion that non-moral
properties make objects havemoral properties. At least, this iswhat Jonathan
Dancy, the leading proponent of particularism, argues in his recent book
Ethics Without Principles, and elsewhere.
In the present paper, I defend supervenience against this challenge. That
is, I argue that particularism does not threaten the ability of supervenience to
account for the notion that non-moral properties make objects have moral
properties. While doing so, I hope to contribute to our understanding of
what is involved in this notion. In the next section, I consider a general
argument put forward by Dancy against supervenience and criticize his alternative, resultance. In Section 3, I develop a version of supervenience
that I call Specific Moral Supervenience, SMS, and which I think avoids
Dancy’s argument. There are basically two conceptions of particularism:
what is known as ‘holism’ and the contention that there are no true
moral principles. In Section 4, I argue that the view that SMS provides a
basis for an account of the notion that non-moral properties make objects
have moral properties is compatible with the pertinent version of holism.
However, in Section 5 we see that SMS is incompatible with the view
that there are no true moral principles. Particularists find support for this
view in the distinction between non-moral properties that make objects
have moral properties and so-called enablers. On Dancy’s conception of
this distinction, it follows that SMS does not refer to non-moral properties
that make objects have moral properties and that there are no true moral
principles of the relevant kind. In Sections 6 and 7, I defend SMS against
these two consequences. In doing so, I distinguish two uses of ‘make’
and provide a pragmatic account of the distinction between non-moral
properties that make objects have moral properties and enablers