Particularism is widely conceived to endorse the view that moral reason is context-dependent. This being so, it is often accused of flattening the moral landscape—treating the feature of promise-keeping as constituting no more of a (moral) reason for action than the feature of wearing a yellow shoelace in advance of the considerations of the contexts. In reply, Dancy maintains that his particularism allows some features such as promise-keeping to have a reason status by default, ontologically speaking; it is just that their default reason status might get ‘switched off’ in some contexts. In this paper, I will argue that Dancy's ontological understanding of default reason wouldn't help the particularists address the flattening objection, due to a violation of what Tsu calls ‘the embedded thesis’, which is a general constraint on how moral reason behaves. However, once the nature of default reason is correctly understood as psychological, particularism will be enabled to deflate the flattening objection, or so I will argue.

中文翻译：

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嵌入性和默认理性的心理本质：论特殊主义者应如何解决扁平化反对意见


特殊主义被广泛认为支持道德理性依赖于情境的观点。正因为如此，人们常常指责它扁平化了道德景观——将信守诺言的特征视为不构成行动的（道德）理由，就像在考虑情境之前系上黄色鞋带的特征一样。作为回应，丹西坚持认为，从本体论的角度来看，他的特殊主义允许某些特征（例如信守诺言）默认具有理性状态。只是他们的默认原因状态在某些情况下可能会“关闭”。在本文中，我将认为，丹西对默认理性的本体论理解无助于特殊主义者解决扁平化反对意见，因为它违反了津所谓的“嵌入论点”，这是对道德理性行为方式的一般约束。然而，一旦默认理性的本质被正确地理解为心理学，特殊主义将能够平息扁平化的反对意见，至少我会这么认为。