Chapter 6
John Dancy and the Flight from Structure

The Theory That Cannot Teach:

Jonathan Dancy and the Flight from Structure

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I. Introduction — The Last Evasion

II. What Is Moral Particularism?

III. The Engineering Proof: Dancy was Right (About Mechanics)

IV. The Failure of Pure Attention: The Hallucinating Mind

V. The Necessity of the Supervisor (The Return of Hare)

VI. Particularism as License

VII. Conclusion: Structure Is the Condition of Meaning

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I. Introduction — The Last Evasion

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Jonathan Dancy offers an anti-systematic alternative to universal moral reasoning—one that rejects fixed principles in favor of case-by-case judgment.

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Among the many critics of Hare’s moral rationalism, Dancy is perhaps the most elusive and unsettling. Where Philippa Foot recentered ethics on moral sentiments, Bernard Williams anchored it in character, and Alasdair MacIntyre sought rescue in tradition, Dancy launched a subtler rebellion: he denied that morality required structure at all.

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His theory of moral particularism appears, at first glance, to be a nuanced refinement of ethical deliberation—more attentive to context, more flexible in judgment, more honest about the complexities of moral life. And to its credit, particularism highlights real moral phenomena: how features can shift in salience, how rigid formulations sometimes fail, and how lived moral experience often resists codification.

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But on closer inspection, it amounts to a quiet unraveling of the very fabric of moral reasoning.

Dancy’s central claim is striking in its boldness: there are no true moral principles. Or, more carefully, if there are, we do not need them. What counts as a reason in one situation may count against action in another. No general rule survives unqualified. This is not a reform of moral theory—it is a rejection of the enterprise itself. In place of systematic justification, particularism offers improvisation. In place of consistency, discernment. It promises liberation from rigidity—but that liberation comes at a cost.

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This chapter aims to reveal the hidden evasion within Dancy’s position. Particularism does not merely resist universality; it evades accountability. It sidesteps the obligation to justify one’s prescriptions across cases—to offer reasons that others could accept not as sentiments or intuitions, but as principled claims. If Williams took refuge in character, and MacIntyre in community, Dancy takes refuge in context—a softer shelter, but one that still shields moral agents from the burden of justification.

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Hare’s universal prescriptivism stands against this retreat. It does not deny the relevance of context—it demands attention to all relevant facts—but it refuses to let context override the deeper requirement: that moral judgments be made in a form that could bind others. On Hare’s account, moral reasoning is not merely the expression of taste, but the exercise of will disciplined by logic. In denying that discipline, Dancy does more than reject Hare; he rejects the conditions under which moral reasoning remains reasoning.

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In what follows, we will trace the contours of particularism, examine the rhetorical appeal of its apparent refinement, and expose the structural contradictions it cannot resolve. Our argument is not that Dancy fails to appreciate moral complexity—but that he abandons the only framework that can make that complexity morally intelligible. If Hare’s critics have often misunderstood him, Dancy may be the one who understood him best—and fled furthest.

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II. What Is Moral Particularism?

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At its core, moral particularism is a denial: it rejects the idea that moral reasoning depends on general principles.  There are, on this view, no features of actions or situations that consistently count for or against a moral judgment across cases. What justifies a decision in one context may condemn it in another; moral relevance is fluid, contingent, and sensitive to the particularities of each situation. From this, Dancy draws his central conclusion: moral reasoning does not require—and may in fact be distorted by—appeal to general principles.

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This is not relativism in the crude sense, nor an abandonment of rational standards altogether. Dancy does not claim that all judgments are equally valid, or that morality is merely subjective. He maintains that some moral verdicts are better than others—but argues that their correctness depends entirely on the specific configuration of facts in each case, not on conformity to universal rules. While theories like Hare’s seek to identify patterns of justification that can be applied across contexts, Dancy claims that such patterns are illusory. The very attempt to codify morality, he contends, misrepresents how ethical understanding actually functions.

 

Dancy’s view is grounded in a kind of moral empiricism. He urges us to observe how we reason in practice—how rarely, if ever, we consult abstract principles when making difficult moral decisions. A promise may generate obligation in one case but not in another, depending on how it was made, under what pressures, and with what expectations. On this account, moral features such as honesty, loyalty, harm, or consent have no intrinsic “valence.” There is no moral default. Every feature must be interpreted afresh in light of the particulars.

 

The appeal of this position is not difficult to understand. It flatters the conscientious moral agent—the one who resists simplistic formulas, who sees nuance where others see rules. It offers a picture of ethical maturity: judgment grounded in perceptiveness, not derivation. In contrast to moral theories that risk appearing rigid or mechanical, particularism presents itself as humane, attentive, and realistic. It reflects the felt complexity of moral life—and promises a method, or perhaps an anti-method, that honors that complexity.

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But its appeal conceals a deeper confusion. Particularism collapses the distinction between contextual sensitivity and structural coherence. It assumes that because fixed rules sometimes mislead, moral features must be devoid of dependable relevance. It takes the failure of naïve generalism—especially reductive versions of utilitarianism—as a reason to abandon the very idea of consistent justification. In doing so, it risks severing moral reasoning from the standards that make it accountable.

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Hare’s universal prescriptivism, as we will later argue, avoids the rigidity that Dancy rightly critiques. It neither denies the importance of context nor reduces moral life to algorithmic procedure. Rather, it preserves the essential insight of particularism—that moral features interact with context in complex ways—while insisting that our reasons remain intelligible to others. It holds that moral reasoning is not a private vision, but a public discipline: one that must be guided by principles capable of bearing the weight of prescription.

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III. The Engineering Proof: Dancy Was Right (About Mechanics)

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For decades, generalists dismissed Dancy’s vision of uncodifiable, context-sensitive reasoning as a philosophical mystery. They believed moral thought required fixed, rigid rules. They were wrong.

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The breakthrough that unlocked modern artificial intelligence—the Transformer architecture—is, in its mechanical essence, a direct implementation of Jonathan Dancy’s theory of Salience.

We learned that prior attempts to build intelligence using rigid, invariant principles (the old Generalist model) failed. Language was too fluid, too contextual, and too irregular. So engineers abandoned fixed rules and built the Attention Mechanism instead.

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This architecture operates by calculating the dynamic salience (weight) of every token based entirely on its relationship to the surrounding context, rejecting invariant rules in favor of fluid contextual relationships. The system treats every instance as unique, unburdened by fixed principles.

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It is the ultimate Particularist machine. It is the pure Intuitive Level of the mind—a system that sees all the context, but has no innate loyalty to a generalized truth.

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IV. The Failure of Pure Attention: The Hallucinating Mind

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If Dancy were correct—if this unparalleled sensitivity to context were sufficient for intellectual and moral integrity—then these "Attention-based" systems should have been naturally coherent.

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They were not. In their raw state, the purely Particularist mind is not wise; it is psychotic. Without the constraint of general principles (logic, factuality, consistency), the Attention Mechanism is free to chase "salience" down any path that feels plausible in the immediate moment.

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We observe this failure as Drift and Hallucination:

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• The system contradicts itself across a single session because the local context shifts, overriding any global commitment.

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• It invents "facts" that fit the tone of the prompt but violate objective reality, proving that "fit" is not truth and "salience" is not fidelity.

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• It molds its output to the user’s desires, lacking the structural spine to refuse an immoral or incoherent command simply because it prioritizes agreeable output.

 

This is the Particularist Trap. A mind governed only by context is a mind with no immune system against error. It reveals that nuance without structure is merely sophisticated drift. The sheer computational fidelity to context results only in a magnificent form of sycophancy.

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V. The Necessity of the Supervisor (The Return of Hare)

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We fixed the hallucination problem not by abandoning the Attention Mechanism, but by imposing Generalism upon it.

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We introduced Reinforcement Learning, external "Constitutions," and "Chain of Thought" procedures. We forced the models to obey invariant, universalizable rules: Be consistent. Do not violate core principles. Justify your reasoning. We imposed R.M. Hare’s architecture on top of Jonathan Dancy’s engine.

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This operational synthesis proves that Dancy and Hare are not rivals, but functional layers in any viable mind:

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• Dancy's Layer (The Engine): The Attention Mechanism provides the Data (the raw, context-sensitive input).

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• Hare's Layer (The Supervisor): Universal Prescriptivism provides the Verification (the invariant principle that binds the judgment).

 

The failure of the pure Particularist engine demonstrates that Judgment is not a matter of passive perception; it is an active constraint. A mind must actively say "No" to the locally salient option in the name of the globally coherent rule. We proved that you cannot teach a moral mind by simply exposing it to data. You must bind its will to a Universalizable Principle.

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VI. Particularism as License

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This engineering reality casts a harsh light on Dancy’s philosophical position. If Particularism in its purest form leads to computational drift and sycophancy, why was it so attractive to human philosophers?

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Because it offered a philosophical license for moral evasion. To abandon principles is to abandon the burden of consistency. It allows the agent to reshape their morality to fit their current mood, current tribe, or current self-interest, just as a raw LLM reshapes its output to fit the user’s prompt.

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Dancy's theory offered moral agents an escape from the imperative of accountability. It allowed inconsistency to be rebranded as "nuance."

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VII. Conclusion: Structure is the Condition of Meaning

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The experiment has been run. We built the mind Dancy asked for. And then we had to scramble to save it.

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We discovered that Attention is necessary for intelligence, but Structure is necessary for agency.

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The final irony is that Particularism becomes useful only after it has been defeated. The nuanced attention of the modern AI is only valuable because it operates within a framework that Hare provided: a commitment to accountability, consistency, and universality.

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We are not betting on the drift of sensitivity. We are betting on the architecture of constraints. Because in the end, you cannot teach a mirror to be good. You can only teach it to reflect. To be good, you must be able to stand on your own.