Rules and Exceptions

T HE fact that there are exceptions to at least some moral rules raises some interesting questions about the status of rules and about the nature of moral behavior and deliberation. Some philosophers may be inclined to think that the occurrence of exceptions introduces or threatens to introduce uncertainty into morality, and as a result they may be tempted to construe rules in such a way as to avoid or remove this uncertainty. In this paper I want to discuss several such attempts. But before I do this, I must attend to several preliminary matters. First, I must note the distinction between questions about the application of rules and questions about exceptions to them. We do not speak of an action as an exception to a rule, of course, unless we believe or assume that the rule applies to the action. If the rule does not apply, there can be no question of an exception; if the rule applies, there could be a question about an exception; and if the rule applies but we are justified in not following it, an exception is allowed. In this paper I am confining my attention to justifiable exceptions and the issues raised by their occurrence. Secondly, when I speak of "rules" I have in mind statements such as "It is wrong to lie," "It is wrong to inflict pain on animals," "It is wrong to break promises," and similar statements used to prescribe or prohibit some particular kind of behavior and cited as reasons supporting moral judgments. I am not thinking of statements, such as Kant's "Categorical Imperative," which stipulate how we should arrive at or test decisions; nor am I thinking of statements whose primary function is to tell us something about the nature of moral phenomena or reasoning-statements such as "Ought implies can" and "Similar actions are justified in similar circumstances." In restricting myself thus, I am not implying that there is a neat list of rules, that we would or need agree completely about any offered list, or that the way in which such statements function is transparent. These are questions for further inquiry. Nor have I given exact criteria for distinguishing between what I call rules and another sort of general moral statement exemplified by the utilitarian "principle." I cannot here, for the distinction is bound up with the very thing I want to investigate: exceptions and the difficulties they raise in both theory and practice.