Most of the agents believe that acting morally entails the possibility of tracing their behavior back to norms, rules, principles. Ethical particularism in Dancy’s version represents a radical challenge to this idea. For the particularist, those who act morally do not need to appeal to prin-ciples either to motivate their action ex ante or to explain it ex post. Incidentally, Dancy seems to consider particularism also a criticism of our moral tradition that incorporates Christian ethics. In this article I make some criticisms of Dancy’s position and I argue that particularism does not provide any explanation of phenomena that are important both for morality and for social cooperation, such as trust, predictability, reliability usually attributed to moral agents.
