Caj Strandberg has posted Particularism and Supervenience on the web. Here is the abstract:
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 is generally 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 way in which non-moral properties make objects have moral properties. At least, this is what 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.
There is, of course, an equivalent issue for legal theory and the philosophy of law. Just as there are moral particuarlists, there are legal particularists–those who believe that legal properties are best understood as attaching to particular cases. Similarly, it is generally thought that legal properties supervene on nonlegal properties. Hence the question, can legal particularism be reconciled with supervenience?