  In ethics, actions are said to be right/wrong—but is it action types or only action tokens? There is a dispute about this. Most ethicists from Mill (1979) to Ross (1988) hold that the hallmark of ethical conduct is universalizability, so that a particular action is right/wrong only if it is right/wrong for anyone else in similar circumstances—in other words, only if it is the right/wrong type of action. If certain types of actions are right and others wrong, then there may be general indefeasible ethical principles (however complicated they may be to state, and whether they can be stated at all). But some ethicists hold that there are no general ethical principles that hold come what may—that there is always some circumstance in which such principles would prescribe the wrong outcome—and such ethicists may go on to add that only particular (token) actions are right/wrong, not types of actions. See, for example, Murdoch 1970 and Dancy 2004.