 It should be noted that we have been using a weak notion of generality, here. It is contrasted only with the kind of strict particularity that comes with indexicals and proper names. General statements or claims – ones that contain no such particular references – are not necessarily universal generalizations, making an assertion about all cases of the mentioned type. Thus, “one should normally help those in dire need” is a general principle, in this weak sense. Possibly, such logically loose principles would be obfuscatory in the context of an attempt to reconstruct the ultimate truth-conditions of moral statements. Such logically loose principles would clearly be useless in any attempt to generate a deductively tight “practical syllogism.” In our day-to-day, non-deductive reasoning, however, such logically loose principles appear to be quite useful. (Recall that we are understanding “reasoning” quite broadly, as responsibly conducted thinking: nothing in this understanding of reasoning suggests any uniquely privileged place for deductive inference: cf. Harman 1986. For more on defeasible or “default” principles, see  section 2.5.)  