f we are going to debate the question whether there is a need for moral principles we need some idea of what we mean by a ‘moral principle’ Unfortunately there are two radically different conceptions of what moral principles are The first conception the ‘absolute’ conception takes a moral principle to be a universal claim to the effect that all actions of a certain type are overall wrong or right The principle ‘don’t break your promises’can be expressed in various ways ‘it is wrong to break one’s promises’ ‘all actions that involve breaking a promise are wrong’—and so on On the absolute conception these all mean that each and every action of breaking a promise is a wrong action whatever else there may be to be said for it Each such action is wrong overall despite any redeeming features it may have There is a very different way of understanding a moral principle as ‘contributory’ rather than as absolute Understood in this second way our principle maintains that if an action involves breaking a promise that counts against it The action is the worse for being a promisebreaking Of course it may be the worse for being a promisebreaking but the better for some other feature that it has—that of being kindly meant say The contributory conception of moral principles allows that more than one principle can apply to the case before us since it holds that each principle is as it were partial each specifies how things are only in a certain respect But actions have many relevant features some counting in favour and others against Whether the action is overall right or wrong can only be determined by the overall balance of right and wrong in it The contributory principles do not themselves tell us how to determine that balance They only specify contributions one by one and leave us to work out how these add up Some people suppose that the principles can themselves be ranked in order of importance if that were right it would be of some help to us in working out what matters most in a given case Others suppose that there is no available lexical ordering of such a sort and that the matter is left to unaided ‘judgement’ Since there are these two quite different conceptions of what a moral principle says our discussion will need to address both possibilities If particularism is true there is not much room for moral principles of either sort