Specifying Specification

This paper tackles the accusation that applied ethics is no serious academic enterprise because it lacks theoretical bracing. It does so in two steps. In the first step I introduce and discuss a highly acclaimed method to guarantee stability in ethical theories: Henry Richardson’s specification. The discussion shows how seriously ethicists take the stability of the connection between the foundational parts of their theories and their further development as well as their “application” to particular problems or cases. A detailed scrutiny of specification leads to the second step, where I use insights from legal theory to inform the debate around stability from that point of view. This view reveals some of specification’s limitations. I suggest that, once specification is sufficiently specified, it appears astonishingly similar to deduction as used in legal theory. Legal theory also provides valuable insight into the functional range of deduction and its relation to other forms of reasoning. This leads to a richer understanding of stability in normative theories and to a smart division of labor between deduction and other forms of reasoning. The comparison to legal theory thereby provides a framework for how different methods such as specification, deduction, balancing, and analogy relate to one another.