Common morality versus specified principlism - Reply to Richardson

In his article 'Specifying. balancing and interpreting bioethical principle s' (Richardson, 2000). Henry Richardson claims that the two dominant theori es in bioethics - principlism, put forward by Beauchamp and Childress in Pr inciples of Bioethics, and common morality, put forward by Gert, Culver and Clouser in Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals - are deficient because the y employ balancing rather than specification to resolve disputes between pr inciples or rules. We show that, contrary to Richardson's claim, the major problem with principlism, either the original version, or the specified pri nciplism of Richardson, is that it conceives of morality as being composed of free-standing principles, lather than as common morality conceives it, a s being a complete public system, composed of rules. ideals, morally releva nt features, and a procedure for determining when a rule can be justifiably violated.