INFERENCE

3.6.4 The word in question need not be (as here) a value-word; it may be a descriptive
word whose meaning is loose enough to admit of such treatment. Such decisions, of
course, render the law more precise, not looser. The extension of the word may be
actually altered, or it may merely be rendered more precise. And it should not need
pointing out that decisions of this kind are decisions, and not, as Aristotle seems
sometimes to think, exercises of a peculiar kind of perception.7 We perceive, indeed, a
difference in the class of case; but we decide whether this difference justifies us treating
it as exceptional. Thus, far from principles like 'Never say what is false' being in some
way by nature irredeemably loose, it is part of our moral development to turn them
from provisional principles into precise principles with their exceptions definitely laid
down; this process is, of course, never completed, but it is always going on in any
individual lifetime. If we accept and continue to accept such a principle we cannot, as in
the case of the rule about taking time off work, break it and leave the principle intact;
we have to decide whether to observe the principle and refuse to modify it, or to break
it and modify it by admitting a class of exceptions; whereas if the principle were really
by nature loose, we could break it without modifying it at all. In the following chapter I
shall consider in greater detail how we develop and modify our principles.