“Respect autonomy” will not tell you what to do about a seventy-eight-year-old with early dementia who wants to go home alone. Principles are too abstract to guide action, so Beauchamp and Childress add two operations: specification and balancing. Build the rule clause by clause, watch four famous critics react to what you built, then justify the override and name what you still owe.
1 · The case
2 · Specify the norm
Henry Richardson’s move (1990): narrow a norm by adding content about where, when, why, how, by what means, to whom and by whom. Click clauses to add them.