There is a great difference between people in respect of their readiness to qualify their moral principles in new circumstances. One man may be very hidebound; he may feel that he knows what he ought to do in a certain situation as soon as he has acquainted himself with its most general features, without examining it at all closely to see whether it has any special feature which would call for a different judgement. Another man may be more cautious (some people are even pathologically cautious in this respect); he will never make up his mind what he ought to do, even in a quite familiar situation, until he has scrutinized every detail of it to make sure that he can really subsume it under the principles that seem at first sight most relevant.

(R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 41)