Preface

Summary

WRITING about moral philosophy should be a hazardous business, not just for the reasons attendant on writing about any difficult subject, or writing about anything, but for two special reasons. The first is that one is likely to reveal the limitations and inadequacies of one's own perceptions more directly than in, at least, other parts of philosophy. The second is that one could run the risk, if one were taken seriously, of misleading people about matters of importance. While few writers on the subject have avoided the first hazard, very many have avoided the second, either by making it impossible to take them seriously, or by refusing to write about anything of importance, or both.

This sad truth is often brought forward as a particular charge against contemporary moral philosophy of the ‘analytical’ or ‘linguistic’ style: that it is peculiarly empty and boring. In one way, as a particular charge, this is unfair: most moral philosophy at most times has been empty and boring, and the number of great books in the subject (as opposed to books involved in one way or another in morality) can be literally counted on the fingers of one hand. The emptiness of past works, however, has often been the emptiness of conventional moralizing, the banal treatment of moral issues. Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.