An argument against the claim that moral realism cannot be sustained because moral beliefs, being affective-conative states, cannot themselves be true or false. In fact moral claims can fail both in terms of a failure of the standard it expresses to be realised by a given agent and also in terms of whatever it commends to be good or bad, right or wrong, in actual fact.

The subject of this paper is a particular kind of fear. The danger to which it is a response is the possibility that the evaluative dimension of life from which we derive the values by which we live is arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, nothing we value would be valuable. There are strong reasons both for and against this kind of fear. I am concerned with understanding these reasons and judging their strengths and weaknesses.

An adequate moral theory must – or so many philosophers have argued – be compatible with the attitudes and practical requirements of deep friendship. Bernard Williams suggested that the decision procedure required by both deontology and consequentialism inserts a fetishising filter between the natural moral motivation of any normal person to prioritise friends and the decision to act on it. But this injects ‘one thought too many’ into the moral reaction mechanism. It is standardly assumed that virtue ethics is somehow immune to this objection. The present article explores this assumption and finds it wanting in various respects. Virtue ethics filters friendship through phronesis and thus inserts an extra thought into the mechanism in question. To escape Williams's curse, the only way is to argue that the extra thought required by virtue ethics is not ‘one thought too many’. The article closes with an attempt to show that, contra deontology, the friendship motivation in virtue ethics is derived from the moral virtue, not the intellectual filter, and, contra consequentialism, phronesis does not require the maximisation of value. The presumed advantage of virtue ethics must lie in the content of its filter rather than the filter's non-existence.

Philosophy is now in its 77th year. It likes to think of itself as still sprightly in approach and open-minded in content. Nevertheless it has a burden of history and of expectation, and it has an academic level to maintain. Even though it strives, as always and unlike some of its contemporaries, to be written for the most part in a language recognizable as English and to address topics of genuine human interest, its reputation defends on its being recognized as a leading journal of philosophy in the academic world.

So it is a pleasure to welcome, in April 2002, a sister periodical, called simply Think. Like Philosophy, Think will be published under the auspices of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. It will do some of the educational things the Royal Institute of Philosophy was originally set up to do, but cannot be done in an academic journal such as Philosophy. Think will consist, for the most part, of short articles of genuine philosophy, but they will be articles accessible to any who are prepared simply to think. In particular, Think will aim to interest young people, including the increasing numbers who now take philosophy as part of the school curriculum, but who may have little or no knowledge of academic philosophy.

Think is not a magazine. Its pages will not contain philosophical gossip or anecdote. These are not unworthy activities, even in a philosophical context, but there are other places for them. Even where imaginative in presentation, and even though they need not have the originality and depth expected in an academic journal, the articles in Think will be recognizably philosophical in tone and ambition. Think's articles will aim, simply, to make their readers think philosophically, in the best possible way, and to think about topics which are recognizably philosophical.

Not that Think will eschew controversy. Its authors will, from time to time, defend controversial positions, and will provoke equally controversially replies. And if at times the opinions expressed in Think have a younger or more radical feel to them than those characteristically expressed in its older and more venerable relation, that is as it should be, and all a proper part of the role of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

I argue for a novel understanding of the nature of agent-regret. On the standard picture, agent-regret involves regretting the result of one's action and thus regretting one's action. I argue that the standard picture is a flawed analysis of agent-regret. I offer several cases of agent-regret where the agent feels agent-regret but does not regret the result itself. I appeal to other cases where an agent's attitude towards something depends upon whether or not they are involved in that thing. I argue that the same applies to actions: sometimes an agent's attitude towards a result differs from their attitude to their involvement in bringing about that result. Agent-regret is regret about my own action, but it need not involve regret about something in the world. I end by considering how this picture of agent-regret allows us to respond to a particular criticism of agent-regret.

The appeal of the moral principle according to which we should treat like cases alike is so great that it verges on the axiomatic, or on the platitudinous. Recently, however, the principle has been challenged in deeply interesting ways. These ways are interesting because they do not invite skepticism about morality at large, but about the specific claim that what is good (or bad) for an agent in a given situation must be good (or bad) for any other similarly situated agent. I here assess the post-challenge viability of the principle. In a sense, the principle survives, but this is neither an unqualified victory nor an inspiring result. The examination of these matters contains an important (and under-investigated) lesson about the nature of moral experience.