Abstract

That's what I reckon morality is all about — how to preach, not how to act. My aim is not to answer this question of how to preach. I want to defend the claim that it is the, or at least a, central problem of ethics: that it is in fact the problem of what moral principles to accept.My argument consists of an account of what is involved in accepting a moral principle. By a moral principle I mean a kind of principle about how people should act. Moral principles are not the only principles you can have about how people should act. There are principles of prudence, or rational self-interest. There are aesthetic principles, such as might be expressed in a remark like “you shouldn't put a magenta cushion on a scarlet sofa”. There are principles of etiquette. And no doubt there are others. I develop my account of morality by asking what distinguishes moral principles from the rest.