The papers collected here have all been published in the past seven years, mostly in collective volumes, in three cases as contributions to Festschriften. I am grateful to editors and publishers for their agreement to republication. Most of the essays are substantially unchanged, though I have made some stylistic alteration to all of them. Three have undergone rather greater change. In the case of Justice as a Virtue, which was written for a volume on Aristotle's moral philosophy, the aim has been to take away some of the more detailed exegesis. The most extensive revisions have been to Moral Luck itself, where I have tried to get the main idea under rather better control than it was in the first version. I have not entirely succeeded, and in deciding to give its name to the book, my aim has been not to draw particular attention to that essay, but rather to suggest something which may indeed have contributed to its imperfections – that concerns echoed in that title are picked up in different forms in several parts of the book.

It will be obvious that certain worries both in and about moral philosophy, and also certain images of human action and practical thought, run through most of the papers. It is also obvious, when the papers are brought together, that they raise some pressing questions which they do not do much to answer.