This book essentially turns on three basic claims.

The first is that while attention to the foundations of moral deliberation, insight and analysis is important, we do not yet possess a firm, comprehensive theory. The belief that God is the foundation of morality is only satisfying if you leave various awkward questions to one side; and although it seems that a naturalistic approach is the way to go, such naturalism is only credible if it takes proper account of humanity's socialised being and does not merely reduce the sociocultural to the natural. So although the book's aim is not to propose a full theory of social humanism, it has highlighted three principles that are surely crucial to it and to which we have returned selectively throughout: compatibilism (Chapters One, Three, Five and Ten), intersubjectivism (Chapters One, Three, Four, Five, Eight, Nine and Ten) and egalitarianism (Chapters Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine and Eleven).

Suspecting that a pluralistic, multi-perspective strategy is appropriate, the book spent some time outlining three of the most prominent normative philosophies of ethics. These are summarised in Chapter Five and there is nothing more to add here. Chapter Five also defended an eclectic, pragmatic but nevertheless rigorous conjunction of consequentialism, Kantianism/contractualism and virtuism, arguing that they can all combine the abstract and the commonsensical in critically reflective methods of analysis, and that they all touch base with social humanism in one respect or another. Figure 5.1 captures the second of this book's central claims.

The third is defended mainly in Chapters Six and Seven. Having established the relevance of those philosophies to applied ethics, we saw how various concepts, frameworks and premises have played out by investigating a series of specific questions that emerge at the place where applied ethics and social policy debates intersect. Of particular importance are the meaning, scope and implications of harm, the possible ways in which interactions between autonomy and paternalism can be interpreted, and the doctrine of double effect. The ‘social context’ outlined in Chapters Six and Seven was not intended to be thorough because the purpose was to recommend an ‘environmental paternalism’, that is, a paternalism more concerned with the justice of social conditions (what Rawls called society's basic structure) and with the enabling of individual agency and responsibility, rather than a heavy-handed management of personal attitudes, habits and behaviour.