It is one of the most platitudinous axioms of contemporary moral consciousness that there is a crude asymmetry between political morality and personal morality. Indeed we are so sharply conscious of the discontinuities between them that we are often incapable of discerning any continuities at all, still more so of giving a coherent account of the precise nature of whatever continuity there is. We are all too familiar with the tendency to consider the conduct of states of which we happen to disapprove in a legalistic fashion and that of those of which we approve in a ‘realistic’ fashion, or for a judgement which seems moralistic in the mouth of others to become simply moral in our own. There is nothing very obscure in the abstract about how this conceptual chaos has arisen—the transition from judging the intrinsic quality of acts in terms of a highly definite legal system, enforced by divine sanctions, to assessing their returns in terms of the free-floating calculation of interests. This converts the practice of moral judgement from a predominantly judicial activity, casuistry, to a predominantly empirical one, prediction. Instead of being a self-evident moral enormity to do evil that good may come of it, it is precisely what comes of it which determines whether it is good or bad. This transition seems to produce its most pressing difficulties in the analysis of the relation of intention to moral responsibility.