THIS last discussion has led us sideways into certain questions of what morality is about and how ‘the moral’ is to be delimited. A lot has been written about this, in search of some criteria for distinguishing the moral from the non-moral. These recent discussions are considered by G. J. Warnock in his admirably concise, lucid, and forceful book Contemporary Moral Philosophy: he rightly emphasizes the extraordinary fact that a great deal of this discussion has proceeded in a vacuum, in pursuit of a criterion which might give us a way of distinguishing moral and non-moral, perhaps a way which bore some rough resemblance to ways in which we, now, make such a distinction, but without shedding any light on, or being guided by, the evidently more basic question of what this distinction is for, what significant point is made by dividing up human actions, or policies, or motives, or reasons along these lines. Some of the remarks in the previous section touch on that point.

I shall assume as given – indeed I have already assumed it earlier – a conclusion which Mr Warnock reaches in his discussion and which must certainly be correct, namely that any significant delimitation of the moral must involve reference to the content of the judgements, policies, principles, or whatever, that are being described as ‘moral’.