Morality has been getting a great deal of looking at in recent years by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, social scientists, journalists, and novelists, as well as by people, especially students, women, and young people, on the street. Much of this investigation has been aimed at redesigning morality or developing a ‘new morality’, and some of it at doing away with morality entirely and replacing it with something else, with the something elses ranging all the way from love, through religion, sincerity, authenticity, and doing one's own thing, to selfishness. New-moralism and amoralism seem to be widespread, the first often being seen as an antidote to the second. At any rate, many are convinced that morality, at least modern morality, Christian or non-Christian, has been based on a mistake, or on a number of mistakes, though there are different views about what these are. Among others, moral philosophers have also been looking at morality, especially in the form of an inquiry into its definition, meaning, or nature, and into its logic, categories, and justification, but usually with some aloofness from the fray, thinking of themselves rather as elucidating morality than as revising or replacing it, leaving the driving to others, or taking for granted that morality is essentially sound as it stands, though sometimes defending it or at least studying the logic of the question ‘Why should I be moral?’

There were 180 applications from prospective contestants of the StawellGift in 1978. The race limit, imposed in the interests of safety, is just 60 runners. Of the 60 acceptances Richard Roe was the hotfavourite, but healong with six others fell victim to the great oyster poisoning, and had towithdraw on the day of the race, along with five of the others; the sixth died of the poisoning just as the race was run. In the event the winner was John Doe, the second favourite according to the bookmakers.

In his recent paper on Aristotelian dialectic, Professor Hamlyn claims that ‘what may be important for Aristotle's purposes is not the truth but the acceptance of the truth’ (p. 474). Dialectic is protreptic, and not strictly philosophical, spadework: ‘[t]he appeal to endoxa is, as it were, a setting of the scene, providing the context for argument out of which, it is hoped, will emerge the insights from which demonstration and thus further understanding can follow’ (p. 475).

There is so much truth in the conception of the state as a natural organism and of man as a political animal, as commonly contrasted with the various theories of the state as an artificial formation based on contract, or implied contract, that Aristotle's proposition is rarely criticized from any other standpoint. When Aristotle said that man was a political animal, that is that political life was his nature, and consequently that the state, as the ultimate development of his nature, was a natural institution, or, as we should say, an organism, he was, we may say with a good deal of certainty, speaking in the light of this contrast. But his theory must be judged on its own merits, and not on the demerits of that which he was attacking. We may grant that the state is natural; but we may nevertheless mean by “natural” something other than Aristotle means. And if our conception of Nature is different from his, it will follow that our agreement about the state is one of words only.

One of the questions that any future history of British moral philosophy in the twentieth century should investigate and document is how it came about that Moore's Principia Ethica was appropriated by what we can call theHumean tradition of moral philosophy. I shall not trace that development now but only argue that there was no excuse or justification for it.

The concepts of pleasure and good, both separately and in their relation to one another, have for centuries been a favourite and fruitful subject of philosophical discussion. The contrasting concepts of pain and evil, however, though by no means entirely neglected, have been, and still are, less popular among philosophers. The reason for this disparity is not altogether clear. The title of a recent autobiography, “Philosophers lead sheltered lives,” might support the explanation that philosophers are (no doubt very properly) reluctant to write on matters of which they have little or no first-hand knowledge. Pleasure and good, it may be said, form part of their own personal experience: but their academic seclusion has little place for either pain or evil. A more serious reason is the assumption, often made but rarely defended, that, since pain and pleasure, evil and good, are in some sense pairs of “opposites,” a full discussion of all four concepts is unnecessary. The nature of pain, it is thought, can easily be inferred from the nature of pleasure, and that of evil from that of good. But even if this were true, it ought not to be taken for granted; the belief (it is more often implicit than explicit) that these concepts are symmetrically disposed opposites ought to be held (if at all) only after an investigation into all of them. And in fact the belief is not true. It does not need profound insight or observation to see that we cannot (as some of the utilitarians once thought) construct a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus quantity. Contemporary hedonists have often paid more attention to the psychological complexities involved in this problem than did their classical predecessors. A. L. Hilliard, for example, distinguishes carefully between pain and unpleasantness. Pain he describes as a sensitivity, “correlated with the excitation of specific receptors in the nervous system”: unpleasantness is an affectivity (i.e. roughly, an emotion) to which physiological correlates, though they must be assumed to exist, have not yet been discovered.