¹ Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, rev. edn. trans. Beck, L. W., New York 1993, p. 8nGoogle Scholar.

² Much recent discussion of Bentham's view has challenged his claims (and, later, Mill's claims) to this kind of philosophical modesty. Michael Slote contends that when utilitarianism was ‘first discussed in the eighteenth century’, utilitarianism was ‘an original moral idea’. See Slote, Michael, ‘Is Virtue Possible?’, Analysis, xlii (1982)Google Scholar. Similarly, Michael Walzer has argued that utilitarianism is a product of ‘philosophical invention’. (Walzer suggests, at one point, that Bentham took himself to have ‘discovered’ the principle of utility anew – rather than to have ‘invented’ it. Walzer never indicates why he retreats from this claim. It is clear, however, that this claim is incompatible with Bentham's famous insistence that he was so moved by reading Hume's discussions of utility that the ‘scales fell’ from his eyes.) Walzer's discussion of Bentham appears in Walzer, , Interpretation and Social Criticism, Cambridge, Ma, 1987, p. 27Google Scholar.

³ I have in mind a variety of thinkers including (but not limited to) Annette Baier, Cheryl Noble, Michael Oakeshott, and Richard Rorty, Michael Walzer, and Bernard Williams.

⁴ Noble, Cheryl, ‘Normative Ethical Theories’, in Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, ed. Clarke, S. C. and Simpson, E., Albany, NY, 1989, p. 53Google Scholar.

⁵ Oakeshott, Michael, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Oakeshott, , Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, expanded edn., Indianapolis, 1991Google Scholar.

⁶ See the introduction to Griffin, James, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance, Oxford, 1986, pp. 2 fGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Moody-Adams, Michele M., Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy, Cambridge, Ma, 1997Google Scholar.

⁸ Broad, C. D., Five Types of Ethical Theory, London, 1930, p. 1Google Scholar.