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 attitude of the impartial spectator has seemed to some to be the appropriate one for a moral philosopher: the philosopher should disengage himself from the moral battle and try to understand it; the academic moral philosopher's responsibility is to write about morality rather than to recommend moral positions—and, indeed, where an ideological standpoint is presupposed in academic moral philosophy, it is commonly not consciously presupposed.

Fulke Greville speaks of the will as inevitably divided between reason and passion. Shakespeare takes such a division seriously but, through Hamlet, he recognizes the possibility of reason and passion being united in a man's will and purpose.

To the Socratic injunction ‘Know Thyself’ one wonders how to respond. Presumably Socrates is asking us to attempt a project at which we are supposed to have some chance of success and this leads one to ask ‘Can I know myself?’ One is led to ask it, but the question can seem rhetorical. Many would reply that of course one can do this because there is nothing easier for me to know than my own self. I do, therefore I can. I know it simply by being myself. Not only this, one might regard knowledge of oneself as unavoidable so that the answer to the question ‘Can I know myself?’ is ‘Yes’ and the answer to the question ‘Can I avoid knowing myself?’ is ‘No’. Now if we cannot avoid knowing ourselves, if Socrates is asking us to do somethingwhich we inevitably do anyway, then he has certainly earned his reputation for irony.

Suppose I have a friend (whose good sense on most matters I respect) who takes seriously the possibility that some at least of the miracle storiesassociated with the origin of the Christian religion are substantially true. He does not say that he knows them to be true, but given his belief in the existence of an almighty, all loving creator-god, he sees no reason to think it impossible that they are, and considerable reason for thinking one or two of them highly probable. He regards those who claim that (say) the resurrection of Jesus could not have happened as being unreasonably dogmatic, and as displaying an attitude of mind more appropriate to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than the latter half of the twentieth century. To rule out the very possibility of the truth of such stories on a priori grounds seems to him to manifest a simplistic philosophical faith which is at least as naive and arbitrary, and perhaps considerably more arrogant,than his own religious faith. Could he be right?

In this paper I wish to take my earlier analysis of the relationship between facts and preferences further to cast light on how some types of preference claims might be assessed. I have argued that both Hume's Rule and the doctrine of the autonomy of values must be rejected on grounds of elementary logic. To take a well worn example:

Re-arranging gives: