ABSTRACT
Ethics seems to be quite the most abstract and disembodied kind of knowledge we are ever likely to meet, but the title of the chapter looks as if we are placing it uncomfortably close to action, which is uncompromisingly out there in the real world, as they say. This juxtaposition of such opposites is valuable for identifying some of the reasons why ethics and action might be closely connected, and it also provides a usefully hard-headed way of studying the kind of spontaneous practical ethics that people use. The inhabitants of Market Town, as everywhere else, are beginning to see science not just as a difficult subject that is regularly taught at school and university but, more urgently, as the domain in which a large number of our most tricky contemporary ethical decisions have had to be worked out.
