ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the suggestion that demands of practical ethics would force an altered view of ethical theory. The analytical ordinary language approach became uncomfortable with formalist conceptions of logic and analysis, with broad abstract ideas of value and fact. The present demand that ethical theory help in moral problems sets such help as a criterion of success or failure in ethical theory itself. Analytic ethics presented a polarization of methods. Positivism sought large-scale formal deductive systems that reconstructed and refined the language of ethics; it disparaged the looseness of ordinary language as a heritage of obscurity. An individualistic model is enshrined in contemporary ethical theory and much of social science: group values and laws are built up from the interaction of individuals as atomic units. Philosophical movements of our century have gradually forced ethical theory to recognize the many dimensions of the act or situation that is under moral judgment or decision.
