ABSTRACT
One must be careful to avoid the danger to which moral philosophers are particularly exposed, of making extravagant claims for the practical value of our particular theory. It would be foolish to claim for it, for instance, that it can, to put it bluntly, make a bad man good. There is, perhaps, one possible case where a moral theory might have a direct practical effect, if it were accepted. Aristotle's view involves the denial of the idea that it is in any way possible to get absolute general rules by the use of which one can tell beforehand whether any particular sort of action will be right or wrong. To get general rules at all it is, of course, necessary to distinguish the common features of a number of different actions from their special individual features, to consider the former by themselves, and to ignore the latter.
