ABSTRACT
English moral philosophy, with a few honourable exceptions, offers the gloomy spectacle of a danse macabre, in which the personnel of the familiar triangle of deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics, come, in an eternal recurrence, successively centre stage, remaining there with all the stability and conviction of post-war French governments. And stability has no more been given to this mise-en-scène by the lend-lease of such American coinages as moral realism, than permanence was given to French political life by the Marshall Plan. Something, Nietzsche remarked, is up with morality, but one searches in vain the bulk of anglophone moral philosophy for any sustained engagement with that possibility.
