ABSTRACT
There is a long-standing dispute between two main types of ethical theory, which, nevertheless, is not always stated in the same terms. It is the purpose of this paper to ask whether it matters in what terms we formulate it. I shall argue that one way of posing the issue has advan-tages over the others, if we want to get to the root of the matter. This is because all the others pose it in terms which, for want of clarity and other reasons, leave it undecidable unless in the end we have recourse to the preferred way.
